Oscar-winning actor who shone on the screen but kept to herself

Maggie Smith’s voice – a drawl capable of giving an apparently innocuous remark a thousand different meanings.

Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess Grantham in Downton Abbey. (Photo: Nick Briggs AP/PBS.)

Friends, fellow actors and critics tried to identify the true source of Maggie Smith’s prowess as an actor. They came up with different answers: ‘‘Very tall, very thin … with all this red hair” said playwright Beverley Cross, later to be her second husband, on first seeing her as Viola in 1952 in Twelfth Night.

Director Robin Phillips, who guided her in great classical roles, delighted in ‘‘those witty elbows”.

‘‘Some of the finest fingers in the business,” was Kenneth Tynan’s verdict.

Then there was the voice, ­usually a drawl that allowed little hint of her lower middle-class background. It was capable of giving an apparently innocuous remark 1000 different meanings. As she aged, critics began to notice her skill at playing the sad, the repressed and the lonely.

She was by nature reclusive and her eyes gradually acquired a look of distrust, partially as a result of the publicity that gathered around her stormy first marriage to Robert Stephens. Yet the stage, as she once admitted, was the one place where she was never shy.

“I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone,” she said.

She made many films but the theatre was her home, as she decided when she was a schoolgirl. She was born in Essex in 1934; her mother was a dour Scottish secretary, her father, Nathaniel, a pathologist

She entered a drama school attached to the Oxford Playhouse, an open door to undergraduate productions and revues. It was while appearing on the Edinburgh Festival fringe that she attracted the attention of a New York impresario Leonard Stillman. He signed her for Broadway in New Faces in 1956. Equity already had a Margaret Smith so she made her American debut as Maggie.

Back in Britain, she teamed with Kenneth Williams, who split the salad of the title with a large white rabbit. Critics of Smith’s vocal mannerisms reckon she picked up a number of them from him. Certainly she was not averse to aping Williams’s bitchy sense of humour.

In 1960, Laurence Olivier was appearing in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros opposite Joan Plowright but there was talk of an affair between the two leads. Plowright prudently retired to be replaced by Smith.

Plowright, though, quickly recognised Smith’s abilities and was instrumental in persuading Olivier to make her a founder member of his National Theatre company in 1963.

The National Theatre company drew from Smith some of her greatest performances: Silvia in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, Desdemona in Othello.

Shortly after the marriage to stage star Stephens, she won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It remains among her best films. Stephens was also in it, but the limelight was never his.

The idea of casting husband and wife together in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, directed by John Gielgud, might have looked inspired on paper. In reality, it was always going to be fraught. They argued constantly. Stephens and Smith parted at the end of the play’s run.

Phillips, who had been handed the artistic reins at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, swept her off to his theatre and persuaded her over the next five years, with a break in 1979, to play the great classical roles for him: Cleopatra, Rosalind, Masha in The Three Sisters, and Lady Macbeth. She was tempted back to London in 1979 by Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day, in which she took over from Diana Rigg.

There were character roles in two popular Agatha Christie movies, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun, and a reasonable comic performance that brought a second Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite. But 1984’s A Private Function, Alan Bennett’s social comedy of snobbery and greed in postwar Britain, gave her a chance with the first of a new range of crabbed women.

The performance brought her a Bafta, as did her overbearing Charlotte Bartlett in the Merchant-Ivory film A Room with a View.

She played another dis­appointed woman – Susan, the vicar’s wife, in the Talking Heads monologue, Bed Among the Lentils. “The most marvellous thing about Maggie is that she can go from comedy to tragedy in one sentence,” Bennett said.

She captured English poise and eccentricity, and she paired imperiousness or disdain with wide-eyed vulnerability. The most subtle of these anxious creatures was Judith Hearne in Jack Clayton’s film of the Brian Moore novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Smith’s portrayal of a Dublin spinster who believes (falsely) that love has come along at last is among her finest, not least because her whole box of acting tricks was discarded.

She made another film, for television, with Jack Clayton, Memento Mori, before taking on the role that had long been waiting: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

There was much speculation over how Dame Maggie would handle the ‘‘handbag” line. In the event she did the only possible thing and virtually threw it away. But otherwise she carried the production, filling the theatre when it seemed only musicals could sell tickets. When asked whether she wanted to take it to Broadway, she said: “I wouldn’t take it to Woking.”

Such was her withering style. Michael Palin once said “Maggie in a bad mood is clearly a few degrees worse than anyone else in a bad mood”. Her moods may have been affected by Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroid condition that caused many health problems including distension of the eyeballs.

She toured Australia in Bennett’s Talking Heads. Later, she and Judi Dench, the grandes dames of the British theatre, were on stage together for the first time in David Hare’s The Breath of Life in London.

She continued in films and on television, where aristocratic, barbed elderly ladies became a speciality. “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” she once said. She enjoyed her turn as professor Minerva McGonagall, deputy head of Hogwarts, in the Harry Potter films and is said to have been the only performer author JK Rowling specifically sought out.

She and Dench were spinster sisters in Ladies in Lavender and from 2010 to 2015 she returned to the aristocracy as the imperious dowager Countess of Grantham in period drama Downton Abbey.

The Times