Photo: USA Films/Everett Collection
In a fêted seven-decade career spanning stage, screen, and television — never once proving less than incredible, with her protuberant eyes and wry tone — Dame Maggie Smith was a national treasure for her native Britain. In her variety of roles over the years, from Shakespeare and Agatha Christie to Merchant-Ivory and Harry Potter, Smith cultivated a specific kind of Englishness for the screen but was never afraid to upend expectation. She had Royal Shakespeare and the Old Vic in her bones, and few screen actors today can claim the pedigree of her past. She starred opposite Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, and Richard Burton, to name but a few, but was characteristically modest about her achievements. “I’ve won two Oscars and I still don’t begin to understand film acting,” she once said.
Born in 1930s Essex, Smith made her stage debut in 1952, and she was already a tried-and-true veteran by the time of her first Oscar at 35, as the titular star of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. To a younger generation, Maggie Smith was the formidable Professor McGonagall from the eight Harry Potter films, or perhaps the sardonic and sniffy Violet Crawley of Downton Abbey fame (she wryly remarked she’d never watched the show when asked). She kept working and was visible right up until her death at age 89, recognized on the street in a way that sometimes discomfited her, but crucially, beloved and appreciated for her body of work.
Here are eleven essential performances from Dame Maggie Smith’s remarkable and irreplaceable career.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
Smith won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for this curious, eccentric role as a 1930s schoolmistress who takes four young girls under her wing — for better and for worse. She espouses strong views on womanhood, culture, art, music … and fascism. Influential and destructive, Smith brings a tremulous self-delusion and confidence to the part, with a wild passion for life that contradicts everything young women are supposed to be taught at a strict all-girls school, particularly a fascination with men. Based on a novel by Muriel Spark, the film captures the amorality and disaster that results from the teacher’s behavior, but Smith brings a defiance to the flame-haired Jean Brodie that you can’t help but find a soft spot for.
Death on the Nile (1978)
In this ensemble follow-up to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mystery tale Murder on the Orient Express, 1930s-era gloss is the order of the day. Smith plays Miss Bowers, a glamorous tuxedo-donning assistant, styled à la Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, to an aged and refined lady (Bette Davis). It’s no small feat to appear opposite one of the greatest screen actors of all time and not only come out well but hold your own, yet Smith does precisely this. The pair bicker and moan at one another like equals, and even with Bette Davis in the role of a waspish superior, Smith’s muttering defiance and barely-contained exasperation give her the audience’s eye.
California Suite (1978)
Smith won her second Academy Award, this time in Supporting Actress, for her part in a raucous anthology film about a series of colorful and troubled guests checking into a Los Angeles luxury hotel. Ironically enough, her part is that of an actress nominated for the same exact honor — except in the film, she’s convinced she’ll never win the Oscar, and she sweeps bitterly from despair to fury over it. Avoiding any histrionics (a go-to when actors play actors as a rule), her sequence, where she bitterly fights with her companion (Michael Caine) before they attend the Academy Awards ceremony, is undeniably the very best thing in the film. It’s a perfectly calibrated performance of aching vulnerability and narcissism in free fall. Of course she won the Oscar.
The Missionary (1982)
Smith took an early interest in working with Beatle George Harrison’s independent production company, Handmade Films, in the 1980s. In this historical comedy farce, she plays wealthy, sex-starved Lady Isabel Ames, who offers Michael Palin, a former missionary to Africa, large donations for his next “charitable” cause: helping to rehabilitate local sex workers — but only if he will repay her in the bedroom. It’s about as problematic as it sounds, but Smith is genuinely hilarious in the role, with a self-aware, arched brow and intentional double entendres in her plummy accent. Smith’s willingness to do smutty comedy just shows how flexible she was as an actor.
A Room With a View (1985)
Smith got another Academy Award nomination under her belt for her memorable performance in this Merchant-Ivory love story of repression and Edwardian yearning. Smith is Charlotte, older cousin and chaperone to our unmarried protagonist Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter). As was the custom of the day, Charlotte’s role was never to allow Lucy out unaccompanied to protect her honor and reputation. But the brilliance of Smith in this supporting role is that she is clearly stifled and struggling against the confines of the situation, too; she does her best to protect her charge, fussing over her and giving strident advice about avoiding impudent men. But she knows when a battle is lost and lovers will be lovers; here it’s all over her face.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)
Working again with Handmade Films, Smith carries this lesser-appreciated 1950s period drama on her shoulders as the titular spinster of the title, a lonely Irish woman who can no longer make ends meet with her piano lessons. The pious woman moves to a Dublin boarding house and meets a charming American man (played by the ever-charismatic Bob Hoskins) who seems to seek to woo her, though his intentions are ambiguous and he mistakenly seems to think she has a substantial amount of money to her name. So Smith is set up on a tragic and touching trajectory, ultimately building to the blind rage of a woman who feels she has wasted her life with religion and being much, much too “good.”
Sister Act (1992)
You likely remember the story of Deloris (Whoopi Goldberg), a pretend nun-on-the-run who hides in a convent to avoid retribution from gangsters who know she witnessed a crime. If so, you surely remember Maggie Smith’s role as well. One of the things that has always distinguished Smith was her ability to play both high and low, with real variety in her roles and no snobbery around the sorts of parts she’d take on, whether it be Desdemona in Othello opposite Laurence Olivier or the unforgettable Reverend Mother in Sister Act. (She appears in both Sister Act films, in fact, in a credit to her likability in the part.) Her part seems easy on paper: a mean and demanding mother superior at the start who ultimately helps Deloris hide in the convent. But the film simply wouldn’t be as fun as it is without Smith’s expertly disapproving — but begrudgingly amused — presence.
Gosford Park (2001)
Smith is literally her later Downton Abbey character in this film; Julian Fellowes, who wrote Gosford and created Downton, keeps her aristocratic title for his show, which was originally meant as a spinoff of the movie but became its own standalone story. Maverick director Robert Altman, of Nashville fame, was well-known for his ability to direct a large ensemble cast, and to infuse those complicated stories with a granular sense of humanity for each of his characters, even if they had fairly limited screen time. That is undeniably true of this whodunit black comedy about a weekend shooting party at a lavish country estate, with shades of everything from Agatha Christie to Jean Renoir, and a lacerating view of the class-and-servant system of early 20th-century England. In the pecking order of above-and-below stairs characters, Maggie Smith’s Dowager falls somewhere near the top; imperious and cheerfully callous about how little she pays her maids, she’s a monster in lace sleeves.
The Harry Potter movies
The tough-but-fair Professor McGonagall of the Potter stories is the kind of part Maggie Smith knew precisely how to play, arguably even had a corner on; the prim and proper British lady who abides to rules to a T, but has a sly, wicked sense of humor and knows precisely when to look the other way. Always on the side of good (unlike some other Hogwarts staff), Smith brought her longtime screen presence to a younger generation of filmgoers on the strength of the series’ global success. She later joked about having to wear so many silly hats for the part (“It was like Albert Hall, it was so huge and heavy,” she quipped), but the part cemented her image in the public forever.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), directed by John Madden
This breakout British domestic hit spawned not only a sequel but possibly an entire cottage industry of golden-oldie AARP feel-good hits. These sunny, humorous films with romantic subplots and comic high jinks found a starting point with this surprise fan favorite. When a gang of elderly folks discover an apparently exotic retirement home out in balmy Jaipur, they decide to embark on a late-in-life adventure and get more than they bargained for. The usually likable Smith is more than up to the challenge of a less cuddly role, and here she plays the part of a former housekeeper, Muriel, who goes to India to get a cheaper hip replacement. She also happens to be a former racist who eventually sees the error of her ways, in some of the film’s only scenes which present anything remotely knotty or challenging about aging or society. Trust Maggie Smith to extract something worthwhile from such frothy material.
The Downton Abbey franchise
“I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” said Smith in a 2017 interview of her role as Dowager Countess Violet Crawley in the hit television show. Combining a sense of stodgy Victorian propriety with an eye-twinkling cattiness and natural look of disapproval, she infamously regarded modern trappings — from a swivel chair to a telephone — with great suspicion, and like a true British blue-blood, detests the vulgarity of Americans. Her bitchiness is legendary, and meme-able, especially given her tendency toward coldly witty bon mots. Smith gives the Dowager gravitas and authority, making the woman seem less silly than she might in other iterations of aristocracy. Make what you will of the politics of the show, but Smith was its crown jewel, and when she quit, they simply couldn’t make it without her.
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