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Maggie Smith remembered for roles in ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Downton Abbey’

Vaseline September 27, 2024

Maggie Smith, who died Sept. 27, was a masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar in 1969 for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and gained new fans in the 21st century as the widowed Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey.” ‘ and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film

“She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their special mother and grandmother,” Ms. Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement released by publicist Clair Dobbs.

Ms. Smith was often rated as the leading British female performer of a generation that also included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a string of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

Even in her later years, she remained in demand, despite her lament that “when you get to the grandma age, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Mrs. Smith dryly summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. When asked why she took on the role, she joked: “Harry Potter is my retirement.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Ms. Smith in a television production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I have ever worked with.” You’ll have to get up very, very early in the morning to outsmart Maggie Smith.

‘Jean Brodie’, in which she played a dangerously charismatic schoolteacher from Edinburgh, won her the 1969 Academy Award for Best Actress and also the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).

Ms. Smith added an Oscar for supporting actress for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for leading actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View’. View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as supporting actress in ‘Othello’, ‘Travels with My Aunt’, ‘Room with a View’ and ‘Gosford Park’, and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in ‘Tea with Mussolini’. On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

Her work earned three Golden Globe nominations in 2012 for the globally successful TV series ‘Downton Abbey’ and the films ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ and ‘Quartet’.

Mrs. Smith had a reputation for being difficult and sometimes overshadowing others.

Richard Burton noted that Ms. Smith didn’t just take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall found that Mrs. Smith “wasn’t all that difficult unless she was among the 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.”

Mrs. Smith admitted that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but they don’t tolerate me either, so I’m prickly,” Ms. Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m pretty good at playing prickly older ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Ms. 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 from Coward or Wilde.

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

“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and it was never laughed at again,” she recalls. “The moment you say something funny, it’s gossamer. It’s really gone.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934 in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London. She briefly summarized her life: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started acting, one is still acting.”

Her father was appointed to war service in Oxford in 1939, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy internship.

“I’ve done so many things, you know, through the universities there. … If you were smart enough and I suppose you were fast enough, you could do reps almost every week, because all the colleges did different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

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

Laurence Olivier discovered her talent, invited her to join his original National Theater company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Ms Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theater productions, were major influences.

Alan Bennett, who was preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Ms. Smith’s reputation for being bored. As actor Jeremy Brett put it, “She starts out divine and then goes away, like cheese.”

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

As extravagant as she was on stage or in front of the cameras, Ms. Smith was known for being fiercely private.

Simon Callow, who starred with her in ‘A Room with a View’, said he ruined their first meeting by throwing compliments.

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Maggie Smith remembered for roles in ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Downton Abbey’

Vaseline

Maggie Smith remembered for roles in ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Downton Abbey’

Vaseline

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