Remembering Maggie Smith

Putting it simply, Maggie Smith is one of Britain's finest ever actors. Her passing at the age of 89 means no more inimitable performances. But she leaves a remarkable legacy, as Cinema Paradiso reveals.

'One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one's still acting.' Only Maggie Smith could have summed up a glittering career in such a matter-of-fact manner. She won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, four Emmys, and five BAFTAs, including a record four for Best Actress. Her Tony Award made her one of only 14 actresses to win the Triple Crown of Acting and she would certainly have become an EGOT if she hadn't been too busy on stage and screen to enter a recording studio.

In later years, Smith became renowned for a distinctive brand of disdainful grandeur that combined imperious poise and lethal delivery. Yet her characterisations were also tinged with an aching vulnerability and enigmatic complexity that made them so human and truthful. Writer and presenter Bamber Gascoigne said of style, 'It is extraordinarily mannered - but this is largely its strength, since the mannerisms are so completely and unmistakably her own. Most great comedians have this quality of unique oddity; anyone else borrowing the gestures or tricks would look plain ridiculous, but in them the effect is superb.'

Director Mike Newell joked that Smith would approach a scene with the attitude, 'he's asking for this, but he's going to get something bigger and better, and I hope he realises he's a very lucky boy'. She had a talent for the unexpected that epitomised her creative courage. New York Times critic Frank Rich hit the nail on the head when he opined, 'Miss Smith's personality so saturates everything around her that, like the character she plays, she instantly floods a world of grey with colour.' For Smith, however, the secret to her success and longevity was the realisation, 'you can only do what you do'.

Inspiring Dreams

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford on 28 December 1934, six years after her twin brothers, Ian and Alistair. Father Nathaniel was a laboratory technician from Newcastle, while mother Meg Hutton was an accounts secretary from Glasgow. He was Anglican, she was Presbyterian and they raised their children to be independent in an atmosphere of nurturing protectiveness and disciplined expectation. Looking back at Nat, Smith said, 'there was an incredible nervousness about him. You couldn't do this, couldn't do that. Mustn't ride a bike, you'd be bound to fall off. Couldn't swim, you'd most certainly drown.'

When Margaret was four, the family moved to Oxford when Nat got a job at the university's Dunn School of Pathology. She attended St James's School in Cowley before going to the fee-paying Greycotes prep school, where she became friends with novelist Graham Greene's daughter, Lucy. As

Meg worked at Morris Motors, Margaret did the household chores. But she was barred from her brothers' bedroom and developed a sense of self-sufficiency that she bolstered with an irreverence that matured into the waspish humour for which she became as famed as her refusal to suffer fools.

Although Margaret took piano and ballet lessons, money was tight and trips to the theatre were rare. Her father spanked her with a leather belt when she went with neighbours to see Alfred E. Green's The Jolson Story (1946), which she hadn't particularly enjoyed. But she remembered knowing she wanted to act from the age of eight, although her ambitions were thwarted by Dorothy Bartholomew, her English teacher at Oxford High School for Girls, who didn't think she could handle the role of Viola in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Miriam Margolyes was a contemporary at the school, where Smith acquired the nickname, 'The Woozler', because she was forever making her classmates laugh. However, she only did modestly in her O Levels and pleaded with her father to allow her to leave at 16 to join the newly launched Oxford Playhouse Theatre School. Meg thought she was doomed to fail, 'with a face like that', and urged to take a secretarial course. But Margaret had been inspired by Pamela Brown's books about the Blue Door acting company, even though she would later say about her vocation, 'It's not even that you particularly want to be an actor. You have to be. There's nothing you can do to stop it.'

Principal Isabel van Beers arranged for her students to do various jobs at the Oxford Playhouse and it was here that Smith made her first appearance as Jean in Elsa Shelley's The Pick-Up Girl in October 1951. Moreover, at the end of her two-year course, she finally got to play Viola in a student production that toured France with John Wood as Malvolio. Type his name into the Cinema Paradiso searchline to discover his credits. Curiously, he never acted with Smith on screen.

Lettuce and Larry

Smith's first professional contract with the Oxford Repertory Players earned her £4 10s a week as an assistant stage manager, who also did walk-on roles. She was also free to work with the Oxford Theatre Group and her involvement in the Cakes and Ale revue led to her making her first TV appearance alongside Ned Sherrin in Oxford Accents on 26 February 1954. In addition to acting roles, Smith also spent time as a hostess on Hughie Green's game show, Double Your Money, and played an uncredited party guest in Cy Endfield's Child in the House (1956), which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso on a disc with Maclean Rogers's Front Line Kids (1942) and Wolf Rilla's The Scamp (1957).

When she acted in an Oxford production of Ian Hay's The Housemaster, co-star Ronnie Barker told Smith she was wasting her time trying to be an actress (he later acknowledged his mistake). But Maggie Smith - as she now was because Equity already had a Margaret Smith on its books - was starting to impress directors of the calibre of Peter Hall and Peter Wood. Indeed, her work in Oxford Eight led to her being chosen for the New Faces of '56 revue at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.

On her return to Britain, Smith was cast opposite Kenneth Williams in Bamber Gascoigne's musical romp, Share My Lettuce (1957), which prompted Michael Balcon to sign her to a seven-year contract with the rump of Ealing Studios, which was based at the MGM British Studios at Borehamwood. She made her featured bow as Bridget Howard, the chief constable's niece who helps fugitive George Nader, in Seth Holt's Nowhere to Go (1958), a realist thriller that had been co-scripted by Kenneth Tynan, whom Smith had once felled with a hockey stick while jumping off a bus on Oxford High Street. For her efforts, she received a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer.

Theatre, however, would occupy her for the next four years, as Smith honed her craft. Among her triumphs was the Peter Shaffer double bill of The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1962), which reunited her with Kenneth Williams. He confided to his diary at the end of her run, 'I didn't say goodbye or anything, 'cos I'd have cried. But that girl has a magic, and a deftness of touch in comedy that makes you really grateful, and she's capable of a generosity of spirit that is beautiful. She's one of those rare people who make things and places suddenly marvellous, just by being there. She's adorable.'

Smith won the first of her five Evening Standard Best Actress award for the production, while she picked up the Variety Club prize the following year for Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary. Acclaim for Noël Coward's Hay Fever (1964) was the cue for her to join Laurence Olivier's first National Theatre season at the Old Vic. She had played Desdemona opposite him on stage in Othello (1960) and would earn her first Oscar nomination when she reprised the role in Stuart Burge's Othello (1965), which features Olivier in blackface. Although the theatre kept her busy, she found time to demonstrate her comic skills as Chantal in Michael Truman's crime caper, Go to Blazes (1963). Richard Burton was so-impressed with her scene-stealing display as Rod Taylor's besotted secretary, Miss Mead, in Anthony Asquith's The V.I.P.s (1963) that he accused her of grand larceny. She also held her own against Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch as house guest Philpot in Jack Clayton's Harold Pinter-scripted adaptation of Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater (1964).

Despite falling out with Olivier, who saw her as daunting competition, Smith was also becoming a regular on television, although she tended to favour drama showcases to episodic series. She also caused a minor scandal when she fell for married fellow National Theatre recruit, Robert Stephens during a production of Much Ado About Nothing, and married him in 1967. Sons Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin would both become actors. In his autobiography, Knight Errant, Stephens recalled a stagehand warning him, 'Watch out for her, she drinks like a fish and swears like a trooper.' But he was smitten. As he wrote. 'She impressed me then as being a miserable, rather forlorn creature. But she struck across my bows in those opening months of the National like a salt-sprayed sea breeze.'

Stephens was not alone in falling under Smith's spell, however. Legendary Hollywood director John Ford cast her as Nora alongside Rod Taylor and Julie Christie in the Sean O'Casey drama, Young Cassidy (1965), while Joseph L. Mankiewicz chose her for Sarah Watkins, the nurse who recognises that scheming millionaire Rex Harrison has read Ben Jonson's play, Volpone, in the underrated comedy thriller, The Honey Pot (1967), which was partially based on a play by Frederick Knott, who had been responsible for Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder (1955) and Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967). Smith also gave Peter Ustinov a run for his money as klutzy secretary and aspiring flautist Patty Terwilliger Smith in Eric Till's con caper, Hot Millions (1968). But it was her next venture that would make Maggie Smith a star.

Crème de la crème

While at Ealing, Smith had once received a message from the publicity department that read, 'Your fan mail total for this month is nil.' Things changed dramatically, however, when Julie Andrews turned down the lead in Ronald Neame's adaptation of Muriel Spark's bestseller, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Vanessa Redgrave had created the role on stage, but Smith added a hint of mischievous wit and delusional egotism. As a private joke, she based the dangerously charismatic teacher at a 1930s Edinburgh girls school on her mother, as she moulded impressionable young minds with her fascistic views. while flirting with smitten colleagues Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson.

She didn't attend the Oscar ceremony, as she pipped Jane Fonda ( They Shoot Horses, Don't They? ), Geneviève Bujold ( Anne of the Thousand Days ), Liza Minnelli (The Sterile Cuckoo), and Jean Simmons (The Happy Ending) to Best Actress. It might not have been a particularly strong field, but Smith could have argued with a line from the film, 'For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.' Smith also won the BAFTA, with school principal Celia Johnson taking the Best Supporting mask over Pamela Franklin, as the student who snitches on Brodie after she falls from her favour.

A cameo followed, as the music hall star crooning, 'I'll Make a Man of You' in Richard Attenborough's Great War musical, Oh! What A Lovely War (1969). Such was Smith's newfound status that, when Ingmar Bergman opted to work outside Scandinavia for the first time, he picked her to lead his National Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1970). Another Variety Club award followed for Noël Coward's Private Lives. opposite Stephnes, although the marriage was coming under strain because of his frequent infidelities. During the filming of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Stephens tried to kill himself. But the couple battled on before divorcing in 1975 and Smith swiftly married Beverley Cross, a playwright who had adored her since their first meeting in Oxford in 1952.

Among Smith's other stage triumphs in this period were Peter Pan (1973), in which she took the title role. When Steven Spielberg revisited J.M. Barrie's story in Hook (1991), however, Smith played the ageing Wendy to Robin Williams's Peter. But she was growing disillusioned with the West End and spent three years at the Stratford Festival in Ontatio, Canada, having 'a damned good try at a lot of things that I would probably never be cast for in England'. This liberating experience allowed Smith to spread her creative wings and gave her the confidence to rescue George Cukor's adaptation of Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt (1972) by replacing Katharine Hepburn when she fell out with the producers. At just 37, Smith was far too young to play maiden aunt Augusta Bertram. But she shared Angela Lansbury's gift for playing above her years and she is wildly amusing leading prim banker nephew Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) on a Wodehousian journey of discovery. It's frustrating that the film is not currently on disc. as Smith very much merited her Best Actress nomination. But the role is significant because it provided the template for the lonelyhearts, chaperones, spinsters, and dowagers for which she would be so feted in the second half of her career.

Stage and family commitments kept Smith off screen for much of the 1970s. But she revelled in playing the richest woman in England, Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga, in William Slater's 1972 BBC Play of the Month take on George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess, which Anthony Asquith had filmed with Sophia Loren in 1960. Moreover, Smith got to play a rare romantic lead, as the socially awkward Lila Fisher befriends asthmatic American Walter Elbertson (Timothy Bottoms) on a Spanish bus tour in Alan J. Pakula's wrongly overlooked, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973).

A couple of whodunts next occupied Smith, as Neil Simon provided her and David Niven with plenty of relishable dialogue as Dick and Nora Charleston, the married sleuths in Robert Moore's Murder By Death (1976). They were modelled on Nick and Nora Charles, William Powell and Myrna Loy's characters in MGM's Thin Man series - all of which is available from Cinema Paradiso: The Thin Man (1934); After the Thin Man (1936); Another Thin Man (1939); Shadow of the Thin Man (1941); The Thin Man Goes Home (1945); and Song of the Thin Man (1947).

Simon's pastiche was pitch perfect. But Anthony Shaffer also got Agatha Christie's argot down to a tee for John Guillermin's Death on the Nile (1978), in which Smith got to trade badinage with Bette Davis, as companion-cum-nurse Miss Bowers tries to keep kleptomaniac boss Marie Van Schuyler under control during a vacation in Egypt. Smith clearly enjoyed the experience, as she reunited with Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot in the guise of actress-turned-hotelier Daphne Castle, who traded insults with erstwhile thesping rival, Arlena Stuart (Diana Rigg), in her Adriatic hotel in Guy Hamilton's Evil Under the Sun (1982).

Smith was celebrated for her acid drops off screen, as she had a quick and wicked sense of humour that she often turned on those who displeased her. In many ways, however, this was a defence mechanism, as Smith was painfully shy and often claimed only to be truly comfortable when playing someone else. Neil Simon tapped into these insecurities in creating Diana Barrie, the British actress in Herbert Ross's California Suite (1978), who arrives in Hollywood for the Academy Awards with her gay antique-dealing husband, Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine). By winning Best Supporting Actress, Smith became the first and only Oscar winner to have played an Oscar nominee - although Cate Blanchett would do something similar as four-timer Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), although she doesn't actually attend any ceremonies during the picture.

HandMade Ivory

Whenever a great performer dies, it's always sad to read about the brilliance of their stage work, as the vast majority of it would not have been filmed and all memory of it will fade into myth as the cast members, critics, and lucky audience members who got to witness it slowly disappear. How one wishes someone had had the forethought to place a camera before the stage as Maggie Smith played Ruth Carson in Tom Stoppard's Night and Day, Virginia Woolf in Edna O'Brien's Virginia (both 1980), Millament in William Congreve's The Way of the World (1984), and Lettice Doucette in Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage (1987), which was written specially for her and brought a Tony Award for its Broadway run.

During this rich vein of theatrical form, Smith also gave some of her best screen performances. Husband Beverley Cross wrote her an eye-catching cameo as Thetis the sea goddess in Desmond Davis's Clash of the Titans (1981), a reworking of the Perseus story that boasts the final stop-motion animation produced by the peerless Ray Harryhausen. The same year, Smith made the first of her two excursions into the realm of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory to play Lois, the painter wife of antique dealer H.J. Heidler (Alan Bates), who attempts to betray Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) for nefarious ends in 1920s Paris in the Jean Rhys adaptation, Quartet. Almost three decades later, Smith would appear in a film of the same name. But Dustin Hoffman's Quartet (2012) was based on a Ronald Harwood play about the relationships between four opera singers in a retirement home: Wilfred Bond (Billy Connolly); Cecily Robson (Pauline Collins); Reginald Paget (Tom Courtenay); and his ex-wife, Jean Horton (Smith).

Pleased for once not to be 'jammed into wimples and corsets', Smith delighted in a HandMade double-header with Monty Python alumnus, Michael Palin. In Richard Loncraine's The Missionary (1982), she was hilariously libidinous as Lady Isabel Ames, who funds the shelter for fallen East End women in 1910s London that proves a moral challenge for the Reverend Charles Fortescue (Palin). However, she's less generous with her sexual favours as Joyce in Malcolm Mowbray's A Private Function (1984). The wife of northern chiropodist Gilbert Chilvers (Palin), she hopes to climb the social ladder by beating postwar rationing and inviting some local bigwigs to a slap-up pork dinner to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

The BAFTA-winning role was written for her by Alan Bennett, who also gifted Smith the part of Susan, the alcoholic wife of a preoccupied vicar who takes comfort with an Asian shopkeeper in 'A Bed Among the Lentils', one of the masterly monologues in Talking Heads (1988). Lesley Manville took the role when Bennett reworked the series as Talking Heads in 2020. Isolation and religion also went together in Jack Clayton's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987). John Huston and Irvin Kershner had respectively optioned the rights to Brian Moore's novel to star Katharine Hepburn and Deborah Kerr in the title role. But Smith got the nod to play the Dublin spinster who falls for her landlady's shady brother (Bob Hoskins) and won her fourth BAFTA in the process.

Opportunism was also the name of the game in Bryan Forbes's Better Late Than Never (1983), a rare Smith misfire that sees Miss Anderson trying to referee between David Niven and Art Carney, who each claims to be the grandfather of a 10 year-old about to inherit a fortune. Despite pairing Smith with Christopher Plummer, Lily in Love (1983) doesn't quite come off, either, even though there's much to enjoy about Károly Makk's updating of a Ferenc Molnár play about a vain actor disguising himself as a dashing stranger in order to seduce his writer wife into giving him a part in her new play.

The contrast between Lily Wynn and Charlotte Bartlett couldn't be greater. She is the gossipy repressed cousin who escorts Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) to Florence in E.M. Forster's A Room With a View (1985) and singularly fails to protect her from the attentions of fellow tourist, George Emerson (Julian Sands). Smith discussed being part of the Merchant-Ivory fraternity in Humphrey Dixon's documentary, The Wandering Company (1984). But she opted not to return to the fold after having received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and won the Golden Globe in the same category and Best Actress at the BAFTAs.

The decade ended on a challenging note, however. Struggling to recover from a broken arm sustained in a fall from her bicycle, Smith was diagnosed with Graves Disease. A course of radiotherapy and eye surgery restored her to health, but she was out of the limelight for over a year.

Hitting Hollywood

Having been made a dame in 1990, Smith eased herself back into acting by voicing Rosaline in Armondo Linus Acosta's quirky animation-cum-concert piece, Romeo.Juliet (1990). She spent the ensuing decade alternating between films and acclaimed stage shows like a revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1993) and the Edward Albee duo of Three Tall Women (1994) and A Delicate Balance (1997). But much of her screen work took Smith to Hollywood.

She hissed out despairing rejoinders to the ebullient Whoopi Goldberg's accidental nun, as the world-weary Mother Superior in Emile Ardolino's Sister Act (1992) and Bill Duke's Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). Following a deliciously dark turn as the schemingly wicked Mrs Mabel Pettigrew in Jack Clayton's take on Muriel Spark's gleefully malevolent comedy, Memento Mori (1992), Smith returned Stateside to play formidable Southern matriarch Violet Venable in Richard Eyre's tele-remake of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer (1993). The latter brought her an Emmy nomination in a role that had originally played on screen by Katharine Hepburn in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1959 feature adaptation.

A BAFTA nomination followed for an affecting performance as no-nonsense housekeeper, Mrs Medlock, in Agnieszka Holland's interpretation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's tale, The Secret Garden (1993). She was equally clipped when the British Academy bestowed a Special Award and she restricted her acceptance speech to a brief thank you and the observation, 'If it's possible to be in films without taking your clothes off or killing people with machine guns. I seem to have indeed managed to do that!'

She was on fierier form as Cecily Neville, Duchess of York directing bile at Ian McKellen's usurper (and her son) in Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995), which restaged Shakespeare's War of the Roses play in a fascistically inclined 1930s Britain. More acid drops were delivered with nonchalant timing, as much-divorced Manhattan socialite Gunilla Garson Goldberg leaves arriviste Sarah Jessica Parker and declining actress Goldie Hawn in no doubt as to her opinions in Hugh Wilson's The First Wives Club (1996).

Sadly, we can't currently bring you Smith's choice display as meddlesome aunt, Lavinia Penniman, in Agnieszka Holland's reading of Henry James's Washington Square (1997). Also missing is Peter Yates's Curtain Call (aka It All Came True, 1998), in which Smith reunited with Michael Caine to play the bickering ghosts of actors, Lily Marlowe and Max Gale, who haunt the townhouse of James Spader's struggling publisher. As is Smith's performance as Queen Alexandra opposite David Jason's Sandringham estate manager leading a detachment to Gallipoli in Julian Jarrold's All the King's Men. But the biggest frustration is the absence of Deborah Warner's The Last September (both 1999), an adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's elegiac family saga set in post-Civil War Ireland, in which Michael Gambon and Smith excel as the aristocratic County Cork relicts, Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor, facing up to the new reality of their situation.

Cinema Paradiso users can, however, rent Franco Zeffirelli's autobiographical drama, Tea With Mussolini, in which echoes of Miss Brodie can be detected in Lady Hestor Random's admiration for Il Duce, as she lords it over fellow ex-pats Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Cher, and Lily Tomlin in 1930s Florence. Smith won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress. She also received an Emmy nomination for her two-episode stint as Betsey Trotwood in Simon Curtis's BBC serialisation of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (both 1999). Moreover, she made the acquaintance of a young actor playing the boyhood hero, who credited her with helping him secure the role of a lifetime. His name was Daniel Radcliffe.

Minerva, Violet, and the Curse of Fame

By all accounts, while negotiating the film adaptations of her bestselling children's books, J.K. Rowling personally requested that Maggie Smith played Professor Minerva McGonagall, the transfiguration tutor, Gryffindor house head, and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. During the course of the eight-film series, she would be promoted and play a key role, as a member of the Order of the Phoenix, in the vanquishing of the evil Lord Voldemort (surely that's still not a spoiler?).

Partway through the series, Smith was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. But she remained a vital member of the ensemble and often stole scenes with effortless and impeccable timing in Chris Columbus's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2003), Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), and David Yates's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011).

Smith liked to joke about her 'Harry Potter pension fund', but the franchise endeared her to a whole new audience. 'A lot of very small people used to say hello to me and that was nice,' she mused. But she had always treasured the anonymity that made it easier to guard her privacy and she would come to resent the intrusions that would come with her second major role of the new millennium.

Whether she realised it or not, her performance as Constance, Countess of Trentham in Robert Altman's country house whodunit, Gosford Park (2001), was a trial run for another part that Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes had in mind for her. Cinema Paradiso regulars can learn more about this all-star classic in our What to Watch If You Liked Gosford Park article and see how Smith landed Best Supporting nominations at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and Oscars, while she, Helen Mirren, and Emily Watson were all nominated for Best European Actress at the European Film Awards.

After a time away, the stage beckoned again when Smith co-starred with Judi Dench in David Hare's The Breath of Life (2002). However, a rare flop in the form of Edward Albee's The Lady From Dubuque (2007) put Smith off theatre for over a decade, as she concentrated on the screen and her health. She returned to Hollywood to play the older Caroline Elizabeth Bennett alongside Ellen Burstyn, Shirley Knight and Fionnula Flanagan in Callie Khouri's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), which co-starred Sandra Bullock and Ashley Judd.

Proving there were no hard feelings, Smith teamed once more with Ronnie Barker, as romantic novelist-turned-pensione owner, Emily Delahunty, in Richard Loncraine's tele-adaptation of William Trevor's My House in Umbria. Smith received a Primetime Emmy and her eighth Golden Globe nomination for her commanding performance, which she followed by complementing Judi Dench, as sisters Janet and Ursula Widdington nursing a Polish violinist in 1930s Cornwall in Charles Dance's Ladies in Lavender (both 2003), which was adapted from a 1908 short story by William J. Locke.

In 2004, Smith told The Guardian, 'I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.' She continued, however, 'I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen...My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing...If you do comedy, you kind of don't count. Comedy is never considered the real thing.' Yet she cheerfully signed on to play Grace Hawkins, the housekeeper of unworldy vicar Rowan Atkinson and his restless wife, Kristin Scott Thomas, in Niall Johnson's darkly amusing, Keeping Mum (2005).

In a change of pace, Smith appeared as Lady Gresham, whose nephew proposes to the young Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) in Julian Jarrold's Georgian saga, Becoming Jane (2007). The same year saw her snag another Emmy nomination for sharing the role of once-brilliant writer Mary Gilbert with Ruth Wilson in Stephen Poliakoff's BBC drama, Capturing Mary, which flashes back to the 1950s, where Mary meets the dangerously aspirational Greville White (David Walliams).

In another flashbacking period piece, Smith played sternly fond grandmother Linnet Oldknow to young Tolly (Alex Etel), who is sent to spend a Christmas on the family estate after his father goes missing during the Second World War. From Time to Time (2009) was adapted from Lucy M. Boston's The Chimneys of Green Knowe, a sequel to The Children of Green Knowe that had been charmingly adapted for the BBC by Colin Cant in 1986. The writer and director was Julian Fellowes, who was about offer Smith the part that would change her life at the age of 75.

She would just have time to essay eccentric shopkeeper Agatha Docherty opposite Emma Thompson in another story centring on wartime evacuations, Susanna White's Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010), before she was spirited off to Highclere Castle for the first of her 52 episodes of Downton Abbey (2010-15), as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. While Fellowes scripted, the series was executive produced by Gareth Neame, the grandson of Smith's director on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Snooty, frank, and fiercely protective of her family, Lady Violet made the show essential viewing for millions and earned Smith two Emmys and a Golden Globe. She reprised the role for Michael Engler's Downton Abbey (2019) and Simon Curtis's Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). But she never really enjoyed the experience.

'I am deeply grateful for the work in Potter and indeed Downton,' she told one interviewer, 'but it wasn't what you'd call satisfying. I didn't really feel I was acting in those things.' She never watched the series and found the new wave of fame it brought her intolerable. 'It's too much really,' she complained. 'I want to go to the supermarket in peace, and then you feel bad if you ignore people when they come up to you.' On another occasion, she confessed, 'It's true I don't tolerate fools but then they don't tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that's why I'm quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.'

When asked on the US chat show, 60 Minutes, whether she had any interest in fame, Smith retorted, 'Absolutely none. I mean, why would I?' Another reporter was told, 'It's ridiculous. I was able to live a somewhat normal life until I started doing Downton Abbey. I know that sounds funny, but I am serious. Before that I could go to all the places I wanted and see all of the things that I like, but now I can't, which I find incredibly awful. Flattering, but awful.' The message didn't get through, however, and each icy Trentham bon mot made Smith more of a national treasure to be lionised and pestered.

It was something of a relief to hide away in a dubbing studio to voice Lady Blueberry in Kelly Asbury's animation, Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), which was co-produced by Elton John and David Furnish, who would come calling again for John Stevenson's Sherlock Gnomes (2018), which cast Johnny Depp in the title role. Smith was also less known in Rajasthan and enjoyed the company of Judi Dench and an exemplary ensemble to play Muriel Donnelly, the retired housekeeper who overcomes her xenophobia to travel to India for a cheap hip operation in John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012). Indeed, she had such a good time that Smith returned to India for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015).

Following her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Dustin Hoffman's aforementioned directorial debut, Quartet, Smith teamed up with another first-timer, as Mathilde Girard in Israel Horovitz's screen adaptation of his 1996 play, My Old Lady (2014), with Kiristin Scott Thomas playing her daughter and Kevin Kline the New Yorker hoping to sell the flat she occupies, which has been bequeathed to him by his late father. Squatter's rights also came to the fore in Nicholas Hytner's The Lady in the Van (2015), which saw Smith reprise the role of Miss Mary Shepherd from the 1999 play that Alan Bennett had written about the cantankerous and odiferous pensioner with a secret past, who had parked her battered van on his Camden driveway for 15 years. The Daily Telegraph's review of the play could have been dusted down for the film. 'Her comic timing is irresistible, her vocal delivery lethal in its precision,' claimed the critic. 'Better still, there are sudden moments when Smith seems to peer deep within, capturing a terrifying sense of anguish and fear.'

Some saw flashes of these emotions in Smith herself, as she used her infamous tetchiness to protect herself. As she told The Guardian, 'Every time I start anything, I think, "This time I'm going to be like Jude [Dench], and it will all be lovely, it will be merry and bright, the Quaker will come out in me."' She was aware, however, 'It's gone too far now to take back. If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn't work - it would frighten people more if I were nice. They'd be paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to.' But the real Dame Maggie was very much in evidence when director Roger Michell persuaded her to sit down and reminisce with Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins for his documentary, Nothing Like a Dame (2018). Has anyone ever thought of bringing, say, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Tom Courtenay, and Anthony Hopkins together while they're still around?

Plans were announced last year for a film version of Smith's 2019 return to the stage at the age of 84 in the one-woman show, A German Life. This had been adapted by Christopher Hampton from the 2016 documentary of the same name, in which directors Christian Krönes, Olaf S. Müller, Roland Schrotthofer, and Florian Weigensamer had turned their camera on 102 year-old Brunhilde Pomsel, a Jewish woman who had worked as a secretary for Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, during the war. It would appear that Jonathan Kent didn't get to finish his screen version, which leaves one to wonder whether anybody took the trouble to film Smith on stage at the Bridge Theatre.

Ol Parker had co-written the Marigold Hotel movies and he coaxed Smith into playing the storytelling Aunt Julia in Gil Kenan's A Boy Called Christmas (2021). Smith would have just one more performance in her, as Lily Fox, the 1960s Dubliner still grieving for her drowned son, who travels to Lourdes with a parish party that includes Kathy Bates, Laura Linney, and Agnes O'Casey in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club (2023). Alan Bennett had said, 'The boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is always poised,' and it's certainly true of this wittily sentimental swan song, which isn't currently available on disc.

'I don't feel I am the kind of people I play,' Smith had told the New York Times in 1979. But she clearly found solace and fulfilment in playing them. 'The time on stage is easier than the rest of one's existence,' she had continued. 'At least for those two and a half hours you can be quite sure who you are. The rest of the time I find very confusing. 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.'

We can only be grateful that she spent seven decades seeking those somebody elses, as they will never be forgotten - and neither will she.