Maggie Smith died in September 2024 at the age of 89, and only now is it known what she left behind: 16 million pounds, around 18.6 million euros, and a house in the South Downs in Sussex with a barn, a stable and a vineyard. She kept the house for about forty years. She raised her sons there. It is not a prop from a series - it is the address where a life was lived.

The interesting part is not the figure but the date on the will: September 1996. So, almost thirty years before her death, she sat down and wrote out what went where - and then never opened the document again. The entire estate went first into a trust for her second husband, the playwright Beverley Cross. When he died in 1998, a clause kicked in transferring everything to her two sons from her first marriage to the actor Robert Stephens - Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, both actors as well. After debts were settled, the net value stands at 15,977,325 pounds.

One decision from 1996, and not a single dispute thirty years later

How many families do you know who got through an inheritance without a single court hearing? The story here is not the wealth - it is the fact that one document, written in good time and left alone, settled what tears whole families apart over decades. Her sons described her as "an intensely private person" and said she died peacefully, with family and friends beside her. She left two sons and five grandchildren.

Her career spanned seventy years. Six Oscar nominations, two wins - for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in 1969 and "California Suite" in 1978. Most of the world met her late, as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in "Downton Abbey" between 2010 and 2015, which brought her two Emmy awards, and as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

It was on the set of one of those films, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009. She kept working through the chemotherapy. That detail did not make it into a single piece of marketing material while it was happening - it came out much later, which says rather precisely what kind of woman this was.