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Maggie Smith handprints in Leicester Square. Photo by R Sones.

Top 10 Incredible Facts about Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith, full name Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, Essex, England. She is an English stage and film actress known for her poignancy and wit in comedic roles.

Smith began her stage career as a student, performing at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952, and made her Broadway debut in New Faces of ’56. She has a record six Best Actress Evening Standard Awards for her work on the London stage:

• The Private Ear and The Public Eye,
• Hedda Gabler,
• Virginia,
• The Way of the World,
• Three Tall Women, and
• A German Life.

She was nominated for Tony Awards for Private Lives (1975) and Night and Day (1979), before winning the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage in 1990.

She appeared in West End productions of Antony and Cleopatra (1976) and Macbeth (1978) as well as Stratford Shakespeare Festival productions of Antony and Cleopatra (1976).

1. Maggie Smith’s parents were not smitted with her acting ambitions

Her father worked as a lab technician at the University of Oxford. Smith’s parents were not theatergoers, and her interest in the performing arts surprised even her.

She had no idea where the urge came from. Maggie Smith once got into a lot of trouble because her neighbors took her to the movies on a Sunday.

Smith’s mother, a secretary from Glasgow, Scotland, thought her daughter should follow in her footsteps as a secretary and doubted she’d be a successful actress.

2. Maggie Smith would rather be on stage than on screen

A stage. Photo by Barry Weatherall.

Maggie Smith’s memorable performances in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey are clear indications of her brilliant virtuosity as an actor to most viewers. To Smith, however, those roles are essentially low-hanging fruit.

She was grateful for the opportunity to work on Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, but it wasn’t particularly fulfilling.

She and Alan Rickman (who played Severus Snape) allegedly used to commiserate about how they both felt their work in Harry Potter was nothing more than a series of reaction shots.

3. Shakespeare isn’t Maggie Smith’s cup of tea

Shakespeare. Photo by Taha.

Maggie Smith began her career as Viola in an Oxford Playhouse School production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when she was 17 years old, and she went on to appear in countless Shakespeare plays while working with Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in the 1960s and Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s.

She was even nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Desdemona in the 1965 film adaptation of Othello (which featured Olivier in the title role). Despite her impressive resume and self-proclaimed love of the stage, Smith maintains that Shakespeare’s works aren’t her cup of tea.

4. Maggie Smith can also sing

Smith’s witty delivery and expressive gestures made her a natural choice for satire and comedy roles in variety shows, and her early career was marked by dynamic musical performances in revues—though Smith is modest about her own singing ability.

Producer Leonard Sillman saw her in a West End revue and immediately cast her in his Broadway revue New Faces of 1956.

Smith has not only performed on Broadway, but she also sang a stirring rendition of the World War I recruiting song “I’ll Make a Man of You” in 1969’s Oh! What a Lovely War, and appeared on The Carol Burnett Show several times in the 1970s, performing several highly amusing musical numbers.

5. She has won the Tony, Emmy, and Academy Awards

Smith won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as the titular character in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and a Tony for her performance as Lettice Douffet in the 1990 comedy Lettice and Lovage. Smith completed the Triple Crown in 2003, when she won an Emmy for her performance as the lead in HBO’s television film My House in Umbria.

Actors are only required to win one of each award to be considered a Triple Crown winner, but Smith has a few extra. Among many nominations, she won three Emmys for Downton Abbey and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for California Suite in 1978.

6. Maggie Smith has been married twice

Smith first met playwright Beverley Cross in 1952 at an Oxford student revue and later appeared in his 1960 play Strip the Willow. While waiting for Cross’ divorce to be finalized, the two dated, but their relationship was cut short when Smith joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theater and fell in love with another company member, Robert Stephens.

The couple married in 1967 and went on to star in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and Travels With My Aunt in 1972. Before splitting up in 1975, they had two children, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin. Smith and Cross married soon after and remained together until Cross died in 1998.

7. Her two sons are both actors

Smith has stated that she did not encourage her sons to become actors, but they both followed in their mother’s footsteps. Toby Stephens, her eldest child, starred alongside Ruth Wilson in the 2006 miniseries Jane Eyre and is perhaps best known for his role as Captain Flint in Starz’s Black Sails. Chris, the younger brother who appeared in Black Sails.

8. Maggie Smith has teased Sir Ian McKellen several times

Sir Ian McKellen. Photo by Man Alive!.

Sir Ian McKellen told Maggie Smith at the 2002 Academy Awards that he had worn a traditional New Zealand pounamu pendant to bring him good luck in the Best Supporting Actor category—he had been nominated for his role as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

After he was defeated, he ran into Smith, who remarked, “It didn’t work, did it?”

Then, on The Graham Norton Show, while recounting the story, McKellen did a riotously entertaining impression of Smith, which apparently wasn’t an isolated incident.

She told the Evening Standard, “He does them all the time.” “I told him rather angrily that I’d done one of him but no one knew him well enough to recognize it.”

9. She was diagnosed with  while working on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Breast cancer ribbon. Photo by Angiola Harry.

In 2009, it was revealed that Maggie Smith was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer while filming the sixth Harry Potter film.

Smith admitted that the experience made her “fearful of the amount of energy one needs to be in a film or a play,” but she never stopped working. She had no hair but had no ttrouble putting on wigs. She also appeared in 2009’s From Time to Time and 2010’s Nanny McPhee Returns, and she reprised her role as Professor McGonagall in 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

10. Maggie Smith has no intention of ever retiring

Dame Maggie Smith. Photo by Kebl0597.

Smith stated on 60 Minutes in 2013 that, while she felt her theater days were over, she would never officially retire from film or television.

Smith returned to the stage after a 12-year hiatus to play Brunhilde Pomsel, the secretary of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in A German Life at London’s Bridge Theatre in 2019.