Maggie Smith, the Esteemed Icon of Theatre and Film, Passes Away at 89

Maggie Smith, one of the most esteemed British stage and screen actors of her time, passed away on Friday in London at the age of 89. Known for her award-winning performances, she portrayed a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and the sharp-tongued dowager countess in “Downton Abbey.” Her family announced her death, which occurred in a hospital, but did not disclose the cause.

American audiences had yet to recognize her talent when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), a film about a 1930s teacher at a girls’ school with unconventional views and a complicated love life. Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right,” leading to her first Academy Award for Best Actress. She later received a second Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “California Suite” (1978), where she portrayed a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), experiencing both disappointment and bittersweet moments that night.

Ms. Smith’s accolades began in 1962 when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the early 2000s, she had accumulated two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, six BAFTAs, and numerous nominations, yet she could often go about her life unrecognized—until the phenomenon of “Downton Abbey.”

The series, which premiered in the UK in 2010 and in the US the following year, chronicled the lives of the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his aristocratic family, and their troubled staff at a grand Jacobean mansion during the years 1912 to 1925. Ms. Smith emerged as the breakout star, portraying Lord Grantham’s elderly mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess, who disapproved of modern conveniences like electric lights and held a comically imperious demeanor. In one memorable scene, she dismissed a suggestion to send a younger relative to New York with the words, “Oh, I don’t think things are quite that desperate.” Suddenly, in her mid-70s, she became a megastar.

Reflecting on her newfound fame, she remarked to arts journalist Mark Lawson in 2017, “It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey.’ Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

Prior to this, her most notable public visibility came from her role as Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” films, where she portrayed the stern transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts across seven films from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011). McGonagall, characterized by her Victorian-style gowns and a distinctive Scottish brooch, was a memorable figure, yet Ms. Smith mostly evaded intense public scrutiny, apart from being recognized by young fans. She recounted, “A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice,” recalling one boy who curiously asked, “Were you really a cat?”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, Essex, now part of London’s Redbridge borough. Her father, Nathaniel Smith, was a public-health pathologist, and her mother, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, a secretary originally from Scotland. When Maggie was five, the family moved to Oxford, where her father taught. She attended the Oxford School for Girls and began her acting career with the newly formed Oxford Playhouse, making her debut in a production of “Twelfth Night” in 1952.