Obituary for Maggie Smith: The sharp tongue is silent

Dame Maggie Smith often played women who never missed a snarky comment – before she won over another generation as Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. Now the two-time Oscar winner has died.

There are great actors who disappear behind their roles, but there is a special art to playing very different people and yet always giving them a little bit of yourself. Dame Maggie Smith could do that, in each of her performances you can see everything at the same time. She was the cocky Miss Jean Brodie in her heyday, 1969, thirteen years later she was the charming Daphne Castle, who in “Evil Under the Sun” makes the new wife mad for the guest she has a crush on, she was Minerva McGonagall, Professor of Transfiguration at Hogwarts, also the old aunt in “Gosford Park” and of course the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey. They all had something in common – the sharp tongue that Maggie Smith had in real life, and the clean-cut face with huge eyes.