Maggie Smith has died and it’s a gratifying thing that the millennials know who she was because this legendary actress was known to them because she was Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. She was also the greatest high comedienne of her generation, the successor to Dame Edith Evans who eventually played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and then said with characteristic self-deprecation when asked if she wanted to take the production to Broadway, ‘I wouldn’t take it to Woking.’ None of which stopped the world from saying they got the wrong dame in the film remake with Judi Dench.
You can see the two of them acting together like goddesses in Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender. But something in Maggie Smith was naturally generous. Cher holds her own with her in that beautiful Zeffirelli film Tea with Mussolini but she once reduced Olivier to a hapless state of missing his cues and fluffing his lines because he accused her of being too slow: he never acted with her again. Earlier in her brilliant career he asked her how she had perfected the highly distinctive laugh she used in the Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. She said she explained it to him and then discovered she couldn't do it again and felt this was Sir Laurence’s intention.
But she had an extraordinary career by any standard. She won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playing at the age of 34, in 1969, a charismatic Scottish schoolmistress, with a fatal impact. She said decades later in her throwaway fashion that Professor McGonagall was just Miss Jean Brodie in a witch’s hat. She went on to win another Oscar, a supporting one, for the film of Neil Simon’s California Suite with Michael Caine.
But she was extraordinary even among great actors. Listen to her as Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder or watch her on YouTube read Betjeman’s Death In Leamington with Kenneth Williams in the presence of the poet on Parkinson. She was an extraordinary professional who was brusque and uninterested in the mystique of her technique. When Olivier, as Othello, questioned her diction as Desdemona she waited until he had elaborately put himself in blackface and then came up behind him and said in her most dulcet tones, ‘How now brown cow.’
It’s very satisfying that she made one film, Gosford Park, with a great director Robert Altman, though there are those who say that her flat Dublin voiced characterisation in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne from the novel by Brian Moore is the finest thing she ever did on screen.
Ingmar Bergman directed her in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and she was described as lethally cold looking at her pregnant self with terrifying detachment. On the other hand her Miss Julie – in that overpowering Strindberg play – was a victim rather than a predominantly demon-like perpetrator of mischief. Then again, when she did Noel Coward’s Private Lives with her actor husband Robert Stephens (who lusted for a fame to which she was indifferent) all those marital wisecracks did come across like the poisoned intimacies of Strindberg.
None of which stops the millions of viewers who thrilled to her performance as the Dowager Duchess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. Of course it was Maggie Smith stooping to conquer but her presence in Downton transfigured this soap into one of the finest things of its kind ever made and the rest of the cast (including Penelope Wilton as the middle class mother) rose to meet her.
'If you care about theatre and film and television you should be grateful to have lived at the same time as Maggie Smith. She was an artist of incomparable power and nuance, of tremendous wit and complementary poignancy. The Harry Potter kids are lucky to have experienced such style and know-how and grace.'
Nothing is more typical of Maggie Smith than the way she decided to pack her bags and head for Stratford, Ontario where she essayed some of the greatest roles in the dramatic canon including Millamant in The Way of the World, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind in As You Like It and Cleopatra herself. Again, she made no great claims for the result even though theatregoers round the world would have killed to see the upshot. Of her serpent queen of old Nile she only said, ‘I’m glad I had a go.’
But the acting profession was in awe. Billy Wilder took Jack Lemmon to see her perform and Lemmon said, ‘Boy that girl’s got timing.’ It was as if she listened over and over to crack the code of what made a mouthful of air into a sublimely funny thing.
But she had great hallucinatory skills as well. You could watch her doing an Alan Bennett monologue Bed Among the Lentils where she plays the alcoholic wife of a vicar from the back stalls where you wished you were not sitting and find yourself seeing a performance with a degree of detail that was all to do with Maggie Smith’s powers of suggestion.
They could even work like this in reverse. The Lady from Dubuque is not meant to be seen from the third row of the front stalls of the Haymarket by someone in a state of jetlag induced attention collapse but Albee’s play – one of his minor plays – still had a mesmeric quality with Dame Maggie at the helm.
She admired fellow high comedians such as Rex Harrison and said in a speech once that he could have towered in the great Shakespearean roles if he had attempted. He was magnetising in the only one he ever recorded, Much Ado About Nothing, and she did it in 1967 in a wicked production by Zeffirelli with moving statues, Derek Jacobi as a Italian-accented Don Pedro and Frank Finlay as a very Italian idiotic Dogberry. Maggie Smith played Beatrice with that lightning timing which somehow made the transition to gravity when she says ‘Kill Claudio’ spine-tingling.
But she could do everything. It was as if the technique of comedy unlocked the tears in things for Maggie Smith.
She could be dry and deadly. She did a production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer which included Richard E. Grant in the cast and as a consequence cast him in Earnest not realising he did not, she thought, have the technique for high comedy: she referred to him as Richard E. Cant. She had a terrifying coolness towards the pomp and circumstance of titled actors. Why would you ever use it, she asked, unless you were someone like Sir King Bensley?
But the dryness was not separate from the fear that sometimes hit her when she was feeling her way in a part. Simon Callow wrote on Sunday September 29th in The London Times of the difficulty she had when he directed her in Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine and then the eventual triumph. He also talked about the last thing she had done on stage. It was in 2019 and a one-hander by Christopher Hampton, A German Life, in which a woman reminisces about her life, including a stint as Joseph Goebbels’ secretary.
But Maggie Smith could do everything from popular comedies such as Lettice and Lovage – which she did with Margaret Tyzack – to Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. It was Richard Burton forever associated with Albee because of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf who talked about what it was like acting with Maggie Smith in The V.I.P.s with a script by Terence Rattigan. He said she didn’t so much steal the scene as commit ‘grand larceny’ with it.
If you care about theatre and film and television you should be grateful to have lived at the same time as Maggie Smith. She was an artist of incomparable power and nuance, of tremendous wit and complementary poignancy. The Harry Potter kids are lucky to have experienced such style and know-how and grace.
If you want to read an account of her life and her career, Michael Coveney’s 2015 Maggie Smith: A Biography is much more critically alert than most comparable lives of an actor. Given the interest in Maggie Smith across the generations it deserves a new revised edition.
Peter Craven is a literary and culture critic.
Main image: Dame Maggie Smith attends the Premiere of 'Quartet' during the 56th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square on October 15, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images)