Acclaimed Actress Dame Maggie Smith of ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Harry Potter’ Fame Dies at 89

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.​

Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in The VIPs with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the director Peter Hall found that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”

​Smith conceded that she could be impatient at times.​

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”​

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of Lettice and Lovage, praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”​

Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever.​

“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “The moment you say something is funny it’s gossamer. It’s gone, really.”​

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”​

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.​

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there.... If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.​

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.​

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his costar in a 1965 film adaptation of Othello.​

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.​

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue A Bed Among the Lentils, said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”​

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett, who also wrote a starring role for Smith in The Lady in the Van.​

Maggie Smith as Professor Minerva McGonagall in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2."

Everett Collection

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.​

Simon Callow, who acted with her in A Room with a View, said he ruined their first meeting by spouting compliments.​

“I blurted out various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew. She doesn’t like that sort of thing very much at all,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.”​

Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, in 1990.​

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.​​