Dame Maggie Smith lamented how Downton Abbey changed her off-screen life

From small stage to big screen, Dame Maggie’s moving performances always stole the show.

But she was also immensely dedicated. Even in later life, she was known for never turning up on set without memorising her lines perfectly.

“I never saw her on set with a little script, she knew it before she got here,” Lady Carnarvon, who lives in Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey was filmed, told BBC Breakfast.

“She worked so hard, to get up at silly o’ clock… and to wear corsets for hours on end,” she said, adding that she continued working right up to the end of her life.

“I think inside, there was an anxiety to get it right,” Margoyles said. “But she always did.”

Throughout it all, she remained famously private.

She rarely did interviews. And Margolyes notes that Dame Maggie “didn’t like being on chat shows”, despite being good at them.

When she won her first Oscar in 1970, for her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she skipped the awards ceremony.

At the time, she was acting in a play in London. Many other actors would have let the understudy take over for the night, but not Dame Maggie.

She did show up to accept her Special Award Bafta in 1993, but her speech lasted a mere 30 seconds.

“If it’s possible to be in films without taking your clothes off or killing people with machine guns. I seem to have indeed managed,” she said.

It all paints a picture of an actress who found the whole idea of being a star faintly embarrassing, despite having an entire Wikipedia page, external dedicated to the number of awards she has won.

“She was a very private person,” Lady Carnarvon added.

“I always wanted to respect that and not overstep any boundaries. Which I think she was in that way, just like her character on TV.”

But despite being determined to go under the radar whenever possible, Dame Maggie absolutely made her mark on everyone she met.

Perhaps her old friend, the late actor Kenneth Williams, put it best, in his diary entry about Dame Maggie in December 1962.

“The weather cold and dreary and mediocre audiences made [Dame Maggie’s] departure drab and unexciting. I didn’t say goodbye or anything, ‘cos I’d have cried.

“But that girl has a magic, and a deftness of touch in comedy that makes you really grateful, and she’s capable of a generosity of spirit that is beautiful.

“She’s one of those rare people who make things and places suddenly marvellous, just by being there. She’s adorable.”