Dame Maggie Smith passed away at the age on 89 on September 27, 2024. Though younger fans likely know her best for playing acerbic characters such as Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, Dame Maggie's career began decades earlier.
After landing a string of small roles on television throughout the 1950s, Smith began working in film. Her breakout with American audiences came with her 1969 role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on the Muriel Spark novel of the same name, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress.
As Smith's award-studded career continued, she showed a knack for playing curt older women. In 1972 Smith starred as the 70-year-old aunt in the adaptation of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt, despite the fact that she was just 37 at the time. Shortly after Smith starred in two Broadway shows—1975's “Private Lives” and 1979's “Night and Day,” both of which earned her Tony award nominations.
Perhaps Smith remained less known with American audiences for decades because she spent so much time on the British stage. From acting opposite Laurence Olivier in “Othello” to starring in “Hedda Gabler,” Ingmar Bergman's first production outside Scandinavia, Smith was performing among theater royalty.
In 1981, Smith won an Evening Standard award for playing Virginia Woolf in Edna O'Brien's “Virginia.” Throughout her career, she would collect six of those awards for her roles in British theater.
Starting in the 1990s, Smith began appearing in more Hollywood movies that would make her familiar to American audiences, including Sister Act and The First Wives Club. And then, of course, came Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in which she played Minerva McGonagall, a role she would reprise 7 more times throughout the series.
While Harry Potter largely made Smith recognizable to children, Downton Abbey made her known to virtually everyone. In her mid-70s, she was suddenly a household name. “It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” she told Mark Lawson at the B.F.I. and Radio Times Festival in 2017, adding later: “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
Smith continued acting after Downton Abbey, taking roles such as the titular character in 2015's The Lady in the Van, in which she played a headstrong unhoused woman.
Though she was in the public eye for more than six decades, Smith was known to have no interest in celebrity, and was rather introverted. As she told the New York Times in 1979, “I’m always very relieved to be somebody else, because I’m not sure at all who I am or what indeed my personality is.”
Want to learn more about Dame Maggie Smith? Read her biography now.
Maggie Smith
From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie's path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors of the era. Whether stealing scenes from Richard Burton, answering back to Laurence Olivier, or playing opposite Judi Dench in Breath of Life, her career can be seen as a 'Who's Who' of British theatre. Her film and television career has been just as starry. From the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the meddling chaperone in A Room With a View to the Harry Potter films in which she played Minerva McGonagall (as she put it 'Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard's hat') and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films in which she played the wise Muriel Donnelly, Smith has thrilled, engaged and made audiences laugh. As Violet Crawley, the formidable Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey she conquered millions more. Paradoxically she remains an enigmatic figure, rarely appearing in public.
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