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Louise Thomas
Editor
Dame Maggie Smith was often open about her lack of time or interest in watching her performance as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in ITV’s hit period drama, Downton Abbey.
Smith, who died peacefully in hospital early on Friday (Sunday 27), aged 89, starred as Violet Crawley in every episode of the popular six-season show about the aristocratic family and their domestic servants in the early 20th century.
She later reprised her role in the two movie spin-offs: Downton Abbey (2019) and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022), alongside co-stars Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Elizabeth McGovern.
Even during her time on the series, she wasn’t afraid of admitting in several interviews that she had never watched the show.
In 2013, months after the series aired its third season, Smith told 60 Minutes presenter Steve Kroft that she had “never watched it,” confessing that she would find it too frustrating to watch her performance and nitpick over how she could have done things differently.
“I will look at it when it’s all over, maybe, because it’s frustrating,” she said at the time. “I always see things that I would like to do differently, and think, ‘Why in the name of God did I do that?’”
Following the show’s conclusion, she expressed relief that it had come to an end.
“I really am [relieved],” Smith said on an October 2015 episode of The Graham Norton Show. “Because, honestly, by the time we finished, [Crawley] must’ve been 110. I couldn’t go on and on. I couldn’t; it just didn’t make sense.”
In the years after the show’s finale, she revealed that she had been gifted a Downton Abbey box set but still hadn’t gotten around to watching it.
“I haven’t got time,” she joked to actors Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins in their 2018 documentary Tea with the Dames. “I shall have to hasten otherwise I won’t last long enough to see the wretched thing!”
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Throughout her decades-long stage and screen career, Smith gave life to a host of memorable characters, from Muriel Spark’s passionate Edinburgh girls’ school teacher Jean Brodie, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and most notably to Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film franchise.
She also appeared in other film hits including Steven Spielberg’s Hook and the Sister Act franchise.
In a statement issued via her publicist, Smith’s two sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, announced her death, saying: “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning.”
Remembering Smith as an “intensely private person,” they shared she was surrounded by “friends and family at the end.”
