Maggie Smith was long regarded as one of the most private figures in British entertainment, an actress who built a career on emotional precision while keeping her own life carefully out of view. But behind the Oscars, Emmys, and Tony Award, and behind her iconic roles as Professor Minerva McGonagall and the Dowager Countess, her personal life was marked by deep and lasting heartbreak. Over six decades, Smith became one of Britain’s most accomplished actors. She won two Academy Awards, seven BAFTAs, four Emmys, and a Tony, placing her among the few performers to achieve the triple crown of acting.
Her first Oscar came for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, and her second arrived nearly a decade later for California Suite. Later generations knew her for Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, roles that made her a global star long after she had established herself on the stage. But before those later roles, Smith’s personal and professional lives were closely intertwined at the National Theatre, the company she joined in the 1960s under Laurence Olivier. It was there that she met Robert Stephens, a leading man of his generation and a performer widely considered a likely successor to Olivier.
The two became formidable artistic partners, appearing together on stage in Franco Zeffirelli’s Much Ado About Nothing and later in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. They married on June 29, 1967. Their first son, Chris Larkin, was born that year, and their second, Toby Stephens, followed in 1969. The timing seemed ideal.
Smith’s career was accelerating, and both parents were established actors. But then came The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress, confirming her place as a major international screen actor. The success did not exist in isolation. Stephens’s career was entering a much more difficult period, and his personal life was unraveling.
He later acknowledged the role that alcohol, women, and his own emotional problems played in the collapse of his life. In 1970, while working on Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Stephens suffered intense mental health problems that led to a drastic episode, which became a turning point for the marriage. Smith later spoke about that period with unusual openness in a rare 2004 interview with The Guardian. She said the situation between them became increasingly difficult after the incident.
They had two young boys, and neither she nor Stephens seemed to understand how to deal with what was happening. Infidelity compounded the damage. Stephens was repeatedly unfaithful, and Smith later described the number of affairs as one of the reasons the marriage became impossible to sustain. It was not one isolated betrayal but a pattern that continued even as they tried to keep the family together.
By 1973, Smith decided she could no longer remain in the marriage. She later recalled telling Stephens it could not continue, and he agreed. Her description of that period was blunt: the situation had become destructive to everyone involved. The divorce followed in 1975.
The end of the marriage did not mean Smith erased Stephens from her life. They had two sons together, both of whom eventually became actors. Smith later made clear that whatever had happened between them, she remained grateful for the family they had created. After leaving Stephens, Smith moved toward a relationship with someone who had been part of her life for years.
Beverly Cross had loved her long before she was famous, and their eventual marriage became the one she believed would last. Then, after 23 years together, that life disappeared almost overnight. Smith first met Cross in 1952 when she was a young performer at Oxford and he was a student with ambitions of becoming a playwright. Cross was captivated by her, recognizing not just her appearance but something unusual in her as a performer: intelligence, comic timing, and an ability to command attention without appearing to demand it.
Cross wanted to marry her, but he was still legally entangled in his first marriage, and the divorce process in Britain at the time was complicated and lengthy. While Cross waited for his marriage to be dissolved, Smith fell in love with Robert Stephens. She and Stephens married in 1967, and Cross moved on as well, marrying model Gayden Collins. But Cross never entirely disappeared from Smith’s life.
When her marriage to Stephens ended, he was once again free. In June 1975, exactly 23 years after their first meeting, Smith and Cross married. This time, the circumstances were different. Smith was an Oscar-winning performer and a mother of two.
Cross was an accomplished playwright and screenwriter whose work included Jason and the Argonauts. Their marriage gave Smith something her first marriage had not: stability. Cross became a steady presence in the family, helping create a quieter home life away from the intensity of London’s theater world. For more than two decades, they stayed together.
Then, in 1998, everything changed. Cross died on March 20th at the age of 66 after suffering an aneurysm. Smith was left without the person who had been part of her life, in one form or another, for nearly half a century. The loss was not simply that of a husband.
It was the loss of someone who had known her before the awards, before the fame, and before she became one of the most recognizable actresses in Britain. Smith rarely spoke publicly about grief, but when she did, her words revealed how profoundly Cross’s death had affected her. She described the experience as devastating and acknowledged how difficult it was to continue with ordinary life afterward. She remained professionally productive, returning to the stage and making films.
Privately, however, she became even more guarded. She did not replace Cross with another husband. There was no second great romance that followed his death. Smith remained unmarried for the rest of her life.
But the losses did not stop there. In the later decades of her career, many of the actors with whom she had shared the stage, the screen, and some of the most important years of her professional life began to disappear. One of the most painful losses was Alan Rickman, her colleague in Harry Potter and a fellow performer whose friendship was built on the dry humor they both understood instinctively. Rickman had admired Smith before he became famous himself.
As a young actor, he had watched her perform and understood that he was seeing someone operating at an extraordinary level. Their most famous collaboration began when Smith was cast as Professor Minerva McGonagall and Rickman became Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. They were part of an older generation working on films dominated by young performers, which created an unusual dynamic behind the scenes. Smith, Rickman, and Michael Gambon had enormous theatrical experience between them, but much of their time on set was spent waiting for the younger actors to complete their scenes before they could deliver a reaction shot.
Rickman once described Smith as one of the wittiest people alive. That made his death particularly painful. Rickman died on January 14th, 2016, aged 69, after pancreatic cancer. He had kept his illness largely private, and the public learned of his diagnosis only after his death.
After Rickman’s death, Smith remembered him not only as an exceptional actor but also as someone whose company she genuinely enjoyed. She recalled how much they laughed together and how pleasurable it had been to work alongside him. There was another loss that arrived much earlier, one that changed the Harry Potter world itself. Richard Harris, who played Albus Dumbledore in the first two films, died before the young cast had even completed its journey through the story.
Smith and Harris belonged to a generation that had transformed British acting during the 1950s and 60s. Both had established themselves through theater before becoming internationally recognized screen performers. By the time Harris arrived at Hogwarts, he was already an established star with two Academy Award nominations and a reputation for playing intense, complicated characters. Their pairing in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone brought together two performers with decades of experience.
Dumbledore was warm, mysterious, and quietly commanding. McGonagall was disciplined, formidable, and almost impossible to intimidate. Together, they made Hogwarts feel as though it existed long before Harry arrived. The two actors returned for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but Harris’s health was already deteriorating.
During production, he became seriously ill and was eventually diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Despite his condition, he completed his work on the film. Harris died on October 25th, 2002, at University College Hospital in London. He was 72.
He became the first major adult member of the central Harry Potter cast to die. The loss created an immediate practical problem for the filmmakers because Dumbledore was central to the story, and the series had many more films ahead. Michael Gambon was chosen to take over the role. For Smith, the loss was both personal and professional.
Both she and Harris understood the traditions of British theater. Both had built careers before the Harry Potter films existed. The adult performers often formed their own little world around the enormous production, retreating from the noise of the set to talk away from the cameras and younger cast members. The Harry Potter films continued without Harris, but his death changed the emotional landscape of the production.
For Smith, it was another reminder that the acting world she had known for most of her life was gradually disappearing. Years later came another devastating departure. Michael Gambon, who had inherited Harris’s position at the center of Hogwarts, died in 2023. By then, his professional relationship with Maggie Smith stretched back more than half a century.
Smith and Gambon first worked together in the world of British theater. Both became associated with the National Theatre during its formative years under Laurence Olivier. They worked together in productions including Othello in 1964. Their careers repeatedly crossed.
They appeared together in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in 2001, which won the Academy Award for Julian Fellowes’s screenplay. That same year, their professional lives became connected to a much younger generation through Harry Potter. Their history made the pairing particularly interesting. They knew one another’s rhythms.
Alan Rickman noticed that quality as well. In his diaries, Rickman described Gambon as possessing a remarkably wicked sense of humor. That humor worked well alongside Smith’s own. Smith was known for her precision.
Gambon was famous for spontaneity. Their collaboration continued beyond Harry Potter. They appeared together again in Quartet in 2012, a comedy-drama about retired opera singers living in a retirement home. But Gambon’s later years became increasingly difficult.
He had been diagnosed with memory problems, and eventually the condition affected his ability to continue working on stage. He eventually stepped away from stage acting. On September 27th, 2023, Michael Gambon died in the hospital after suffering from pneumonia. He was 82.
For Smith, his death meant losing another person from the generation with whom she had built her career. By then, she had already lost Beverly Cross, Richard Harris, and Alan Rickman. There is an eerie coincidence surrounding the timing of their deaths. Michael Gambon died on September 27th, 2023.
Exactly one year later, on September 27th, 2024, Maggie Smith died at the age of 89. By the time Smith died, the professional world that had surrounded her for most of her life had changed almost beyond recognition. Many of the actors with whom she had shared stages, sets, and decades of friendship were gone.
Gambon was among the last of that generation.
