Maggie Smith obituary: scene-stealing star who became a national institution

“That girl has a magic,” Kenneth Williams confided to his diary while appearing in Peter Shaffer’s twinned 1962 plays The Private Ear and The Public Eye opposite Maggie Smith. He also noted that Smith had “a deftness of touch in comedy that makes you really grateful”. But Smith herself, who has died aged 89, had mixed feelings about her gift. “I got pigeonholed in humour,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count. Comedy is never considered the real thing.” But Maggie Smith was very definitely the real thing.

A perfectionist who forensically studied texts to find character clues, Smith specialised in people who didn’t quite fit. In her first credited film role, in Seth Holt’s highly unEaling thriller Nowhere to Go (1958), she played a chief constable’s niece who assists a fugitive – and this sense of defiance recurred, whether she was playing enigmatic professional women, emotionally stifled housewives, acerbically assertive servants, spirited senior citizens, or haughty grande dames. She was occasionally accused of being mannered. But even Smith’s more flamboyant or eccentric creations had a melancholic fragility that made them recognisable and authentic.

Born in Ilford on 28 December 1934, she was raised in Oxford and enrolled at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre School at 16. She made her stage debut two years later, as Viola in a student production of Twelfth Night. But it was her comic skills that took her to Broadway as part of the New Faces of ’56 revue and which got her noticed by Laurence Olivier, who was convinced that anyone who could do comedy that easily must also be capable of tragedy.

Smith would reprise her 1960 stage performance as Desdemona opposite Olivier in Othello (1965), which brought her first Oscar nomination. But National Theatre commitments limited her film opportunities, even though co-star Richard Burton had deemed her scene-stealing turn as Rod Taylor’s devoted secretary in The V.I.P.s (1963) to be tantamount to grand larceny.

Having been directed by such Hollywood titans as John Ford (Young Cassidy, 1965) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (The Honey Pot, 1967), Smith won the Oscar for best actress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). The producers had courted Julie Andrews, but Smith (whose mother was Scottish) brought a compelling blend of coquettishness, acerbic superiority, fascistic delusion, manipulative cruelty and neurotic vulnerability to the part of the dangerously charismatic 1930s Edinburgh schoolteacher. How different things would be when she was cast as another Scottish educator, Professor Minerva McGonagall, in seven of the eight Harry Potter films (between 2001 and 2011).

Yet it was George Cukor’s take on Graham Greene’s novel Travels with My Aunt (1972) that shaped Smith’s future prospects. The 37-year-old had been recruited to play seventysomething Augusta Bertram after Katharine Hepburn had fallen out with the producers. Smith’s shifts between poise and mischief underscored the social satire, but she also conveyed the excruciating absurdity of life with a forlornness that would recur in her Charlotte Bartlett in A Room with a View (1985), Lavinia Packham in Washington Square (1997) and Lady Hester Random in Tea with Mussolini (1999). Moreover, Aunt Augusta’s lineage can also be traced to those formidable upholders of expiring attitudes and traditions, Constance, Countess of Trentham in Gosford Park (2001) and Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey (2010 to 2016) and its two spin-off features, which were all written by Julian Fellowes. Fellowes also cast Smith as Linnet Oldknow in the overlooked Lucy M. Boston adaptation, From Time to Time (2009).

Only two other men wrote for Smith so adeptly. Having paired her with David Niven to lampoon the Thin Man duo of Nick and Nora Charles in Murder by Death (1976), Neil Simon allowed Smith to become the only Oscar winner to play an Oscar nominee, in a vignette in California Suite (1978) that wickedly caught Smith’s own insecurity with the line: “Eight years with the National Theatre, two Pinters, nine Shakespeares, three Shaws and I finally get nominated for a nauseating little comedy.”

Alan Bennett gave Smith the equally memorable line “Well, Gilbert, I think sexual intercourse is in order,” in A Private Function (1984) – a second HandMade Films teaming with Michael Palin after The Missionary (1982) – in which Smith excels as a chiropodist’s prim wife hoping to climb the social ladder in a postwar northern town with an illicit pork supper. While Joyce Chilvers was repressed, Susan, the alcoholic wife of an uncaring vicar who finds solace with an Asian shopkeeper, was desperately lonely in Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue ‘A Bed Among the Lentils’ (1988). The pain of isolation was evident in another HandMade drama, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), which was based on a Brian Moore novel and earned Smith a BAFTA. But Bennett found a way to combine her knack for withering imperiousness and wounded pride in Miss Mary Shepherd, the homeless woman with a hidden past who takes up residence on Bennett’s Camden driveway in the autobiographical saga The Lady in the Van (2015).

Smith also made the odd trip to Hollywood, spicing up crowdpleasers like Sister Act (1992), The First Wives Club (1996) and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) with her patented mix of weary haughtiness and lethal frankness. This also informs Nothing like a Dame (2018), the wonderfully gossipy documentary that Smith made with Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench; Dench was a close friend with whom she had also co-starred in Ladies in Lavender (2004) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2014). 

The celebrity-shy Smith offered greater insight, however, in a 1979 New York Times interview, in which she revealed, “I don’t feel I am the kind of people I play … I’m always very relieved to be somebody else, because I’m not sure at all who I am or what indeed my personality is. I feel like a person who doesn’t exist until I’m somebody else.”

• Maggie Smith, 28 December 1934 to 27 September 2024