Maggie Smith brought a steely but humane imperiousness to roles

BY THE TIME she was in “Downton Abbey”, the television series in which she played the cutting, waspish Dowager Countess of Grantham, Maggie Smith was 75 years old and had won a pair each of Oscars and Golden Globes, six BAFTAs, an Emmy, a Tony and dozens of other prizes. And yet, she told an interviewer, “I’d led a perfectly normal life…Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

That is untrue; she had been acting steadily for more than a half-century. But her career followed the inverse of most film actresses’; her fame grew in tandem with her age. That stems in part from how difficult she was to typecast. Her performance in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, which produced her first Oscar in 1970, was bravura and commanding—entirely the opposite of the thankless, watery role of Desdemona in “Othello”, which she played four years earlier, earning her first Oscar nomination.
She inhabited her wildly different characters almost too perfectly, though her Lettice Douffet—the Tony-winning role as a fantasist tour guide that Peter Shaffer wrote specifically for her in “Lettice and Lovage”—had a touch of the oxygen-sucking delusional grandeur that defined her Brodie, though in a far more benign form. She channelled that scene-stealing flamboyance into something stiffer and more formidable in “A Room with a View”, for which she won another Oscar nomination in 1987. Her Charlotte Bartlett was a precursor for the characters that defined her late-life revival.
In 2001, Robert Altman cast her in “Gosford Park”, a film written by Julian Fellowes and set in an English country house in the 1930s. Her acidly dismissive Constance Trentham was a clear precursor to her role in “Downton Abbey” (Lord Fellowes also wrote and produced that show): “Bought marmalade,” she sniffs, in her bonnet and stole, when a maid brings her breakfast in bed. “I call that very feeble.” Minerva McGonagall, who transforms from a tabby cat into an intimidating professor in the “Harry Potter” series, was far kinder than either of the other two, but of the same ilk: nobody would want to be confronted by her pursed lips and withering gaze.
What made Dame Maggie’s fearsome roles work, in much the same way that a bit of acidity improves a sweet dish, was superb comic timing, which she mined to great effect in interviews, talk-show appearances and “Tea with the Dames”, a documentary from 2018 featuring her, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins—all similarly honoured and rough contemporaries—discussing their careers. In repose, or among friends, she joked easily and laughed often, without a hint of the sternness that marked her best-known characters.
But it could return. On a British talk show, while discussing how her “Harry Potter” role had introduced her to a new generation of fans, she recalled a boy asking her, “Were you really a cat?” She paused for just the right amount of time. “I heard myself saying, ‘Just pull yourself together.’” And no doubt he did.