Harry Potter And Downton Abbey Actress Maggie Smith Dead At 89

British icon and star of stage and screen, Dame Maggie Smith, tragically died on September 27, 2024 (via Variety). She was 89 years old. 

For many people, Dame Maggie Smith likely means two things: Professor Minerva McGonagall from the "Harry Potter" movies, and the snippety, snooty Dowager Countess Violet Crawley from "Downton Abbey." Long before Smith was giving 10 points to Gryffindor or making cutting remarks to her relatives, however, she'd already wowed audiences with powerful, controlled, and expertly delivered performances for decades: Desdemona in "Othello" (1965), the title character in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969), all the way to "The Secret Garden" (1993) and more. Over the course of her career, she earned, among other awards, two Oscars, four Emmys, and seven BAFTAs (per IMDb). She was knighted, as Vogue points out, in 1990.

It's no coincidence that Smith was typically cast in no-nonsense, honest-to-a-fault roles, as she was much the same in real life (The Independent reports her telling a New York waiter, "The sort you pour down your throat" when asked what kind of water she'd like). Smith despised watching her own performances, particularly on film, as she explains in a YouTube interview with the British Film Institute, because "it's forever." Theater, at least, afforded do-overs.

In fact, Smith greatly disliked the roles that made her famous later in life, as the Decider discusses. She said her acting in "Harry Potter" was "made up entirely of reaction shots," and, as she said on the Graham Norton Show (on YouTube), she never watched a single episode of Downton Abbey.

Born Margaret Natalie Smith in 1934 in Ilford, east of central London, Dame Smith took an early interest in acting, as Biography explains. After her family moved to Oxford and she graduated high school, she went directly to the Oxford Playhouse School. There, she studied for two years and had her debut in a performance of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 1952, before doing a stint on Broadway in 1956 and heading back to the National Theatre of Great Britain in the 1960s. Her career, unlike some other actors, didn't have any detours or substantial stumbling blocks. Smith merely continued onward and upward, and built her resume on the power of her innate talents, training, and presence.

By the time Smith was cast in the role of an eccentric schoolteacher at odds with her administration in 1969's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" — for which she earned her first Oscar — she was well on her way to becoming a legend. This role, and others such as 1985's "A Room with a View," 2001's "Gosford Park," and 2015's "The Lady in the Van," had either literary roots or stage-like qualities to their cinematography and dialogue. This allowed Smith to stay connected to roles that she found fulfilling, because, as she said in the aforementioned interview with the British Film Institute on YouTube, some films could be "torment" depending on the production, the team involved, the work environment, and so on.

In her late life, Maggie Smith returned to the stage in 2019 in a one-person performance of "A German Life" at the Bridge Theater in London, after a 12-year hiatus from theater acting. For 100 minutes audiences listened while Smith sat — never stood — and delivered artfully sparse, succinct autobiographical anecdotes. She played a real-life woman, Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked in the Third Reich's Broadcasting Corporation on the advent of World War II, and who became a personal secretary to Nazi propagandist master, Joseph Goebbels, as The Theatre Times explains.

In her personal life, as the BBC America outlines, Smith shared a love of tennis with fellow knight and renowned actor, Sir Ian McKellen (with whom she often traded impressions of each other), and was close friends with Dame Judi Dench. On a more serious note, as Mental Floss relates, she overcame breast cancer during the filming of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" in 2009.

Smith was married twice in her life, first to actor Sir Robert Stephens, with whom she had two sons, and then to playwright Beverley Cross. She was married to Robert Stephens from 1967 to 1976 (per The New York Times), around the same time she married Beverley Cross. Stephens passed away in 1995, and Cross in 1998. Smith is survived by her two sons, who are also professional actors.