Agnes O’Casey, Irish costar of Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club, released late last year, cherished an apparently characteristic encounter with Dame Maggie Smith.
“Sometimes I’d make a fool of myself,” O’Casey told this writer. “She’d recite poetry. I’d say: ‘Did you come up with that?’”
She adopted Smith’s famous growl.
“‘No, that’s Wordsworth, darling!’”
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Anyone with even a vague awareness of Smith’s great roles will hear the full sweep of timbres in that “Wordsworth”.
The Miracle Club, following three Dubliners on a trip to Lourdes, looks to have been the veteran actor’s last film appearance.
Dame Maggie Smith, who has died in London at the age of 89, remained a genuine star for over 60 years. It is not unusual for actors to move successfully from lead roles to middle-aged character parts to crotchety treasures, but few managed that journey with such a degree of popular acclaim. In the 1950s she starred in revues with Kenneth Williams. In the 1960s she played Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello. The first of her two Oscars came for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970. Thereafter she remained an unavoidable – and, until today, apparently indestructible – pillar of the British acting establishment.
She was capable of great fragility. As far back as 1963, she was heartbreaking as the secretary pathetically in love with boss Rod Taylor in The VIPs. She won a Bafta for her role as the flattened “spinster”, living a small life in a Dublin rooming house, in Jack Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (adapted from a Brian Moore novel) from 1987. But she will be best remembered for a withering haughtiness, perfected with Jean Brodie, that continued to charm millions of new fans in two hits from the millennial years: Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the ITV series Downton Abbey.
Smith was born in Essex to a Scottish mother and a pathologist father from Newcastle upon Tyne. The family moved to Oxford when she was just four years old. Following training at the Oxford Playhouse, at 17, she began taking roles at the Oxford University Dramatic Society – though she was not actually at the university.
Her first television part came in 1955 and, just two years later, she was appearing in revue on Broadway. Her relationship with Kenneth Williams, among the saltiest wits of his time, was later revived on chatshows in the 1970s. He recalled her shock at the cost of lingerie in an upmarket London department store. “Maggie said, ‘Seven guineas for a bra! Cheaper to have your tits off!’ and the place was in uproar!” he said. “They had obviously never heard anyone being quite so forthright in that kind of establishment.”
That angular irreverence was a vital part of the arsenal in decades to come. “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.” American audiences, in particular, never tired of hearing tart dialogue delivered in what they perceived to be patrician tones.
Following that early foray in comedy, her first dramatic stage success came – again opposite Williams – in Peter Shaffer’s The Private Ear and The Public Eye, in 1962. Olivier spotted her and lured her towards an early incarnation of the National Theatre, then in Chichester. There were later tensions with Olivier, but everything fell into place when Julie Andrews turned down the role of the eponymous schoolteacher in Ronald Neame’s adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It now seems inconceivable that Andrews – or indeed anyone else – could have mastered the inspirational mentor let down by a too-close affection for Mussolini.
Smith headed a generation of future dames of the British Empire who weathered time to remain prominently downstage into their golden years. Judi Dench had to wait for later middle age to become a movie star. Vanessa Redgrave was often distracted by politics. But Maggie Smith was always gloriously there. A second Oscar came for California Suite in 1979. Nominations also came for Othello, Travels With My Aunt, A Room With a View and (precursor of Downton Abbey) Gosford Park in 2001.
She was married to the volatile British actor Robert Stephens from 1967 to 1975. Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, their sons, have managed busy acting careers over the last decades. In the same year as her divorce from Stephens she married playwright Alan Beverley Cross and they remained together until his death in 1998.
No doubt many of this weekend’s obituaries will lead with her work in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey. It was, no doubt, a pleasure to remain so busy in her ninth decade. Few followers of this singular talent – with a voice as unmistakable as Churchill’s – will, however, be surprised to hear she had divided feelings. “I am deeply grateful for the work in Potter and indeed Downton, but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying,” she said in 2019. “I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.”
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