How Maggie Smith won two Oscars despite her mother telling her she’d never be an actress ‘with a face like that’

Pictures: GETTY/ITV/ALAMY/ZUMA - Class act: Maggie Smith in 1975 and, 

from top, in Downton Abbey, as Jean Brodie and in the Harry Potter films

...and even became a fashion model aged 88

28 Sep 2024 - Daily Mail

By Michael Thornton

IF THERE had been a competition for scene-stealing among Britain’s great actresses, it’s odds-on that Dame Maggie Smith, who died yesterday at the age of 89, would have won it hands down.

She was still in her twenties when she had a scene with Richard Burton in Terence Rattigan’s comedy-drama The VIPs. She upstaged the Welsh Wizard to such an extent that he later admitted it was tantamount to committing ‘grand larceny’.

More than half a century later, in her eighties, she was still stealing scenes as the indomitable and Machiavellian Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the phenomenally successful Downton Abbey.

Her glittering 72-year career spanned 63 films, 78 stage roles, and 88 television appearances. In the process, she won Oscars for Best Actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and Best Supporting Actress for California Suite (1978). She had four other nominations, and received eight Bafta awards.

King Charles spoke for many last night when he paid tribute saying: ‘As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both on and off the stage.’

Smith won over a new audience in her sixties when she played the acerbic Professor Minerva McGonagall, deputy headmistress of Hogwarts, in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2011).

But Downton confirmed her status as an international star, with her role as the curmudgeonly aristo earning her three Primetime Emmy Awards and helping to ensure that by the time she died she had amassed a fortune estimated at up to £20 million.

And she kept busy to the end. In her 88th year, she was named as the new face of the luxury Spanish fashion house Loewe, and modelled the brand arrayed in a ruffled white dress layered over a black polo neck sweater, and carrying a burgundy handbag.

MARGARET Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, East London, on December 28, 1934, the third child of Nathaniel – or ‘Nat’ – Smith, a medical laboratory technician from Newcastle, and his wife, Meg, a secretary who hailed from Glasgow.

When she was almost five, Margaret moved with her parents and older twin brothers, Alistair and Ian, to Oxford, where, at the age of 12, she became a pupil at the Oxford High School for Girls, then considered one of the best schools in Britain.

Her mother insisted that when she left school she should take a secretarial course, but Margaret remained adamant an acting career was the only future that interested her.

‘Honest to God, I have no idea where the urge [to act] came from,’ she once said. ‘It was such a ghastly time and we didn’t go to the theatre.’

When her mother vetoed her going to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she left school to join the Oxford Playhouse School of Theatre.

In June 1952, at the age of 17, she played Viola in the Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Twelfth Night and was hailed by the critic of the Oxford Mail as ‘the Viola of our dreams’.

Within five years she was performing on Broadway and when she returned to London after a six month run in 1957 it was to star with Kenneth Williams in Share My Lettuce, ‘a diversion with music’ by Bamber Gascoigne, later University Challenge presenter.

She and Williams became close friends and shared an outlandish sense of humour. When they visited Fortnum & Mason together, Maggie enquired the price of a bra. The assistant said it was seven guineas. ‘Seven guineas for a bra?’ shrieked Maggie. ‘Cheaper to have your tits off!’ Williams later recorded that ‘the place was in uproar’.

In 1963, when Laurence Olivier invited Maggie to join his new company at the National Theatre, she was an established star in the West End, commanding 7.5 per cent of the gross box-office take.

Olivier was unable to put a great salary on the table, and Maggie, flummoxed and uncertain, turned down his offer. The playwright Beverley Cross, who was in love with Maggie and would later become her second husband, was horrified by her decision and talked her into reversing it.

One of the roles offered to her was Desdemona in Othello, with Olivier playing the title role. But he considered her ‘too common’ for the part and criticised her vowels. Years later, in 2015, Maggie told chat show host Graham Norton that Olivier had slapped her ‘extremely hard’ across the face during the production.

But when Othello was filmed in 1965, it was, ironically, Maggie who won her first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Desdemona, while Olivier’s performance in the title role was considered over-the-top and verging on the hammy.

Beverley Cross’s insistence that Maggie should reverse her initial refusal to join the National Theatre had the unintended consequence of driving her into the arms of one of the National’s leading actors, Robert Stephens, who in 1965 played Benedick to Maggie’s Beatrice in Franco Zefferelli’s production of Much Ado About Nothing.

Maggie reached the summit of her screen career in 1969 in the title role of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, about an Edinburgh schoolmistress whose ‘gels’ are the ‘crème de la crème’.

ROBERT Stephens played her lover in the film, and by then he had taken the same role in real life. Already twice married and twice divorced, Stephens got her pregnant out of wedlock, and their first son – who later took the stage name Chris Larkin – was born ten days before the couple married in 1967, to the deep disapproval of Maggie’s parents.

In his earlier career at the National, Stephens was spoken of by many observers as the likely successor to Laurence Olivier.

But he was a troubled and unstable character who never came to terms with the reality that, in Maggie, he had married a woman whose achievements and star status were infinitely greater than his own.

This gnawed at his self-esteem, increasingly so after Maggie won the Best Actress Oscar for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, and then a second for California Suite, opposite Michael Caine.

Stephens increasingly took refuge in drink and became a chronic alcoholic. I saw the impact this had on him at first hand when I spent a nightmarish evening in his company at a Brighton restaurant, with Marlene Dietrich seated between us at the table.

Stephens’s loud drunken outbursts riveted fascinated listeners at neighbouring tables but Dietrich retreated into sphinxlike silence and telephoned me the following morning from her hotel to say: ‘It’s not my fault, honey, if he’s had too much to drink.’

Maggie and Stephens had a second son, Toby, in 1969, who also became an acclaimed actor, but by the time the couple co-starred in a West End revival of Private Lives, Noel Coward’s searching study of a disintegrating marriage, the similarities between the feuding characters on stage and the stars portraying them were impossible to ignore.

Sir John Gielgud, who directed the play, recorded that Maggie ‘is hysterical, voiceless and distraught – the marriage on the rocks etc’. Stephens was replaced by John Standing in the London production and also when Maggie took the play to Broadway.

Maggie divorced Robert Stephens on April 6, 1975, and three and a half months later at last married Beverley Cross, who had waited patiently, and they remained supremely happy until his death at the age of 66.

Three years after that loss, in 2001 she made the first of seven screen appearances as Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone. She always regarded the Harry Potter franchise gratefully as ‘my pension’, and loved the fact it made her familiar to young children.

Her first association with Julian Fellowes – the creator of Downton – came in the film Gosford Park (2001), in which the grand and condescending Constance, Countess of Trentham, was clearly the forerunner of the even more iconic Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.

As Muriel Donnelly, a former housekeeper who goes to India to have a hip operation on the cheap in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its sequel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015), she proved she could do ‘common’ quite as well as she could do aristocratic.

In 1999, she had scored a West End triumph as Miss Mary Shepherd, a former concert pianist-turned-bag-lady in The Lady In The Van, in which she lives in her battered yellow van in the narrow driveway of playwright Alan Bennett’s Camden house.

Maggie’s performance in the 2015 screen version was an even greater triumph, winning her a Golden Globe award and a British Academy film award nomination.

AT THE age of 87, after gaining worldwide recognition from 52 television episodes of Downton Abbey, she made her farewell appearance in the second of two spin-off movies from the series, Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022).

After inheriting a French chateau from a male admirer, she finally dies, and Downton’s flag comes fluttering down as her coffin drives away.

Such had been her extraordinary dominance over Downton that further instalments now seemed unthinkable. Dominic West, who appeared in the film with her, was distressed when she told him she was ‘going to throw in the towel’. She said, ‘That’s it. I’m not going to do any more. ‘I’m not doing theatre either, and this will be my last job’. But the words were scarcely out of her mouth before she was announced to star in the screen version of her one-woman stage tour-de-force, A German Life. And this was followed in 2023 by another movie, The Miracle Club, the story of three women from Dublin who leave their homes for the first time to follow their dream of visiting Lourdes. Her company accounts for Dame Margaret Cross Productions revealed that in 2021 she earned more than £2.3 million and had made £1.6 million in profit through the business. It was said that she devoted large amounts of her earnings to financing the education of her two grandsons and three granddaughters. Maggie Smith’s unwavering determination from childhood onwards to become an actress, and her refusal to be deterred by her coldly dismissive Scottish mother’s insistence that she could never hope for an acting career ‘with a face like that’, had been triumphantly vindicated.