Goodnight, Dame Maggie Smith

“What is a weekend?”

This was the question that made Downton Abbey one of my favourite shows of all time. The line itself is amusing - and based in fact - illustrating the divide between aristocracy and the middle classes, but it was the deliverance from the Dowager Countess that made it a moment forever in tele-vision history. Deadpan, clear and clipped with delicious articulation, paired with those unmistakable cheekbones and enormously wise eyes, there really was no finer actress than Dame Maggie Smith.

Even her peers have described the multi-award-winner (double Oscar Best Actress winner) as “one of a kind” and possessed of a “sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent”. British-born Dame Maggie, born Margaret Natalie Smith in 1934, died peacefully last week aged 89. The world of showbiz is now mourning this huge loss and conversations are on the tip of so many tongues asking, “So, what was your favourite Maggie Smith character?”

And boy, is that a tough one!

Today, much of the later generation recognise her as Professor Minerva McGonagall, profes-sor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the head of Gryffindor House in the Harry Potter movies. Even now, as I read the Potter books aloud to my son at bedtime, I can’t help but at-tempt the gentle-but-firm Scottish accent created by Smith to bring McGonagall to life. She was the perfect witch; full of knowledge, extremely magical (she could transform into a cat), scary enough that you wouldn’t mess with her, but could count on her to be the right side of the good fight. For twenty years, she has been recognised all over the world as this character and once, in a supermarket, she caught a child staring at her. She looked at him and he asked, ‘Were you... were you really a cat?” To which Dame Maggie heard herself respond with, “Just pull yourself together.”

A rich and varied career spanned decades before Smith became McGonagall, though. She grew up in Oxford and started acting as a teenager at the Playhouse theatre. Her experience on the stage took her to the National Theatre and London’s West End, hitting the big time when she played Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello in his notorious blackface production in 1964. Only a few years later, she won the Best Actress Oscar playing the lead in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel about the Edinburgh schoolteacher with an admiration for Mus-solini. She has worked alongside the crème de al crème of British acting legends and Hollywood elite, shining in her own light as a star.

That star never faded as the years passed by. If anything, it shone brighter. Although Smith did not originally believe this could turn out to be true. “When you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything,” she once said. My earliest memory of this captivating actress is of her playing Wendy in Steven Spielberg’s Hook, starring alongside the late, great Robin Williams. It’s crazy to think that she was only 56 years old at the time and makeup aged her up to look 90. Only a year later, she was cast opposite Whoopi Goldberg in the music-loving comedy, Sister Act. Smith played the Reverend Mother Superior while Goldberg appeared as a singer who goes into witness protection in a convent. Recalling their time together, Goldberg has said, “Maggie Smith was a great woman and a brilliant actress. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to work with a ‘one of a kind’.”

Her trademark became one-liners, delivering with a sharpness nobody could compete with. Her career certainly didn’t stall because of hitting the granny-era, and when you saw her name on the poster of a new movie, you knew it would be a good one. Dame Maggie Smith’s choices were well-rounded with a touch of class, her performances perfect. When asked if it was true that she didn’t tol-erate fools, she replied with, “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.”

Smith was married twice: to fellow actor Robert Stephens from 1967 to 1975, and they shared two sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, and then to Beverley Cross from 1975 to his death in 1998. She spoke of Cross being the love of her life, and they had fallen in love decades earli-er, but life had other plans which lead to other marriages and eventually divorces. On finding their way to be together again, she had said, “I’m remarkably fortunate. When you meet again someone you should have married in the first place, it’s like a script. That kind of luck is too good to be true.”

Dame Maggie Smith leaves behind her two sons and five loving grandchildren, all devastated by the loss of their legendary mother and grandmother. The public will mourn her loss too, and will no doubt feel there is a the missing piece when future big-budget British dramas and comedies are re-leased. Thank you for an incredible 70-year career on stage and screen. What a privilege it has been to watch you and fall in love with you. Sleep well.

// Hayley Doyle