A day I dreaded has now arrived: Dame Maggie Smith has died.

She was 89, of course, and spent much of her final acting years playing women confronted with the inevitable: her iconic Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of “Downton Abbey,” confesses to illness in the first sequel and dies in the second. Reformed racist Muriel Donnelly of ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ bids a fond farewell to those she helped in ‘The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’. In “The Lady in the Van,” the tragedy of Smith’s stinker Mary Shepherd is only revealed after her surprisingly moving death. And while the disabled Lily Fox survives “The Miracle Club,” Smith’s final film, she does so with a late-in-life reconciliation prompted by a visit to Lourdes.

So she offered us all a long farewell, Maggie Smith did. Her career spanned seven decades; two centuries; stage, screen and television and virtually every genre from Shakespeare to ‘Harry Potter’ and her genius has never faded. Regardless of the general state of the project she found herself in, Smith always managed to enlighten, amaze and entertain.

After watching “The Miracle Club,” I looked up her age — my profession cultivates the grim habit of keeping prewritten obituaries — and I could almost hear her say in that wry, truth-telling grumble, “Not for long.”

Still, it’s a seismic event, a bitter shock: If anyone were to live forever, it would have been Maggie Smith.

Who else would have the audacity to unapologetically admit that, despite ‘owning the box set’, she had never seen ‘Downton Abbey’? Who else would accuse British national treasure (and good friend) Judi Dench of stealing all the good qualities from women their age in the documentary ‘Tea With the Dames’? (“Don’t turn on me,” Dench says, laughing. “I’m turning on you,” Smith replies with a sideways glance. “It’s all coming out now.”) Who else could convey the same air of offended daring to a homeless person woman who lived in an unspeakably filthy van, but also a parade of aristocrats and socialites, divas and fluttering single ladies.

It was far too easy to imagine Smith confronting the specter of death with a raised eyebrow and, after pausing for a moment of indignant silence, announcing that the timing was far too awkward.

The loss of our idols, regardless of their age, is always a form of heartbreak; the world was certainly a richer, more vibrant place with Maggie Smith in it, and now she isn’t. In many ways, she helped redefine what it meant to grow old, especially for women. The face and body may change, but the spirit need not waver, the desire and ability to do what you love need never diminish.

I didn’t have the chance to see her on stage, but on screens big and small she was unwavering and elastic: the radiant if misguided passions of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” the desperate humor of the heartbreaking star in “California Suite,” the reluctant, half-hearted tyranny of the companion in “A Room With a View,” the sponging snobbery of the impoverished relationship in “Gosford Park” – honestly, you could go on (and on) . In her later life she often complained about her frequent appearances in period pieces, but her roles defied category, apart from the fact that, as soon as she played them, they belonged completely to her, the genre of Maggie Smith.

It has become absurdly common for people who should know better to say that it was the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘Downton Abbey’ that brought Smith, already winner of two Oscars, a Tony and Emmy and seven BAFTAs, international fame when : at least in the case of ‘Downton’ it was the other way around.

It’s hard to imagine that “Downton,” even with its excellent world-building period pieces, solid cast and deft writing, would have achieved astonishing hit status without Smith at its center. As the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, she was the superpower of ‘Downton’ – able to freeze a room with one look, break your heart with a flick of the shoulder and summarize the entire theme of the series in just four words. summarize – “What is a week-end?” She was funny, she was formidable and she held the audience, as she held the family, in the palm of her hand. Other main characters might come and go, but without a regular dose of Smith’s Violet, there would be no “Downton.”

Smith, who often claimed that she had never seen the show and found the rigors of filming, not to mention the weight of all those hats, exhausting, had developed a reputation by the end of her career for, as Not difficult, then it certainly was. intimidating, on set.

In ‘Tea With the Dames’ this is partly evident, as she waves away a photographer on set, complains about uncomfortable chairs or describes her often controversial relationship with Laurence Olivier during her days at the National Theater. During a production, Olivier told her that she delivered her lines so slowly that he was “bored offstage.” So on the next show, she said, she spoke so fast that “he didn’t know if it was Wednesday or Christmas.” …I really upset him. He scared her, she said, but “I think I scared the hell out of him at times.”

But there’s also a moment where she and Dench are asked if the first days on set are still scary. “Every day is scary,” Smith says immediately. “I don’t know why people assume it’s different. Filming is very scary because there are so many people involved. Everyone waits with bated breath and if you are wrong, there is a lot of silent looking at each other and rolling of the eyes and there,” she sighs dramatically, “are we really going again?”

It’s very hard to imagine anyone rolling their eyes or sighing when Maggie Smith has done something wrong, almost as hard as imagining such an event actually happening. She was that good as an actor. Whatever she did, she struck the perfect chord with so much confidence that it seems outrageous to even think this could be the result of multiple takes.

So one can only assume that if death came for Maggie Smith, it was only because she allowed it.

“Dead?” her homeless Mary Shepherd protests Alex Jennings’ concerned Alan Bennett in “The Lady in the Van.” “You’ll know when I’m dead.”

As countries mourn and tributes pile up, as her work is praised, characterized and categorized, as we come to grips with the fact that we will never get the chance to see what she would have done next, in large measure we do .