‘Downton Abbey’ star died in September last year aged 89
Maggie Smith’s son Toby Stephens has opened up about the final weeks of the acclaimed actor’s life.
Stephens and his brother Chris Larkin announced their mother, who was best known for her prominent roles in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, had died “peacefully” in hospital in September last year.
Smith’s health was in decline for the final two years of her life and by 2023, the Oscar-winning actor had stopped working altogether.
Speaking to The Times, Stephens revealed he wasn’t in the UK when his mother died because he’d been offered a role in the New Zealand horror film Marama, which was shooting at the time.
Smith encouraged her son to take the role despite her health troubles.
“She was in hospital. She was supposed to be coming out, but the last two years of her life had been a decline: she would get worse, then she would get better, then she would get worse,” he explained.
“So I said, ‘Look I’ve got this film,’ and before I could even ask her, she said, ‘Go do it. God, you don’t want to hang round here, I’m fine.’”
When Stephens arrived in New Zealand, however, the hospital staff informed him that his mother’s condition would not improve. “But it could take two months, two weeks, they didn’t know,” he said.
Shooting had began for Marama, and so Stephens rang Smith who insisted he stay and complete the project. Soon afterwards, his mother stopped being able to communicate.
“I’d spent hours and days sitting with her at home and in hospital over the course of two years, and there was nothing I had left unsaid,” Stephens said.
Smith died on 27 September, the day before Stephens finished filming. His wife, Black Sails star Anna-Louise Plowman, and their three teenage children were all with her at the hospital the day before she died.
Larkin was at Smith’s bedside for her final moments. “I was so sad not to be with him,” Stephens admitted. “I found that very difficult, but she was no longer aware. And it allowed me some space to actually get my head round what had happened.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Stephens said he had been touched by the response to his mother’s death and the number of people who remembered her for her earlier roles.
He added: “The thing that really got me was: it’s very rare that you have actors that everyone likes. And she had spent her life not thinking of herself like that, which is very winning.
“If she had thought of herself like that it would have been ghastly. But she wasn’t like that at all. She had self-knowledge, self-belief. Like most actors, though, she was riven with self-doubt.”
A giant of theatre and a deft character actor on film, Smith was nevertheless something of an outsider, despite the adulation she received throughout her career, having acquired a reputation as rather spiky and acid-tongued, disinclined to suffer fools gladly.
On whether she had ever felt inclined to try to correct this perception, she told an audience at London’s Tricycle Theatre in 2017: “It’s gone too far now to take back. If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work – it would frighten people more if I were nice.
“They’d be paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to. But perhaps I should try it… ‘Hello! What fun! We’re going to be here all day! And then filming all night, too! Goodie! And it’s so lovely and cold!’”
