Dame Maggie Smith, the actor known for her crisp verbal flourishes, her timely ability to arch an eyebrow, and her tart, acerbic wit, has died, per her publicist and family. She was 89 years old.
The recipient of two Academy Awards, five BAFTAs, and four Primetime Emmys, among a lengthy list of other accolades, Smith was perhaps most famous for playing the romantic, hubristic schoolteacher Jean Brodie, who leads a class of 12-year-olds astray with her fascist inclinations in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969); Harry Potter’s flinty Professor Minerva McGonagall; and Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess of Grantham, whose clipped one-liners sparked snorts of mirth on both sides of the Atlantic.
Despite her success, Smith insisted she never had a plan for her career, preferring to work instinctively. “It’s what turns up, quite honestly,” she once said.
“She can capture in a single moment more than many actors can convey in an entire film,” explained Nicholas Hytner, who directed Smith in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. “She can be vulnerable, fierce, bleak and hilarious simultaneously, and she brings to the set each day the energy and curiosity of a young actor who’s just started out.”
Writing Smith’s 1992 biography, critic Michael Coveney stressed that understanding Smith’s childhood is fundamental to understanding her work, famous for, as he wrote, the “stifled aside, muffled barb, the slightly malicious crack.” Born in Ilford, England, Smith grew up in Oxford, where she was at odds with her staunch, Presbyterian parents and older twin brothers. Her mother didn’t think she had much chance as an actor with “a face like that,” and believed her daughter should take a secretarial course right up until she won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Her father, Nat, a lab technician, was more supportive, assiduously filing Smith’s clippings. But he seemed haunted by a repressed sense of theatricality. After retiring, he offered his medical research to the Bodleian library. When it was rejected, he built a bonfire and burned it in the garden.
As a child, Smith was entranced by a series of books called The Swish of the Curtain. From a young age, the allure of acting was that it was a method to enter into another world. “A much better world,” she once said to critic Nancy Banks-Smith. “I’m never shy on stage. Always shy off it… it’s the real world that’s the illusion.”