Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died on Friday in London. She was 89.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. It did not specify the cause of death.
American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have provocative views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her the Academy Award for best actress.
She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.
In real life, prizes had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in 1962, when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards), and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized. Until “Downton Abbey.”
That series followed the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his mostly aristocratic family, and his troubled household staff at their grand Jacobean mansion as the world around them, between 1912 and 1925, refused to stand still. After its premiere in Britain in 2010 and in the United States a year later, the show ran for six seasons. Its breakout star, from the beginning, was Ms. Smith, playing Lord Grantham’s elderly and still stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess.
Suddenly, in her mid-70s, Ms. Smith was a megastar. “It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’” she told the arts journalist Mark Lawson. She added later, “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films.
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, which was a town in Essex at the time and is now part of the borough of Redbridge in London. Her father, Nathaniel Smith, was a public-health pathologist, and her mother, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, was a secretary who was born in Scotland.
When Maggie was 5, the family moved to Oxford, where her father taught. After studying at the Oxford School for Girls, she joined the newly formed Oxford Playhouse and made her acting debut in 1952 in “Twelfth Night.”
Although Ms. Smith was in her early 20s when she appeared in her first movie (as a party guest in “Child in the House,” a 1956 drama) and made her London stage debut (in “Share My Lettuce,” a 1957 musical revue), it could reasonably be argued that she was never an ingénue. Her early films included “The V.I.P.s” (1963), a Technicolor melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), a marital drama written by Harold Pinter and based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer.
Ms. Smith was just 37 when she starred in “Travels With My Aunt” (1972), based on Graham Greene’s novel, playing Aunt Augusta, an amoral world traveler in her 70s.
New York was never a significant factor in Ms. Smith’s career. After her Broadway debut, in the revue “New Faces of 1956,” she stayed away for almost two decades. Returning in 1975, she played the sophisticated Amanda Prynne in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” about a divorced couple who reconnect while honeymooning with their second spouses, then appeared in Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” (1979) as a mining magnate’s unhappy wife. She received Tony nominations for both roles.
In “Lettice and Lovage” (1990), Ms. Smith played a tour guide who makes up outrageous (and vastly entertaining) lies about the old houses she shows people through. Frank Rich paid tribute in his review: “Miss Smith’s personality so saturates everything around her that, like the character she plays, she instantly floods a world of gray with color,” he wrote. “This is idiosyncratic theater acting of a high and endangered order.”
That performance won her a Tony for best actress in a play. But Broadway was a blink of the eye compared with the British stage.
Ms. Smith disliked watching her own performances. As recently as 2020, she said she had still never seen an episode of “Downton Abbey.” Behind the quick wit, though, lay the heart of an introvert. On the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2013, when it was suggested that she had no interest in celebrity, Ms. Smith said: “Absolutely none. I mean, why would I?” She had long described herself as painfully shy.