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Has Maggie Smith Been Playing Herself All This Time?

From Jean Brodie to Downton’s dowager, her history repeats.

Jeremy Helligar
7 min readNov 1, 2019
Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey (Photo: BBC)

“… 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.

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Jeremy Helligar
Jeremy Helligar

Written by Jeremy Helligar

Brother Son Husband Friend Loner Minimalist World Traveler. Author of “Is It True What They Say About Black Men?” and “Storms in Africa” https://rb.gy/3mthoj

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