By the time Dame Maggie Smith left the stage yesterday, at the age of 89, a lot of people might have thought she’d been born with that honorific title.
She played the 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’m always in corsets,” Maggie Smith joked, or perhaps was not joking at all, to British critic Barry Norman on the BBC in 1993. “And I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots.”
But Dame Maggie was also Professor Minerva McGonagall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter films; and the Mother Superior in "Sister Act," starring Whoopi Goldberg as a nightclub singer on the run who hides in a convent; and she won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a free-thinking teacher in a proper British girls school in the 1969 film, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:"
"I influence them to be aware of all the possibilities of life. Of beauty, honor, courage. I do not, Miss McKay, influence them to look for slime where it does not exist. I am going. When my class convenes, they will find me composed, and prepared to review for them a succession of the Stuarts.”
In the 2015 film, "The Lady in the Van," Dame Maggie Smith played a Miss Mary Shepard, a woman who would be called homeless, except she took shelter in the back of a van parked in the driveway of the playwright Alan Bennett for 15 years. She is friendly, but resolutely ungrateful to him:
“You’re not doing me a favor, you know, I have got other fish to fry. A man on the pavement told me if I went south of the river I’d be welcomed with open arms.”
Dame Maggie had upper-crust diction, and working class tenacity in a career that spanned seven decades, in which she almost never stopped working. Those of us who work this shift may especially cherish a line she uttered as the Dowager Countess: “What is a weekend?”
In the theater, it can be when you turn on the stage lights and make people marvel. As Maggie Smith so often did.
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