Maggie Smith’s 12 Best Performances, from ‘Jean Brodie’ to ‘Downton Abbey’

‘The V.I.P.s’ (1963)

Maggie Smith dabbled in films from the late 1950s, as with many English actresses, as secondary to her stage work. With the all-star “The V.I.P.s” (a “Grand Hotel” story of passengers stranded at fogbound Heathrow), she stood out, though was almost completely unknown in a cast of veteran scene-stealers (Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Rutherford, Orson Welles included) as a mousy secretary secretly in love with her boss (Rod Taylor). It was her breakout role, leading to other key early ones, that culminated with “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969). —TB

‘Othello’ (1965)

Maggie Smith received her first Oscar nomination (for supporting actress), portraying Desdemona opposite her mentor Laurence Olivier in his controversial film version of Shakespeare’s play. She, like the rest of the cast, repeated her National Theatre Company role. That stage company, created by Olivier, had already become her theater home, with Olivier regarding the young (early-30s) Smith as his equal and unlike many actors capable of holding her own with him. “Othello” was given an unusual release, playing limited shows the same time across the country in hundreds of theaters. This did more to reinforce her commitment to the stage, while still elevating her profile for future films. —TB

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

Maggie Smith was a lauded theater actress and strictly British commodity when she broke out in 1969 in Ronald Neame’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” It’s hard to register today how surprising that role was at the time. The underlying material explains a lot: American screenwriter Jay Presson Allen adapted her own 1966 sleeper hit play, which was in turn adapted from Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel. (This launched Allen’s screenwriting career for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, and Bob Fosse.)

The timing was perfect. The movie earned raves in the Cannes competition. Both critics and audiences embraced Smith’s rebellious, independent, sexually active woman “in her prime,” who is a gifted, charismatic, and devoted teacher of her Edinburgh school’s “girls.”

But the reason Smith won her first Best Actress Oscar that year (her second was a supporting role in the comedy “California Suite”) was the way she drew you in to Brodie’s lust for life, her yearnings, sexual and otherwise, and the ways that her confident point-of-view leads her down a dark path toward Fascism. She is fierce as she goes up against her lovers (Gordon Jackson and Robert Stephens), her blossoming star pupil (Pamela Franklin) and most of all, her headmistress (Celia Johnson). They are not entirely wrong about her. What a feat. After that stunning tour-de-force, Smith was on her way to countless unforgettable performances and her inevitable ascension to Dame.

Her motto in this film: “Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” —AT

‘Travels with My Aunt’ (1972)

Maggie Smith’s third Oscar nomination, and second for Best Actress, came in George Cukor’s flavorful adaptation of Graham Greene’s story about an eccentric dowager who recruits her prim bank manager nephew (she claims) to accompany her on a multi-country trip that involves ransom, smuggling, and other nefarious activity. For a role originally intended for Katharine Hepburn, MGM balked and insisted on the younger Smith (better for some flashback scenes). The role, though, is pure Hepburn — flamboyant, dominating, and colorful, though some found it too exaggerated. It was not the success MGM hoped for, and led to her transion into ensemble films, usually as a supporting actress, unlike her concurrent stage career. —TB

‘California Suite’ (1978)

Maggie Smith won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a fading British actress who, in a nice bit of unforeseen meta-casting, is visiting Los Angeles for the Academy Awards in the hope that her nomination will revive her sagging career. Neil Simon’s script, a loose remake of his earlier success “Plaza Suite,” follows the comic mishaps of several sets of couples vacationing at the Beverly Hills Hotel; Smith’s story, in which she nervously anticipates the Oscar ceremony while bantering with her gay husband (Michael Caine) is the most effective and affecting thanks to Smith’s dazzling ability to veer from lively snarkiness to pained anxiety and tender affection within the same conversation.

She and Caine create miracles with Simon’s fast badinage, infusing the heightened dialogue with a touching sense of reality; their scenes together feel as painfully true as they are spectacularly entertaining in the best Hollywood tradition. Smith is simultaneously sweet and caustic, confident and self-pitying, and all too human in her high-wire act perfectly balanced between searing drama and broad comedy. —JH

‘A Room with a View’ (1985)

Charlotte Bartlett is the quintessential version of a character type Maggie Smith played several times over the years: an uptight spinster afraid of her own emotions. But her emotions are real nonetheless. Maybe she advises her traveling companion charge, young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), to take a different room because she knows that a young man had just slept in one, and maybe she gasps when her friend Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench) says the words “physical sensation.” But look at how she lights up when Lavish, a lady novelist, has some juicy, bawdy gossip to share. Or how game she is when she decides to keep Lucy’s secret about being kissed under a loggia.

Smith doesn’t waste a second of her performance, but the astounding fact is that, even with all that “acting” on display, she makes you think of all the Charlotte Bartlett types you’ve known in your own life. It’s an incredibly real, lived-in creation she gives us here — where technique and naturalism perfectly meet. And it gave her a first chance to bounce off Dench, born the same year as her and the perfect foil. Charlotte and Eleanor are almost an Edwardian Abbott and Costello in James Ivory’s sublime adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel. She may declare their view-less pensione a failure, but nothing about her performance here is. —CB

‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ (1987)

Perhaps Smith’s greatest ability was to never be boxed in by genre or situation. She found drama in the ridiculous in “Murder by Death” and humor in the serious in “Gosford Park” and managed to keep fans and newcomers alike on their toes throughout her run as Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” film series. In “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” based on the novel by Irish author Brian Moore, Smith delivers one of her more intrinsically sad performances as a middle-aged spinster in 1950s Dublin desperately seeking love.

She manages to attract the attention of a charismatic businessman (Bob Hoskins) only to find his interest in her predicated on the fact that he thought she was wealthy and could possibly invest in his latest idea. What starts as a hopeful chance at a new start soon turns tragic as Smith’s Judith is forced to make sense of why her passion is constantly denied. The film may be a deep cut in Smith’s career, but it earned her one of five BAFTA awards. —HR

‘Sister Act’ (1992)

Everyone will, of course, remember “Sister Act” for Whoopi Goldberg’s iconic and career-defining performance as Sister Mary Clarence, but without Smith’s dower, yet charismatic turn as the Reverend Mother of St. Katherine’s parish, it’s hard to imagine the film working at all. Her icy, stalwart presence is melted by Mary Clarence’s charm, thereby allowing the audience to fall for the narrative and characters who inhabit it. If the message of this popular franchise is that faith can exist in even the most unlikely of hosts, then Smith elevates this notion by exhibiting how faith can shift and adapt and welcome differently-minded people into the fold. —HR

‘Richard III’ (1995)

There isn’t a lot of Maggie Smith in Ian McKellen’s ’30s-tastic, fascist fantasia version of “Richard III” — with Shakespeare’s women, it was ever thus. But boy does she make her moment count. Smith made her professional theater debut all the way back in 1956 as Viola in “Twelfth Night,” and she brings that wealth of experience wielding iambic pentameter as a weapon (and her own imperious fury besides) to her performance as the Duchess of York. Armored in furs that reach all the way up to her hat, she’s one of the few people in the story that, even for a moment, can make Richard (McKellen) feel small.

The 1995 film isn’t just a preview of Dowager Countesses to come, though. Smith played a lot of imposing characters. But as she stands at the door of an airplane, looking down on a bereft Annette Bening and telling her the key to cursing one’s enemy is to “think that your babes were sweeter than they were, and he that slew them fouler than he is,” then Maggie Smith is properly terrifying. —SS

‘Gosford Park’ (2001)

A precursor for Julian Fellowes’ later TV series, “Downton Abbey,” this upstairs/downstairs mystery was a late-career gem from “M*A*S*H” and “Nashville” director Robert Altman featuring a standout performance from Smith even within a huge ensemble cast. As Constance, the Dowager Countess of Trentham and aunt to owner of the palatial estate, Gosford Park, Smith brings a dry and cantankerous wit to the drama unfolding throughout the film. Even a murder can’t stop this snobbish aristocrat from enjoying herself and Smith brings the perfect balance of intrigue and condescension to the whole sordid affair.

“Downton Abbey” was originally supposed to act as a spinoff of the film before Fellowes decided to change the time period. Nonetheless, he still found a way to incorporate Smith as a main cast member — one of the few crossovers from “Gosford Park” other than Richard E. Grant and Jeremy Swift — knowing full well the distinction and humor she would bring to his series. —HR

The ‘Harry Potter’ Films

For British thespians of a certain status, playing a Hogwarts professor was an inevitable rite of passage. Over the course of eight films, the “Harry Potter” franchise became a showcase for virtually every major British actor of the past half century not named Colin Firth. But while heroes and villains came and went from the sprawling wizarding universe, nobody ever captured the spirit of Hogwarts better than Maggie Smith’s Minerva McGonagall. Smith embodied the Transfiguration professor and Gryffindor head with a uniquely British blend of warmth and sternness that served as a rare source of consistency in Harry’s constantly changing world.

While she never stepped into the spotlight or made the story about herself to the extent that some other teachers did, Professor McGonagall blended into the Hogwarts environment so seamlessly that removing her would feel as foreign as ditching the Sorting Hat or Quidditch pitch. In a franchise that was defined as much by good vibes and small details as external plot developments, Smith provided an abundance of both. —CZ

‘Downton Abbey’

“What is a weekend?” You can’t say that Smith’s impeccable line delivery is wholly responsible for all six seasons and two feature films of “Downton Abbey” — including one that is specifically about the lively past of Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. A third “Downton Abbey” film from Julian Fellowes is due in 2025. But Smith’s portrayal of the Dowager Countess was the soul of that series and the key to sympathizing with the adventures of the entire Crawley family, upstairs and downstairs.

She is high-handed, out-of-touch, and entitled in every sense of the word, but also canny, sly, kind in a sideways sort of way, and puts her iron will towards doing the things that she thinks will help the people she loves. She is, in sum, the early 20th-century battleaxe of a grandma we all kind of wish we had. Whether sparring with Robert (Hugh Bonneville) and Isobel (Penelope Wilton) or seeing herself in Mary (Michelle Dockery), Violet is never subtle, but also never shallow or unintelligent. Smith’s performance threads a very fine needle that shows us every side of her, and in so doing, she creates a truly iconic character — not just in her own career, but in television history. —SS