In the movie Hook, Steven Spielberg’s 1991 Peter Pan sequel starring Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, Williams’ Peter visits the London home of his wife’s family, where he reconnects with her grandmother, a very grown up Wendy Darling played by Dame Maggie Smith. She first appears as a ghostly silhouette at the top of a staircase before descending and creeping into the light. Smith was only in her 50s when she shot the movie but had been aged up to look impossibly frail and elderly — her hair a bushy nest, her face etched with wrinkles. And yet, as soon becomes clear, Smith’s character isn’t to be feared. She was the film’s unspoken heart: a comforting, if slightly chilly, presence who seemed to live outside time itself.
For many Millennials, it was a fitting introduction to Smith, whose death at 89 was announced Friday by her family. For decades, Smith existed in our collective imagination as an intimidating grandmother-type who never seemed to suffer fools kindly, yet whose prickly demeanor often belied a sense of warmth and fun. With piercing, wide eyes and a no-nonsense manner, her characters frequently delivered cutting remarks in the most elegant of ways, whether they be against beleaguered maids in a British manor or subservient nuns in a San Franciscan order. Her delivery of a barb often wasn’t just dry — it was a desert of goodwill that left other characters shell-shocked and audiences in stitches.
Consider just one scene in Robert Altman’s crime-fiction masterpiece Gosford Park (2001) in which Smith and a suite of veteran British actors playing the upper crust of 1930s English society dine in a country estate. As an American film director guest played by Bob Balaban gives them a preview of a who-dunnit movie he’s planning, Smith’s sneering dowager countess asks which character will ultimately be revealed as the killer. “I couldn’t tell you that. It would spoil it for you,” Balaban’s director says.
“Oh, but none of us will see it,” Smith says so plainly you’d think she was stating scientific fact.
In the latter decades of her career, Smith made a living playing these steely and wry older women in the Harry Potter films and Downton Abbey — two titles that have understandably dominated most of the headlines leading her obituaries but which provided only a glimpse of her true talents. Indeed, Smith often complained with trademark snark that her work as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Potter franchise required her to coast on cruise control or simply film hundreds of reaction shots to the lines of child co-stars who had long since left the set and gone home for the day. Yet, when she appeared— battling breast cancer in real life and wearing a wig after losing her hair in chemotherapy — in the final movie to cast a spell to protect Hogwarts from an invading dark army, you could feel a palpable sense of relief among audiences that Smith, not just her character, was around to keep watch over things.
These roles brought Smith new levels of fame in the later stage of her life, leaving her to routinely bemoan she could no longer shop at a supermarket without being stopped by new fans, particularly children or — worse — American tourists. “I don’t go anywhere they can get at me,” she once said. “It’s usually in museums and art galleries, so that limits things. I’ll keep away from there. And Harrods, I don’t go near.”
Perhaps because she had by being so active as these “Wilde-Wodehousian aunt” characters in her senior years — in The Lady in The Van (2015), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and its 2015 sequel, Becoming Jane (2007), Ladies in Lavender (2004), Tea with Mussolini (1999), The First Wives Club (1996), The Secret Garden (1993), Sister Act (1992), and A Room With a View (1985), to name but a few — it would always feel slightly jarring to see images or clips of Smith early in her career when she could appear as sultry or an innocent ingénue. It was this latter work, as Desdemona in Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1965 Othello, that earned Smith her first Oscar nomination. She would win the trophy twice during her career, first for her commanding work as a fiery and fascist-sympthaizing teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and then again for California Suite (1978) as a boozy actor who arrives in Hollywood for the Academy Awards but must contend with a sham marriage to her queer husband, played by Sir Michael Caine. “Maggie didn’t just steal the film; she committed grand larceny,” Caine would later complain..
But one of the greatest joys in being a Smith fan was watching her as herself in chat show appearances, interviews, or a 2018 documentary in which she swapped stories with fellow dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, and Joan Plowright. There was something both hilarious and magical in getting to see Smith sit on Graham Norton’s couch and confess plainly that she had never watched Downton Abbey. These appearances, full of her acerbic humor, gave us a glimpse of the real Smith, as well the special feeling that there was an element of herself in every performance.
Those of us who were never able to see any of her work on stage will always feel somewhat cheated. The theater was not only where Smith honed her craft and developed enduring creative partnerships with figures like Olivier, Peter Shaffer, and Alan Bennett, but it was also where she felt most comfortable. Plagued by insecurities, she was reluctant to ever watch herself on film because she felt haunted by acting choices she had made and could never undo. The stage, in contrast, would be a space where she could turn in a whole new performance every night. “I like the ephemeral thing about theater,” she said. “Every performance is like a ghost — it’s there and then it’s gone.”
Thankfully for us, although Smith now herself may be gone, her work and her wit remains.