Acclaimed actress Maggie Smith has passed away. News of her death was announced by her family via her longtime publicist Clair Dobbs. Ms. Smith was 89.
A treasured wit throughout her 50-plus years-long career, Ms. Smith was one of the most prolifically beloved British actors of her generation, winning two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, four Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award, with six additional Olivier Award nominations under her belt. Ms. Smith is one of the few performers to earn the Triple Crown of Acting, which is denoted by having won a competitive Academy Award, Emmy, and Tony for performance, exhibiting a mastery of the big screen, stage, and television.
Ms. Smith began her career on the stage in 1952, working at the Oxford Playhouse before debuting on Broadway in New Faces of '56. Alongside her close friend Judi Dench, her career would blossom into one of the most significant on the British stage, working with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company to reimagine the power a woman could wield in the West End.
By the early 1960s, her legendary status had begun to take hold, winning a record-breaking six Best Actress Evening Standard Awards. She personally caught the eye of Laurence Olivier, who welcomed her into his new National Theatre Company soon after it was formed. Alongside Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon, she became a fixture at the company, spending eight years on its boards.
Said British theatre critic Michael Coveney "[Olivier] knew immediately he'd met his match—that she was extraordinary. He said that anyone who can play comedy that well can also play tragedy and he offered her the likes of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. But having got her into the company they became not enemies, but professional rivals. Never before had anyone on stage been quicker than him and now, it seemed, there was a contest."
While Ms. Smith maintained professional decorum throughout the rivalry, Olivier was far less controlled. As Ms. Smith would detail later in her life, Olivier would physically manhandle her backstage, going so far as to slap her mid-performance during that same production of Othello. Said Ms. Smith in a 2002 documentary, "He said, 'Out devil', and gave me a good swack around the head. I was knocked out - I saw a lot of stars. I remember seeing more stars that night than I had seen in a long time."
Ms. Smith first appeared uncredited on film in 1956, but like her stage career, it was the beginning of the '60s that marked her meteoric ascent. In 1959, Ms. Smith received the first of her 18 British Academy Film Award nominations for her role as Bridget Howard in the film Nowhere to Go, which was her first credited screen appearance. In 1965, the National Theatre's production of Othello (which positioned her opposite Olivier in blackface), was filmed, leading her to earn her first Oscar nomination for her performance. This nomination, which preceded her final season with the National Theatre, led her to turn much of her focus to the screen.
With piercing eyes and a wit to rival Wilde, Ms. Smith was an undeniable asset on screen, exhibiting a fierce intelligence that could have been biting, had it not been tempered by her good humor. By the 1970's, after exiting Olivier's oppressive shadow, Ms. Smith was a star all her own, starring as the eccentric Augusta Bertram in George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt, Miss Bowers in the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile, and Diana Barrie in Neil Simon's California Suite, for which she received the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Ms. Smith did not abandon the stage for the screen; following her exit from The National Theatre, she appeared in numerous productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, as well as throughout London's West End. On Broadway, Ms. Smith received Tony nominations for Noël Coward's Private Lives and Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, but it was 1990's Lettice and Lovage, which playwright Peter Shaffer wrote explicitly for her, that led to her winning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
As she aged, Ms. Smith stood stalwart against industry pressures to fade from screen, instead establishing a rock-solid career that positioned her as one of the most recognizable faces of maternal power on screen. Ms. Smith played the goddess Thetis in Clash of the Titans, Charlotte Bartlett in A Room with a View, and the title role in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne to great acclaim, reveling in dramatic opportunities before spending much of the 1990s sharpening her comedic skills once more, memorably appearing in Hook, The First Wives Club, and Sister Act.
Ms. Smith experienced a major resurgence in the 21st century, receiving international fame for her role as Violet Crawley in the period drama Downton Abbey as well as her performance as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series.
When asked to reflect on the breadth of her late in life career, and her ability to escape the confines of having been called "an undeniable dish" (a physically attractive young woman) in the 1960s, Ms. Smith told NPR "That never was me. The 'dish' department didn't apply. ... I think it's got something to do with one not being a "dish" ... because then you become a character actor and you have much more chance of developing and going on. I mean, God knows it must be lovely to be beautiful, but that's a really difficult thing to lose. But if you've been into character acting really all your life, it's an easy transition. You just go from one to the other and you suddenly realize, 'Oh, I see I'm somebody's mother this time. And I'm somebody's grandmother.' And so it goes on."
Ms. Smith's final stage performance came in 2019, when she starred in Christopher Hampton's solo play A German Life as Brunhilde Pomsel at the Bridge Theatre in London. Performed as an extended monologue, Ms. Smith vividly brought the elderly German woman to life who, in her youth, worked as a secretary for Nazi Joseph Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda. Her performance won her a record sixth Best Actress Evening Standard award.
Her final screen performance, 2023's The Miracle Club, cast her alongside Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, and Agnes O'Casey as a group of working class Irish women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in France.
Ms. Smith was predeceased by both her first husband, Sir Robert Graham Stephens, and her second, Alan Beverly Cross. Ms. Smith is survived by her two sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, and five grandchildren. Her impact on generations of admirers is incalculable.
