Dame Maggie Smith left a £16million fortune following her death aged 89, the Daily Mail can reveal.
The screen legend, who starred in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, died in September 2024, and left almost all of the estate to her two actor sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens – including her sprawling farmhouse home in the Sussex countryside on the South Downs.
The five-bedroom home, where she raised her sons and lived for 40 years, lies in a secluded spot on the edge of the village of Fittleworth. The estate includes barns, a stable and a vineyard.
Dame Maggie, who also had five grandchildren, passed away at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after a prolonged illness.
She wrote her final will in September 1996, leaving the bulk of her estate to a trust for her second husband – playwright and screenwriter Beverly Cross.
But Cross died in 1998, so a clause kicked in that saw her assets passed down to Chris and Toby, born from her first marriage to actor Robert Stephens.
This amounted to just £16 million, reduced to a net estate of £15,977,325 after payment of liabilities.
Dame Maggie’s fortune was accrued during a glittering 70-year stage and screen career in which she was nominated six times for an Academy Award, winning twice for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and California Suite in 1978.
Dame Maggie Smith left a £16million fortune almost entirely to her two sons
Dame Maggie was perhaps best known for playing Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films
She also played the cantankerous octogenarian Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey
In more recent years, she became a favourite playing the no-nonsense Lady Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in ITV drama Downton Abbey.
She also won over a legion of younger fans playing Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise.
She also had major roles in classic Shakespeare stage plays, Hollywood blockbusters and starred alongside British acting greats including Sir Michael Caine, Sir Ian McKellen, Jim Broadbent and Dame Judi Dench.
Born in Ilford, Essex, on December 28, 1934, her acting won recognition from the start of her career, and she received an early Bafta nod for promising newcomer in 1959 for the crime film Nowhere To Go.
This was followed by Bafta nominations for Young Cassidy in 1966, Death On The Nile in 1979, California Suite in 1980, Quartet in 1982, The Secret Garden in 1994, Tea With Mussolini in 2000, Gosford Park in 2002, and The Lady In The Van in 2016.
She also won best actress gongs for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, A Private Function and The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne.
Her final roles included The Miracle Club, which follows a group of women from Dublin who go on a pilgrimage to the French town of Lourdes, and 2022’s Downton Abbey: A New Era, in which Violet dies.
Larkin and Stephens, who were her sons from her first marriage to actor Robert Stephens, said in a statement after her death: ‘It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital.’
The late actress’s inspirational life was later celebrated at Mortlake Crematorium in Richmond, south-west London.
