The Queen of Stage and Screen

Chris Hallam pays tribute to actress Dame Maggie Smith

- Chris Hallam

T he 2022 film Downton Abbey: A New Era featured a landmark moment in the history of the Downton saga: the death of Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Dame Maggie Smith. Those present at Lady Violet's deathbed were pleased to see the old lady retain her usual sharp tongue right to the very end.

"Stop crying, Denker," she said at one point to her lady's maid, Gladys Denker (Sue Johnston), "I can't hear myself die." Seconds later, it became clear these really had been her final words. Lady Violet was no more.

A little over two years later, in September 2024, the world learned of the real-life passing of the woman who had played her, as news emerged of the death of Dame Maggie Smith at the age of 89. Like the fictional dowager countess, Smith was a widow in her late 80s and could be sharp and somewhat intimidating.

But she was never as snobby as Lady Violet (a woman who was once moved to ask: "What is a weekend?") and hailed from a considerably less aristocratic background.

Downton Abbey history records Lady Violet's death as occurring in 1928. In the real world, Margaret Smith (she did not become "Maggie" until the 1950s) was born six years later in Ilford, east London on 27 December 1934. A very private woman who did not enjoy interviews, Smith once summarised her life story in just 16 words: "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one's still acting." This was all true enough, but there is rather more to the tale of Maggie Smith than that.

Her mother was a qualified secretary from Glasgow, her father, a medical laboratory technician from Newcastle.

The family (who included Margaret's two older twin brothers) moved to Oxford when her father's job was relocated there on the outbreak of war in 1939.