We went through the success of the film together, when we were both nominated, partying in Hollywood and the like, and I will never forget her real delight, clapping furiously, as I walked down the aisle to collect my prize. When I think of it now, it makes me cry.
So naturally, when, some years later, Gareth Neame, the producer, approached me with the idea of going back into Gosford territory for television, somehow Maggie was already at the top of my list, even before the scripts were written. But this time the tone was different. I knew Maggie even better by then. I’d directed her in a family film, From Time to Time, and I remember she suffered from Shingles while we were making it, but when I said the word “Action”, that was forgotten until the shot was complete.
But Gosford Park had been quite a dark film, an angry one in fact, and I knew that people would not want to come back every Sunday for a telling-off. It was necessary for the new series, soon christened Downton Abbey, to be a kinder, warmer place, and I wondered at first if Maggie would be up for that different approach. But I needn’t have worried.
She brought the same mixture of wit and wisdom I had come to expect, in a subtler performance than many realised. The much-quoted moment, “What is a weekend?”, was a surprise even to me, as I think I had expected a sort of Lady Bracknell moment of astonished revulsion, when what we got was a bewildered throw-away, much less obvious, much funnier, than I had given her credit for.
Over the years, in Violet Grantham, she created a benevolent tyrant with a universality that I couldn’t have imagined.