The Piercing Presence of Maggie Smith

“You don’t get to be Maggie Smith on screen without being Maggie Smith off screen,” writes Parker, “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.”

Nicholas Hytner, the former artistic director of the National Theatre in London who directed Smith in a 1999 production of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and in his 2015 film adaptation, tells the Guardian that Smith “found life hysterically funny and unbearably painful. Her company was exhilarating—she was even sharper and wittier than her legions of fans imagined her to be. But since the death of her husband, Beverley, in 1998, she was often lonely, and the fun was a way of laughing in the face of the unavoidable misery that draws people to great acting.”

Smith could barely recall a time when she wasn’t drawn to acting. Born in east London to somewhat distant parents who moved the family to Oxford when she was four, Smith, the younger sister of twin brothers, was only seventeen when she took her first role—as Viola in Twelfth Night—at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952. Four years later, she was on Broadway, belting out tunes in the musical review New Faces of ’56.

In 1960, she took over the role of Daisy from Joan Plowright in a London production of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros directed by Orson Welles and starring Laurence Olivier. When Olivier was putting together the National Theatre Company a few years later, he invited Smith to join, although, as critic and Smith biographer Michael Coveney points out, Olivier “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 and he offered her the likes of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. But 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.”

Ingmar Bergman directed Smith in a 1970 production of Hedda Gabler, and in 1976, after divorcing her first husband, actor Robert Stephens, and marrying playwright Beverley Cross, Smith left London for Ontario, where she threw herself into several productions at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. “Her Hippolyta had the sadness of a conquered queen,” writes Guardian critic Michael Billington, “and her Titania was no fluttering fairy, but a conscience-stricken figure.”

The Telegraph meticulously chronicles Smith’s long and illustrious career in the theater, but before moving on to film and television, we need to mention just two more milestones. Previously nominated for Tony Awards for her performances in Noël Coward’s Private Lives and Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, she finally won in 1990 for playing a tour guide who floridly embellishes the history of an English country house in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. This was “perhaps the funniest stage performance I had ever seen,” wrote Charles Isherwood in the New York Times in 2011. “It was a virtuosic turn that drew on all her trademark mannerisms—the flapping wrists, witheringly dry turns of phrase, conspicuously genteel accent—to ripe comic effect. It epitomized for me the particular, gooseflesh-giving magic of seeing a great actor and a great role seamlessly matched onstage.”

By 2019, Smith’s Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies and her Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey, had brought a flush of international fame that Smith frequently complained had upended her quiet private life. She was eighty-four, and after an absence of twelve years, she returned to the stage to play Brunhilde Pomsel, an assistant to Joseph Goebbels, in Christopher Hampton’s one-woman play, A German Life. Over one hundred minutes, Pomsel refuses to admit to anything nearing complicity or guilt. “If we went in thinking of it as long ago,” writes Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph, “she made it close to home. Instead of hiding herself in her character, she showed us again what most of us like to keep hidden, the devil lying in the fine detail of denial.”

The constant shower of accolades throughout Smith’s onstage career would be mirrored right from the start of her on-screen run as well. Playing an ex-débutante who helps out a recently escaped prisoner in Seth Holt’s Nowhere to Go (1958), Smith received her first screen credit and a nomination for a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer to Film. “She’s already showing something extra in an uncharacteristic glamour-girl part,” notes Dave Kehr, and at IndieWire, Tom Brueggemann calls Nowhere to Go “an undervalued thriller late in the history of fabled Ealing Studios.”

The V.I.P.s (1963), written by Terence Rattigan and directed by Anthony Asquith, stars Welles, Rod Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton, who famously quipped that Smith didn’t just steal the scene they were meant to share: “She commits grand larceny.” Reprising her Desdemona opposite Olivier’s Othello in Stuart Burge’s 1965 film, Smith scored her first Oscar nomination—and she won Best Actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Ronald Neame’s adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel.

“That title role—of a freethinking teacher at an Edinburgh all-girls school, who is unapologetic in her favoritism of students she considers special enough to benefit from her social, cultural, and political sculpting—forged a template that defined the actress while never confining her,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. Smith “somehow rolled haughtiness, erudition, a penchant for romantic reverie, and a subtle vein of camp into a single character.”

Smith charmed in George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt (1972) and Alan J. Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973) and joined an all-star cast led by Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in John Guillermin’s Agatha Christie adaptation, Death on the Nile (1978). And then she won her second Oscar for playing a British actress nominated for an Oscar—she loses—in California Suite (1978), written by Neil Simon and directed by Herbert Ross. “Smith’s performance shifts from comedy to plaintiveness with the subtlety of leaves rustling in the autumn light,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek.

Michael Caine, who played the husband of Smith’s character in California Suite, is said to have jokingly called up Michael Palin, who had written the 1982 comedy The Missionary with Smith in mind, to warn him that she would steal his movie. But Palin and Smith teamed up again for Malcolm Mowbray’s A Private Function (1984)—and Smith won a BAFTA. “Maggie made it look so easy,” Palin tells the Guardian, “and yet I always felt that there was something else there. Something held back. An impatience with life. To be blessed with such an instinctive, effortless understanding of what acting was all about made her dismissive of anything she saw as dull and uninspired. She didn’t suffer fools.”

Smith first worked with producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory on Quartet (1981), and in 1985, she joined the cast of A Room with a View led by Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman on holiday in Florence. “Maggie Smith as Lucy’s dithering chaperone is marvelous,” wrote Richard Schickel in Time, and she was nominated for another Oscar. Adapting E. M. Forster’s novel, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won for her screenplay, which Benjamin Dreyer calls “a masterpiece of deciding what to retain, what to dismiss, and what to enrich and build on.”

A few years ago, Michael Sragow wrote that Smith “delivered an electric turn as a deceptively ditzy minx on the make for the heroine’s husband” in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), the first of three films she made with director Jack Clayton. The third was “the funny and humane ensemble piece” Memento Mori (1992), and in between came The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987). “Smith gave her supreme dramatic performance in the role of an unmarried, alcoholic Irish Catholic who feels her religious faith and emotions drying up and the world closing in on her in Dublin circa 1955,” writes Sragow.

The character isn’t all that distant from Susan, a vicar’s wife who delivers a devastating fifty-minute monologue in Bed Among the Lentils (1988), which was presented as part of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series for the BBC. Susan gradually reveals a drinking problem and an affair, and “Smith’s delivery here is so coiled with tension,” writes Dan Callahan at RogerEbert.com, “so laced with authoritative rage at the hypocrisy and meanness of the people around her, that it is difficult to even take a breath once you start watching her; the exhilarating negativity of Smith’s artistic viewpoint on life never had richer material to feed on.”

In her appreciation for Vulture, Kathryn VanArendonk makes an at-first curious and then ultimately productive choice to dig into Smith’s supporting turn in Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991), noting that “her presence as the elder Wendy to Robin Williams’s self-denying Peter Pan is what shapes the entire emotional arc of the movie, and her performance makes it clear that being Wendy sucks. She’s forced into a motherly role too soon, thanklessly tasked with dragging these obnoxiously juvenile boys into the cruel reality of adulthood, then while she ages and gives up her own Neverland dreams, Peter’s still out there living his best, unburdened life . . . Many of Smith’s most potent roles are like this: marginal, secondary characters who are all the more powerful for how fully they draw your attention away from what’s supposedly the central story.”

In 2001, Smith’s life and career took turns she must have appreciated to some degree, even if she never fully came to terms with them. She played the head of Gryffindor House and the deputy headmistress at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first film in the franchise, and Constance, Dowager Countess of Trentham, in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. Constance, the creation of screenwriter Julian Fellowes, was the obvious template for Violet Crawley in Fellowes’s Downton Abbey.

Mike Newell, who directed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), tells the Guardian that Smith “brought a lot” to the role of Minerva McGonagall, “and to the set—and one of those things was terror. Maggie never bit me, but I think if she did bite you, you stayed bitten.” Smith “had a look that could express disappointment or disbelief when she was being directed. A sense of ‘he’s asking for this, but he’s going to get something bigger and better, and I hope he realizes he’s a very lucky boy.’ And I did.”

Violet Crawley is “a savory stereotype of English drama and fiction,” writes Charles Isherwood, “the imperious gentlewoman so secure in her sense of her place in the social sphere (cozily near the apex, of course) that she regards the passing scene with bemused distance, as if through a lorgnette from the private opera box she carries around with her.” She’s “a model of hauteur,” writes Dominic Cavendish. “At the same time, [Smith] could suggest the cost of that carapace, the self-defeating nature of social armor, evincing a British melancholy, a quiet lonely ache. She could bring the house down—and remind us what it’s like to fester in the attic.”

“It’s hard to think of another actor who could do more with syllables than Maggie Smith,” writes Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. “Language for her was an all-purpose prop,” and her “pauses could swallow up surrounding conversation. More powerful than any wisecrack was the space she left for anticipation not only of what she might say but how she might say it . . . If comedy was more native to her than tragedy, it was because she understood that life observed no separation between the two.” Smith “relished the indomitable nature of our quirks and caprices, their capacity to survive even egregious catastrophe. Each of us will eventually be erased, but our unique textures are unrepeatable. She honored those traces even as she ironically nailed their indefensible triviality.”