Maggie Smith

The tyranny of the perfect gesture

Margaret Natalie Smith started acting even though no one in her family believed she could. Her grandmother said she didn't have the face for the theater and that she'd be better off learning typing to earn a steady income. But in 1952, she made her debut at the Oxford Playhouse as Viola in Twelfth Night, defying every domestic prediction.

That was the start of a run of classical roles that took her straight to the National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier. In 1964, Olivier chose her to play Desdemona in Othello. It's said that the slap he delivered on stage was real, because she was the only actress who dared to answer him with the same technical intensity.

She won her first Oscar in 1970 for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

This was the exact moment when studios realized that this woman could carry an entire film with a single turn of her neck. Smith didn't seek the audience's empathy but their respect. She turned her sarcasm into a professional asset that paid off more than the conventional beauty of her contemporaries.

She never liked seeing herself on screen.

During the 1970s she specialized in sharp comedies and the plays of Neil Simon. In 1978 she filmed California Suite and earned her second statuette, playing an actress who loses an Oscar. It was a twist of fate in the script that she executed with mathematical coolness.

But her true source of income and prestige remained on the London stage. Smith hated interviews and preferred the refuge of the dressing room to the glare of parties in Los Angeles. So she stayed away from the press for decades while collecting Tony and BAFTA awards without fuss.

The refuge of big budgets

The arrival of the new century brought a kind of fame she considered noisy and somewhat annoying. In 2001, she accepted the role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter saga. That decision wasn't out of love for magic, but for the financial security that let her keep choosing niche stage productions in London.

The audience simply obeyed her.

Starting in 2010, she moved into television with Downton Abbey. The role of Violet Crawley became a trap she couldn't escape for six seasons and two feature films. Smith often complained that people no longer saw her as an actress, but as a factory of cutting one-liners for internet memes.

In 2015 she starred in The Lady in the Van, spending weeks filming inside a filthy van. It was her most physical performance and the one that best showed her contempt for the artificial glamour of the industry. She needed no makeup to convey the decline of a woman who lived on the street.

For her, acting was a process of eliminating the unnecessary.

In 2023 she released The Miracle Club alongside Kathy Bates. It was one of her last professional commitments before she stepped away from the public spotlight for good. She worked with the same precision she had shown in her Oxford days, and without asking for favors because of her age.

Maggie Smith died on September 27, 2024 at a hospital in London at the age of 89.