Known from “Harry Potter”: Magical, British, terrifying: Maggie Smith is dead

The raised eyebrows, the ironic-melancholic look from giant eyes, the “Really?” seemed to ask, the slightly flared nostrils and the thin lips when she stooped to something as vulgar as anger – Maggie Smith was always unmistakable.

Despite a decades-long stage and film career that began as a young woman, Smith will be best remembered by older people as the acerbic matriarch Violet Crawley in the globally successful television series “Downton Abbey” – and by younger people as Professor Minerva McGonagall in “Harry Potter” films. She also often caused laughter with sarcastic comments.

Dame Maggie Smith died in a London hospital on Friday morning at the age of 89, the British news agency PA reported, citing her family. Her sons thanked the hospital staff. “She was a very private person and ultimately loved by friends and family. She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of her extraordinary mother and grandmother,” the statement said.

Comedian of the first order

“I could never imagine not being an actress,” Maggie Smith once said, “I couldn’t possibly give that up, even if it’s not as glittering a life as people think, but hard drudgery.” She was born on December 28, 1934 in Ilford, near London, and grew up in Oxford because her father found work there as a laboratory technician. Her mother was a secretary and wasn’t particularly keen on her only daughter becoming an actress – “especially with a face like that”.

It wasn’t until Smith won her first Oscar for the lead role in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969) that her mother gave up on the idea that she should have taken a secretarial course. Smith was a comedienne of the first order who, of course, also ventured into Shakespeare – for example as Desdemona in the legendary “Othello” with Laurence Olivier, which earned her the first of four Oscar nominations.

Return to the stage at 85

She received a second Oscar for her supporting role in “The Crazy California Hotel” (1978). Maggie Smith was unbeatable in entertaining films like Death on the Nile, Sister Act and She-Devils Club. In 2015 she played the leading role as a homeless person in the tragicomedy “The Lady with the Van” and in 2019 she returned to the stage after a twelve-year break as Joseph Goebbels’ private secretary in “A German Life”.

Smith had a reputation for not being particularly tolerant of fools. The theater director Peter Hall once characterized her with the words: “I put Maggie on the list of the 50 most difficult people I have ever worked with.” Others appreciated her sense of humor – for example, John Madden, who directed her film “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and its sequel. “She has a fabulously mischievous sense of humor that she uses with laser precision and skill when she feels comfortable.”

Retired life

In her private life, she was extremely introverted, lived a withdrawn life, hated interviews and photos and wanted to be left alone. The worst thing for her was that “Downton Abbey” fans recognized her even abroad. She described her evasive strategy to the Telegraph newspaper when she was approached: “I usually run away. Take a turn and get away, away, away.”

At 80, she announced that she would give up her role as the widowed Countess of Grantham in the television series “Downton Abbey.” “Honestly, the corsets are torture. God knows how they lived back then when they had to wear them all the time,” she told the US trade publication Vanity Fair. Finally she was persuaded to watch the cinema version of the same name.

In 2014, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the British Order of Companions of Honor for her 60-year film and stage career. In addition to the monarch, the order only has a few dozen members, including the physicist Stephen Hawking, the painter David Hockney and the actress Judi Dench. Maggie Smith said in the Telegraph: “If you live long enough, you become an icon. A pretty dusty icon… or a national treasure.”