Maggie Smith, two-time Oscar-winning “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey” actress, dies at 89

The British dame charmed audiences with her many roles, including as Professor McGonagall in the "Harry Potter" films and as the sharp-tongued matriarch Violet in "Downton Abbey."

Maggie Smith — the grande dame of British theater who won two Academy Awards, mentored Harry Potter as Professor McGonagall, and embodied Downton Abbey’s sharp-tongued matriarch Violet — has died. She was 89.

"It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September," her sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, said in a statement provided to the BBC and the Associated Press. "An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren, who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother."

They continued, "We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days. We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time."

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Only Smith could have played Downton’s Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, the crusty but compulsively candid aristocrat who could draw blood with a mere arched eyebrow or perfectly timed barb. "Miss Smith’s presence is always a severe one," wrote The New York Times in a 1970 stage review. “She looks like a pair of scissors, to begin with, a closed pair that cuts even when closed."

"It's true I don't tolerate fools, but then they don't tolerate me," Smith has said of her own reputation.

Margaret Natalie Smith was born near London in 1934, an only daughter with two older twin brothers. Her grandmother suggested early on that she wasn’t pretty enough to be an actress and that she should learn how to type instead, but Smith developed into a swan. During her 60-plus-year career, she worked with the greatest, from Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, to Judi Dench and Michael Caine. She was nominated for an Academy Award six times and won twice, for Best Actress for 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Best Supporting Actress for 1978's California Suite.

But she forged her reputation on the stage, where she perfected her craft, beginning in her hometown of Oxford, and then in her 1956 Broadway debut, a revue titled New Faces of 1956. English theater critic Kenneth Tynan noticed mannerisms in her early comedies that would eventually delight the Downton faithful: "the arched eyebrow, the appalled glare, the outrageous double take, the adenoidal gurgle, the wince of disgust." In 1963, she accepted Olivier's invitation to join the nascent British National Theatre Company, and she went on to star as Desdemona in a celebrated production of Othello that was later adapted for the big screen. That film role earned her her first Oscar nomination.

Hollywood stardom did not come easily for Smith; her sharp features and wry comic gifts made her an unconventional leading lady. But she was perfectly cast in her Academy Award–winning role of Jean Brodie, an authoritative Scottish teacher who takes bright young girls under her wing but whose own personal life is a wreck. She could not attend the ceremony to accept her Oscar because she was debuting a new play, The Beaux Stratagem, in London.

She bounced between stage and screen in the early 1970s, notably starring in Ingmar Bergman's London production of Hedda Gabler and earning a third Oscar nomination for director George Cukor's Travels With My Aunt. But her private life was on shaky ground. Smith had married her Jean Brodie costar Robert Stephens in 1967, when they were both at the National Theater. They had two sons, actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. But Stephens struggled personally, attempting suicide, and the marriage faltered. They divorced in 1974. She turned to an old teenage sweetheart, playwright Beverley Cross; they married in 1975 and remained together until his death in 1998.

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Soon after her second marriage and a Tony-nominated turn in a Broadway revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, Smith was lured to Canada, where she recharged her creative energies for four seasons on the stage at Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. "It was such a vivid and clear time in my head and probably the most important years of my whole career," she told the Toronto Star in 2012.

In 1978, she costarred with Michael Caine in the Neil Simon–scripted California Suite, playing an Oscar nominee who fails to win the prize. Caine said she stole every scene, and the Academy agreed, awarding her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She earned another Tony nomination in 1980 for Night and Day and then returned to the London stage, while mixing in Hollywood parts both highbrow (A Room With a View) and lowbrow (Clash of the Titans).

In 1988, she was dealt dual setbacks: a cycling injury that left her with a broken shoulder just months before her upcoming project, Peter Shaffer's comedy Lettice and Lovage, was to open on Broadway, and a diagnosis of Graves disease, a thyroid condition that causes the eyes to bulge. Surgery and seclusion followed. Lettice and Lovage finally opened in March 1990, and Smith was rewarded with the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

She returned to Hollywood as sweet, grandmotherly Wendy in Steven Spielberg's 1991 Peter Pan film, Hook, and played Whoopi Goldberg's mother superior in the 1992 comedy hit Sister Act. Thus began a transition into more mature roles that made her more popular than ever: The Secret Garden, Washington Square, Tea With Mussolini (which paired her with her great friend Judi Dench), Gosford Park (which earned her a sixth Oscar nod and set the template for her Downton character), and, most notably, her part in the Harry Potter movies. Professor Minerva McGonagall was "Jean Brodie with a witch’s hat," Smith often said, and for more than a decade she appeared in seven of the Potter blockbusters, gaining fame with a younger generation and providing her with, as she half-joked, a generous pension.

In 2010, at age 76, she landed a role only she could play: Lady Violet. Julian Fellowes' upstairs-downstairs soap, Downton Abbey, became a pop-cultural phenomenon, and Smith won two consecutive Emmy Awards for her performance. "She has a style as an actress which is very, very rewarding for a writer," Fellowes, who had also written Gosford Park, told 60 Minutes in 2013. "She's very dry. She has this strength, this kind of emotional strength that is also underlying every laugh she gets." She would later reprised her role in the series' follow-up films: 2019's Downton Abbey and 2021's Downton Abbey: A New Era.

She performed similar magic in 2011's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, playing a feisty — though admittedly less regal — hip-replacement patient who joins a group of British retirees in India. Costarring Dench, the film grossed more than $136 million around the world. "If you're a character actress, you're very fortunate in a way because you can go on," Smith told Australian TV in 2004. "I mean, I now play all these nasty old women, really on the whole. Cornered the market, in fact."

Her most recent credits include playing Aunt Ruth in the 2021 holiday film A Boy Called Christmas and embarking on a journey from Ireland to France alongside Kathy Bates and Laura Linney in the 2023 drama The Miracle Club.

Smith's honors are staggering. In addition to her two Oscars and Tony, she won four Emmys, three Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, and an honorary Olivier Award. In 1990, Queen Elizabeth named her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. English playwright Alan Bennett once said of Smith, "The boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is always poised." In 2002, in between Potter and Gosford Park, she spoke to The London Telegraph about jumping between such disparate projects: "It's not that far away from life. One minute it's all hell and the next minute you're screeching with laughter."

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