‘A legend of her generation’ - Maggie Smith 1934–2024

Michael Billington Michael Billington is the Guardian’s former theatre critic Gareth Neame is an executive producer of Downton Abbey

28 Sep 2024 - The Guardian

Maggie Smith was an actor of legendary wit and style who, even off stage, seemed to have the capacity to deliver a one-line zinger. There’s a lovely moment in Roger Michell’s TV film Nothing Like a Dame in which the assembled quartet (including Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) are asked to talk about the difficulty of living with a title. Joan Plowright says it’s worse for her because she not only has the handle of a dame but that of a lady through her marriage to Laurence Olivier. With exquisite timing and hitting the perfect verb, Smith looks at her old friend and says: “Joan, darling, you’ll just have to grapple with it.”

Smith’s achievements on stage and screen are well documented, but I was lucky to witness a less well-known side of her work: her seasons at the Festival theatre in Stratford, Ontario, from 1976 to 1980. She once told me that she went to work in Canada because of her private life. I wondered if it was also because of her Private Lives which, although a great West End success in 1972, led to accusations that she was becoming the prisoner of her comic mannerisms. Whatever the motivation, her work in the Canadian Stratford had a directness and sincerity that amounted to a reinvention of self.

I was bowled over by what I saw. Among her roles were Titania and Hippolyta in Robin Phillips’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I have rarely seen them better played. Her Titania was no fluttering fairy, but a conscience-stricken figure. Resisting Oberon’s claims to the changeling child in her possession, she recalled how his mother was a votaress of her order but that “she, being mortal of that boy did die … And for her sake I will not part with him”. With those lines, Smith drove straight to the heart.

I saw her again in 1978 as a scintillating Rosalind in As You Like It and as a Lady Macbeth of boundless ambition and limited imagination. Speaking of Duncan’s murder, she cried: “A little water clears us of this deed – how easy is it then,” leaning on the word “easy” with fatal myopia. It is fair to say she transcended a slow-moving production of two intervals. When I turned up at her house the morning after the first night to interview her, her husband suggested he take the phone off the hook. “What for?” she asked. “No one’s likely to ring.”

But she had another triumphant Stratford season in 1980. As Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing,she suggested a bruised heart under a facade of raillery.

I shall remember many other Maggie Smith performances, from her comically angular Myra in Coward’s Hay Fever to her Lady Bracknell-like dowager in Downton Abbey. But I shall always remember that it was through her move to Ontario that she recaptured the clarity, sincerity and emotional openness that lay at the heart of her best work.

As though ITV was going to green light the series, our attention soon turned to casting. Almost the entire cast came in to audition, but there was no question of asking Maggie to come and meet or deliver some lines for us. The role of Violet Grantham was certainly not designed for Maggie – in fact, she had never done a long-running episodic TV series so I had little prospect of being able to get her. But once on the page it did become very clear that it was her and we had to try our best to secure her.

In the end, her contribution to Downton Abbey is immeasurable and the show would not have been the huge global hit it became without her.

Maggie was never ashamed to deliver those barbed lines, in spite of how archaic or antediluvian they may have sounded. Of many aphorisms and “zingers” everyone recalls the rather brilliant “What is a weekend?”, yet she brought the house down with less remembered bon mots such as her rejections of Lady Sybil’s claim that she was political: “No. She isn’t until she is married, then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.”

Maggie famously did not suffer fools. In an earlier film in the 1990s I made a mistake of scheduling a very light first day without dialogue. The next morning she strolled past me muttering entirely for my benefit: “All they’ve got me doing on this show is walking up and down bloody corridors.”

Most of all I remember her huge generosity and affection for the three young actors who played her granddaughters in Downton.

The last Downton film brought the death of the Dowager Countess. When she left the set for the final time, cast and crew lined up outside the abbey and applauded as she was swept away into her car.

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Tributes paid to ‘one of a kind’ in seven decades on stage and screen

Andrew Pulver, Kevin Rawlinson

The Guardian

Maggie Smith, the prolific, awardwinning actor described by peers as being “one of a kind” and possessed of a “sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent”, has died aged 89.

Her work, which ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, brought her global recognition, as well as two Oscars and eight Baftas.

The news was announced by her sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, who said: “An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital for their care and unstinting kindness.”

Tributes came from friends and colleagues. Michael Caine told the Guardian: “It was my privilege to make two films alongside the legendary Maggie Smith. A truly brilliant actress and a dear friend, who I will greatly miss.”

Whoopi Goldberg, with whom Smith worked on the Sister Act films, said: “Maggie Smith was a great woman and a brilliant actress. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to work with the ‘one of a kind’.”

Hugh Bonneville, who appeared alongside Smith in Downton Abbey, said: “Anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent. She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances.”

Smith was also described as a “truly great” actor by Julian Fellowes, the Downton Abbey creator. “She was a joy to write for, subtle, many-layered, intelligent, funny and heartbreaking,” he said.

Michael Palin told the Guardian: “Her wit was sharp and always icily well targeted. I remember having a meal with her and Alan Bennett at a rather smart Yorkshire restaurant during the filming of A Private Function, when I discovered a piece of glass in my mixed salad. No great fuss was made. To the manager, Maggie simply referred to it as ‘a very mixed salad’.”

Smith’s gift for acid-tongued comedy was the source of some of her greatest achievements: the waspish teacher Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, period dramas such as A Room With a View and Gosford Park, and a series of collaborations on stage and screen with Alan Bennett, including The Lady in the Van.

“My career is chequered,” she told the Guardian in 2004. “I think I got pigeonholed in humour … If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count.”

But Smith also excelled in noncomedic dramatic roles, performing opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning a best actress Bafta for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler.

Born in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford. While appearing in a string of stage shows, Smith also made inroads on film, including the 1958 Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Bafta.

In 1969 she was cast in the lead role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel for which she went on to win the best actress Oscar in 1970. Another Oscar nomination for best actress came her way in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels With My Aunt, and an Oscar win (for best supporting actress) in 1979 for California Suite, the Neil Simon-scripted anthology.

Smith continued her parallel film and stage careers in the 1980s, with a supporting role as gossipy cousin Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, for which she was nominated for yet another Oscar.

She starred alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini, and as a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. She won over a whole new generation as Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series.

Last night King Charles paid tribute: “My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dame Maggie Smith. As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both on and off the stage.”

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Ol Parker

28 Sep 2024 - The Guardian

I always believed Maggie Smith was immortal. Of course her work is. But it’s hard to accept all that piss and vinegar didn’t give us a few more years of the pleasure of her company. That’s if she liked you. If she didn’t – and the list is long – then her company was downright terrifying. You don’t get to be Maggie Smith onscreen without being Maggie Smith offscreen, and the acerbic wit, the putdowns, the total lack of fucks given were at least as funny and powerful as the lines writers like myself tried to create for her. But for those of us lucky enough to find her approval, her friendship was passionate, her wisdom unmatched, her loyalty fierce as the sun.

I wrote the part in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for Maggie and only for Maggie. There’s simply no greater thrill for a writer than knowing that the Great Dame is going to be saying your words, dignifying your material, timing the gags incomparably, and finding truth, wit and pain in every line. I got to work with her twice more, on the sequel and on another movie, the second time I’d written a part especially for her.

And then, knowing she’d say no, but wanting to make her laugh, I offered her the part of an all-singing all-dancing teacher in the Mamma Mia! sequel. I was and am incredibly proud of the typically terse text she sent me in reply: “Not even for you, dear.”

Every evening in India the old actors would all have dinner together. And every day we would all laugh and laugh. She had two laughs, Maggie: a dry cackle and a genuine, head-back roar. To hear the latter was the greatest pleasure, to inspire it the biggest privilege. I’ll miss them both. I’ll miss her.

We made the first Marigold Hotel movie with no expectation that anyone would ever see it, let alone that there would be a sequel. But when we were out in India for the second time, someone brought up the idea of a third film. “I’ll only do it,” said Mags, “if you call it Marigold Hospice.” Rest in power, you brilliant genius.

Ol Parker is a director and screenwriter who wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel