Memorial Page for Maggie Smith (née Margaret Natalie Smith)

Maggie Smith (born 28 December 1934 in Ilford, Essex; died 27 September 2024 in London) was a British actress. Across a career spanning seventy years, from the Shakespearean stage to world cinema, she won two Academy Awards before becoming known to a huge younger audience as the stern Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and as the sharp-tongued dowager countess in Downton Abbey.

From Oxford to the stage

Smith grew up the daughter of pathologist Nathaniel Smith and Glasgow-born secretary Margaret Little, with two older brothers; the family moved to Oxford in 1939. She left school at sixteen and joined the Oxford Playhouse School. She made her professional stage debut in 1952 as Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for the Oxford University Dramatic Society, followed by her Broadway debut in 1956 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. From 1963 she was a member of Laurence Olivier's newly founded Royal National Theatre company.

Two marriages

On 29 June 1967 Smith married actor Robert Stephens; the couple had two sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, both of whom also became actors. The marriage, which Smith later described as "very, very turbulent," ended in divorce in 1975. On 23 June that same year she married her childhood sweetheart, playwright Beverley Cross; the marriage lasted until his death on 20 March 1998.

Two Oscars

In 1970 Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and in 1979 the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for California Suite (1978) – a rare double achievement that cemented her standing as one of the finest character actresses of her generation. Throughout, she remained devoted to the theatre: she won her only Tony Award in 1990 in New York for Lettice and Lovage, and later shared the stage with Judi Dench in The Breath of Life (2002).

McGonagall, Downton Abbey and a new audience

From 2001 to 2011, personally recommended for the role by author J. K. Rowling, Smith played Professor Minerva McGonagall in all eight Harry Potter films, becoming known to a vast young audience that had never seen her stage career. From 2010 she played the widowed Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the television series Downton Abbey, a role full of sharp comic timing that she carried through into the series' film sequels in 2019 and 2022.

Illness and death

In 2007 it became publicly known that Smith had been diagnosed with breast cancer; in a later interview she spoke openly of the treatment as something that leaves you "so flattened." She largely recovered and returned to stage and screen. Maggie Smith died on 27 September 2024, aged 89, in London.

Few actresses combined the highest theatrical prestige with mass popularity so effortlessly. Maggie Smith remained in demand into her final years — not despite a stage presence that was impossible to overlook even in a supporting role, but precisely because of it.