British actress Maggie Smith at the Evening Standard Theater Awards, London, 25 January 1962.
Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
By the time Dame Maggie Smith left the stage yesterday, at the age of 89, many people might have thought she was born with that honorific title.
She played leading roles in Shaw, Ibsen, Stoppard and Shakespeare on stage and screen, including Desdemona to Sir Laurence Oliver’s Othello, and of course in recent years, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess in ” Downton Abbey”.
“I always wear a corset,” Maggie Smith joked, or perhaps not at all, to British critic Barry Norman on the BBC in 1993. “And I always wear a wig, and I always wear boots with button it.”
But Dame Maggie is also Professor Minerva McGonagall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter films; and Mother Superior in Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg as a nightclub singer on the run in a convent; and she won an Academy Award for her role as a liberal teacher at an all-girls school in England in the 1969 film, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:”
“I influence them to perceive all the possibilities of life. Of beauty, honor, courage. Miss McKay, I do not influence them to look for slime where it does not exist. I will go. When my class convenes, they will find me calm and prepared to consider for them the succession of the Stuarts.”
In the 2015 film, “The Lady in the Van,” Dame Maggie Smith plays Miss Mary Shepard, a woman considered homeless, except that she takes shelter in the back of a van parked on the street. playwright Alan Bennett’s driving for 15 years. She was friendly but determined to be ungrateful to him:
“You can’t help me, you know, I have other fish to fry. A man on the sidewalk told me that if I went south of the river, I would be welcomed with open arms.”
Dame Maggie possessed upper-class leadership and working-class perseverance in a career spanning seven decades, in which she almost never stopped working. Those of us who work this shift may especially love a line she uttered as the Dowager Countess: “What is a weekend?”
In theater, it might be when you turn on the stage lights and wow everyone. As Maggie Smith often does.
