It is a testament to how long, varied and celebrated a career Dame Maggie Smith enjoyed that it would be insulting to point to any one defining role. In fact, it is reductive even to consider one particular medium.
For film-goers, there’s her Oscar-winning performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). For those who grew up in the 2000s on Harry Potter, Smith, who has died at the age of 89, will always be Professor Minerva McGonagall.
On the small screen, she glowered through Downton Abbey as the indomitable grandmother to a thousand memes, Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.
But many will argue that it is in the theatre that this most versatile of performers showed off a complete mastery that had critics and audiences enthralled, playwrights crafting their work specifically for her and male counterparts cowering in the wings.
This versatility led to her winning a small mountain of acting awards, including two Oscars, four Emmys and a Tony — the so-called Triple Crown — as well as Golden Globes and Baftas.
Born in Ilford, Essex in 1934, she was brought up in Oxford where, at the age of 17, she made her stage debut playing Viola in Twelfth Night and her professional debut on Broadway four years later, in 1956.
As Smith herself succinctly put it: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting.” Showing a particular talent for comedy, she appeared in revues and farces, before catching the eye of Sir Laurence Olivier, who recruited her for the National Theatre, where she quickly established herself as his peer, if not his rival.
Her range saw her triumph in plays by Noël Coward while also winning plaudits for the title role in a production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler directed by Ingmar Bergman. When her Desdemona transferred to the big screen, she received the first of several Academy Award nominations.
Following early screen appearances in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Honey Pot (1967), in 1970 she won her first Oscar, Best Actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and another in 1979 for Best Supporting Actress in California Suite.
Throughout the next decades, she would collaborate with Merchant Ivory, Alan Bennett, Steven Spielberg and Agnieszka Holland on film, as well as appearing in plays by Oscar Wilde, William Congreve and Edward Albee. Peter Shaffer wrote 1987’s Lettice and Lovage specifically for her.
She was married twice, for eight years to actor Sir Robert Stephens — with whom she had two sons, actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens — and to playwright Beverley Cross from 1975 until his death in 1998.
In her later years, she never lost touch with her comic roots, appearing in crowd-pleasers such as Sister Act (1992) with Whoopi Goldberg and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), alongside her close contemporary Dame Judi Dench.
After an 11-year break from the stage, she returned in 2019 in Sir Christopher Hampton’s one-woman show A German Life, in which she played a woman looking back on her youth, when she worked as Joseph Goebbels’ secretary.
Offstage, Smith made for an entertaining raconteuse on talk shows, whether reciting Sir John Betjeman for Sir Michael Parkinson with her frequent stage companion Kenneth Williams, or disparaging her latest manifestation of fame to Graham Norton. When the latter asked if she had ever watched Downton Abbey, she pursed her lips and drolly replied: “I’ve got the box set.”
She could have a spikiness and wit that Dowager Violet would have enjoyed, once saying of Glenn Close: “That’s not an actress, that’s an address”. Her irreverence was proof that no matter how many titles she received — she was made a Dame in 1990 and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, only the third female actor to receive such an honour, in 2014 — her character and freedom was as immune to praise and respectability as it was to criticism.
Tributes have come in from King Charles III and British political leaders from all parties, as well as co-stars and directors.
Sir Kenneth Branagh called her “unquestionably one of the greats”, going on to say: “It was an honour to work with Maggie Smith. A privilege to watch her. In tragedy, she made you catch your breath while she broke your heart. In comedy, she could get a laugh from a look or a line at any time she wished. She was sharp and prepared at work, exhilarating company away from it.”
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