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Has Maggie Smith Been Playing Herself All This Time?
From Jean Brodie to Downton’s dowager, her history repeats.
“… But she’s a very, you know, complicated and quite, in some ways, quite a defensive person. She protects herself a lot, and she needs to, because what’s going on inside her, her talent, is such an absolutely remarkable thing that it could be very easily coarsened or cheapened or diluted in some way.
“And as her devotion to the talent that she’s been born with, and indeed, of course, worked on subsequently, but her guardianship of that talent is a fantastic thing. That’s something I’ve rarely met in actors either. She is protecting herself all the time, and nothing that comes between her and her work can be tolerated.”
That’s esteemed English actor and stage director Simon Callow pontificating on being in the presence of Dame Maggie Smith, the acting deity and the subject of a biographical documentary I just finished watching on YouTube. (She and Callow costarred in the 1985 Merchant Ivory film A Room with a View.)
As I listened to him and others talk about Smith, I sensed a recurring theme: She’s fiercely intelligent, and she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
Were they talking about the great Dame or most of the characters she’s played onstage and onscreen?
I haven’t had the honor of watching Smith in her current definitive role as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, on Downton Abbey (I know, I know — sacrilege!), a part she recently relocated from TV to the big-screen after collecting three Emmys for it. But even without ever having seen a single episode, in my head, I already know what to expect.
After all, I’ve been watching her pull off lovably testy women for the last three decades, in The First Wives Club, in Washington Square, in Tea with Mussolini, in Gosford Park, in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in pretty much everything I’ve seen her in since she entered her senior years.
I have been watching Smith pull off lovably testy women for the last three decades, in The First Wives Club, in Washington Square, in Tea with Mussolini…
