The Grandest Dame of All: Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith, who died in September aged 89, was a unique presence on stage and screen for more than seven decades. The Rake pays tribute.
There are certain things we will never see again: Leicester City winning the Prem. Silhouettes like a De Tomaso Pantera rolling off the production line. And Maggie Smith.
Yes, Dench, Caine, Mirren and McKellen are still with us for now, but when the West End’s lights were dimmed on October 1, it signalled not just the curtain closing on a life (not to mention a hell of a mixed metaphor) but an epoch. Smith was the last celluloid tendril connecting what was once called cinema to the movies to the streamers.
Long before she was the granny everyone wished they had, Smith took home a best actress Oscar as the sexually unapologetic titular character of 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In 1978 alone she was Bette Davis’s duplicitous maid in Death on the Nile and won another Oscar by bringing equal parts grit and frailty to the ensemble cast of California Suite.
The grandest dame of all was 89 when she died in September, and beyond the accolades — she was one of only a handful of people to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar, not to mention five Baftas — her legacy can be summed up in a word: beloved.
Between 2000 and 2009 she endeared herself to a generation as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. From 2010 to 2015 she did it again, swapping potions for period in Downton Abbey. And if ever a face matched a name, it was Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham.
It was a face that started out as a pretty Shakespearean poppet, and through working-class firebrand and fading Hollywood royalty made its way to dismissively loveable curmudgeon. Only to end up, in 2023, in a Loewe advertising campaign shot by Juergen Teller. Time was never fought, and in its crenellated magnificence her face was somewhere between lugubrious basset and relief map of the Thames. The eyes were disproportionately large, the heavy lids at odds with the mischief that burbled behind the irises. Her face, The New York Times noted, “had a balletic mobility that only increased as she aged, apparently untrammelled by surgery or cosmetic intervention”.
With this vehicle at her command, no one did hauteur better — there were universes within the flicker of her brows and the tilt of her chin. Can you imagine anyone else delivering the line, “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s so terribly middle class” with more withering contempt? Yes, it was a product of the Downton Abbey writing room, but, God, she nailed it.
Left to her own devices, she came up with pearlers such as, “Glenn Close isn’t an actress, she’s an address”. Even when there was no definitive proof she had actually said certain things, people wanted it to have happened so much that there was a stampede of attribution. Most notably, the probably apocryphal “my dear, religion is like a penis — it’s a perfectly fine thing for one to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in my face, we have a problem”. Admit it, you heard it in her voice, didn’t you?
Part of the reason Smith — who went by ‘Maggie’ because there was already a Margaret Smith registered as an actress in England — skewered the quirks and foibles of aristos is that she viewed the species up close from a middle-class perspective during childhood. Her mother was a secretary from Glasgow, her dad a Geordie public health pathologist who spent a chunk of his career working at the University of Oxford. They moved there when Maggie was four, and she attended Oxford High School before switching to the Oxford Playhouse at the age of 16 as a prompt girl and understudy.
The mother of two and breast cancer survivor alternated between stage and screen for much of her career, and was considered such an icon of the former that she featured on one of the eight commemorative postage stamps issued on the 200th anniversary of the Old Vic Theatre in 2018.
How good was she? Olivier himself drafted her into his National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1962, and instead of paying obsequious fealty to both his rep and his repertory, Maggie let Larry have it with both barrels. The critic Michael Coveney wrote: “He knew immediately he’d met his match — that she was extraordinary. He said that anyone who can play comedy that well can also play tragedy... Having got her into the company, they became not enemies but professional rivals. Never before had anyone on stage been quicker than him, and now, it seemed, there was a contest.”
Her attitude to it all was best summed up by the fact she was once clocked across the chops by Olivier during a performance of Othello with such force that she was knocked out cold. Afterwards, she archly recalled, “It was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre”. In an era of manufactured glimpses into actors’ motivations and personalities — let’s make them try snacks from their co-stars’ countries — Smith had a bracing and well-earned forthrightness. You never knew what was about to come out of her mouth, but it was always worth your attention. Especially when she was writing her own script. “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools,” she said, “but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”
It’s now time to toast her memory with a cocktail and the most apt of anecdotes. On the first score, we’d recommend one of the four she offered Hercule Poirot in 1982’s Evil Under the Sun: a White Lady, Sidecar, Mainbrace or Between the Sheets. On the second, we ask you to picture a smitten young Potter fan encountering Professor Minerva McGonagall IRL. In what was no doubt a voice of whispered awe, said child asked Smith, “Were you... were you really a cat?” Only for the actress to reply, “Just pull yourself together”. As we say, there’ll never be another like her.
