Critic’s Appreciation: Maggie Smith, Mistress of Scintillating Wit and Withering Disdain
For most people born in the past three decades, Maggie Smith became a familiar figure as Minerva McGonagall, the transfiguration professor and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter movies. That strict but kind sorceress dispensed both imperious commands and compassionate counsel in a clipped Scottish brogue from beneath her pointed black hat.
Others might have met her as Violet Crawley, the tart-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, whose advanced age and creeping infirmity did nothing to diminish her Old World authority — “I wouldn’t know, I’m not familiar with the sensation,” she once remarked, on the foreign concept of being wrong — or her precision at landing a cutting put-down.
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Smith died today in London, aged 89, and those who know her only from those two signature roles would do well to sample the many jewels elsewhere in her seven-decade filmography.
For many of us who had savored Smith’s priceless delivery of the driest witticisms and most delicious bon mots for years, the wider 21st century discovery of her formidable screen persona via those characters brought satisfaction that the youngsters had finally caught up.
Smith had already made an impression in the 1960s with roles in The V.I.P.s, The Pumpkin Eater and the film version of the National Theatre’s Othello, starring opposite Laurence Olivier and landing her first Oscar nomination as Desdemona. But it was the 1969 release of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which won her the Academy Award for best actress, that really put her on the map.
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.
When one pupil eagerly expounds on her achievements as a Girl Guide, Miss Brodie cuts her off: “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.” The rolled-up sleeves of another student distract the teacher from a transporting monologue about love and war, prompting her to bark in indignation, “Are you thinking of doing a day’s washing?”
Smith somehow rolled haughtiness, erudition, a penchant for romantic reverie and a subtle vein of camp into a single character. She makes the movie deceptively funny for a drama about a protagonist whose passionate vocation for teaching is called into question by the betrayal of her pet student, exposing her as a dangerously radical influence on impressionable young women.
Smith’s unsurpassed command of acerbic dialogue made her a favorite of gay men, an iconic status further cemented when she played the eccentric Augusta Bertram in George Cukor’s film of the Graham Greene novel, Travels With My Aunt. Swanning around Europe in an endless series of dazzling ensembles by costumer Anthony Powell, she became the glamorous relative of our dreams, no less than Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame.
Augusta was a role almost twice Smith’s age. A striking woman, she always seemed too endowed with worldliness and wisdom to appear truly young, much like her contemporary Angela Lansbury.
Smith’s expertly timed delivery was put to good use in two all-star Agatha Christie adaptations: Death on the Nile, in which she exchanges bitchy banter with Bette Davis as the nurse and traveling companion to the latter’s wealthy American socialite; and Evil Under the Sun, as a former actress now running a hotel on an Adriatic island, firing verbal darts at a onetime fellow stage performer portrayed by Diana Rigg.
The first of two films Smith made with scripts by zinger specialist Neil Simon was Murder by Death, a whodunit spoof that assembled thinly veiled parodies of famed fictional sleuths for a weekend of homicide in a remote mansion.
Smith paired with David Niven to play classy sophisticates Dick and Dora Charleston, based on Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man series. When Dickie whispers to his wife about the uses to which a missing naked corpse might be put, Dora’s words of disapproval don’t even try to mask her titillation: “Oh, that’s tacky. That’s really tacky.” The balance of decorum and mischief was classic Smith.
Her second Simon vehicle was the comedy anthology California Suite. She was Diana Barrie, a seasoned British actress up for her first Oscar and looking to her increasingly indiscreet gay husband, played by Michael Caine, to calm her nerves and soothe her disappointment when she inevitably loses.
“It’s bizarre,” Diana says during the flight from London. “Eight years with the National Theatre, two Pinters, nine Shakespeares, three Shaws and I finally get nominated for a nauseating little comedy.” The character might have had zero chance of winning, but the performance earned Smith her second Oscar, this time as best supporting actress.
Among Smith’s ’80s output, Clash of the Titans, in which she played the sea goddess Thetis, remains an inadvertently campy guilty pleasure. But she gained new admirers as Charlotte Bartlett, the prim and protective chaperone to Helena Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View, James Ivory’s adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel. That art house smash kick-started a wave of films about buttoned-up Brits shedding their stiffness in Tuscany.
My favorite from that period is Malcolm Mowbray’s hilarious dark comedy A Private Function. Smith starred as Joyce Chilvers, a small-town social climber in postwar Northern England whose hunger to be accepted by the elite locals isn’t helped by her dotty mother nor her underachieving podiatrist husband Gilbert, played by Michael Palin. When Joyce’s scheming — which includes the theft of a pig to be served at a dinner in honor of the royal wedding — finally pays off, she briskly announces, “Well, Gilbert, I think sexual intercourse is in order.”
That feature marked Smith’s first collaboration with playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett, who would go on to write parts for her in Talking Heads, his brilliant 1988 series of television monologues, as a vicar’s alcoholic wife; and The Lady in the Van, his 1999 play based on his experiences with an elderly woman who lived in a dilapidated vehicle parked in his driveway for 15 years. It was later adapted as a film, with Smith once again bringing her innate grandeur to the irritable, unsanitary character without obscuring her vulnerability.
Living in London through much of the 1980s and early ’90s, I was fortunate enough to see Smith onstage a handful of times. First was as Millament, a woman on a tortuous path to the altar in William Congreve’s Restoration comedy, The Way of the World.
Next was Peter Shaffer’s very English comedy Lettice and Lovage. Smith starred as a tour guide of British stately homes, given to wild nonfactual embellishments, opposite Margaret Tyzack as a Preservation Trust employee who ultimately becomes her comrade in the crusade against ugly modern architecture. The production transferred to Broadway, winning Smith a Tony Award for best actress.
My third time was in Oscar Wilde’s satire of Victorian society, The Importance of Being Earnest. As the redoubtable Lady Bracknell, Smith departed from the usual stinging outrage to deliver the classic line, “A handbag?” in an aghast whisper.
Highlights of Smith’s career in the ‘90s include Sister Act, as the disapproving Mother Superior who becomes an unlikely ally to Whoopi Goldberg’s Reno lounge singer while she is being sheltered in a convent from her mobster boyfriend.
Smith was perfection in a small role in The First Wives Club as the fabulously named and fabulously wealthy New York multi-divorcée Gunilla Garson Goldberg, who sabotages the upward social trajectory of Sarah Jessica Parker’s arriviste Shelly. Smith’s ability to make the most of a throwaway line with mere intonation is in ample evidence when she greets Goldie Hawn’s Elise, an aging Hollywood actress fresh from a surgical touch-up, at a mutual friend’s funeral: “Such a tragedy … And your lips!”
Demonstrating that she could bring warmth just as effortlessly as bite, Smith was lovely in Agnieszka Holland’s gorgeous screen version of The Secret Garden. And along with her celebrated co-stars Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Cher, she brought sparkle to Franco Zeffirelli’s old-fashioned drama about expats in prewar Tuscany, Tea With Mussolini.
The standout of Smith’s screen work in the 2000s, alongside the Harry Potter films, was Robert Altman’s masterful upstairs-downstairs English country house murder mystery, Gosford Park. Playing Constance, another dowager countess, she memorably reassures a visiting American film director worried about spoiling the plot of his latest movie, “Oh, but none of us will see it.”
That film planted the seed for screenwriter Julian Fellowes to develop Downton Abbey, with a plum role for Smith that she claimed made her a conspicuously recognizable public figure after years of passing unobserved. It also won her three Emmys.
Smith scored another major hit in 2011 with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which teamed her with Dench, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Dev Patel and spawned an inferior though still financially successful sequel. I happened to call my parents as they were planning a trip to the movies to catch the first installment, and when I asked my forgetful dad what they were seeing, he said, “I can’t remember what it’s called but it’s got Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, so it doesn’t matter.” Their names were all the stamp of approval that many folks required.
While you can’t really go wrong with almost any of the films mentioned here to appreciate Smith in all her glory, I strongly recommend Roger Michell’s Tea With the Dames.
In that captivating, lovingly made 2018 doc, Smith joins Dench and Eileen Atkins on one of their annual visits to Plowright at her cottage near Brighton. The four old friends share memories and anecdotes about their lives, careers and former husbands — including Plowright’s late spouse Olivier, a conspicuous ghost who mentored all of them during his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre. Listening to these titans of their craft dish over champagne and, naturally, tea, is irresistible. How sad that Smith’s departure shrinks the venerable quartet to a trio.
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