The day I feared has arrived: Dame Maggie Smith has died.
She was 89, of course, and spent much of her final years as an actress playing women facing the inevitable: Her iconic Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of “Downton Abbey,” confesses that she is ill in the first following film and dies. in the second. Reformed racist Muriel Donnelly of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” bids a fond farewell to those she has helped in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” In “The Lady in the Van,” the tragedy of Smith's smelly squatter, Mary Shepherd, is revealed only after her surprisingly poignant death. And although the disabled Lily Fox survives “The Miracle Club,” which would be Smith's last film, she does so with a belated reconciliation motivated by a visit to Lourdes.
So Maggie Smith said goodbye to all of us. His career spanned seven decades; two centuries; theater, film and television and virtually every genre, from Shakespeare to “Harry Potter,” and his brilliance never diminished. No matter the overall state of the project he found himself in, Smith never failed to illuminate, amaze, and entertain.
After watching “The Miracle Club,” I looked at her age (my profession cultivates the sad habit of keeping track of prewritten obituaries) and I could practically hear her say in that wry, sincere growl, “It won't be long now.”
Still, it's a seismic event, a bitter shock: if anyone was going to live forever, it would have been Maggie Smith.
Who else would have the temerity to unapologetically admit that, although she “owned the box,” she had never seen “Downton Abbey”? Who else, in the documentary “Tea With the Dames,” would accuse British national treasure (and good friend) Judi Dench of stealing all the good parts of women her age? (“Don't turn on me,” Dench says, laughing. “I'm turning on you,” Smith responds with a sidelong glance. “It's all coming out now.”) Who else could display the same air of offended recklessness? to a homeless woman living in an indescribably filthy van, as he had done to a parade of aristocrats and socialites, divas and flitting single women.
It was all too easy to imagine Smith facing the specter of death with a raised eyebrow and, after pausing for a moment of indignant silence, announcing that the moment was too inconvenient.
The loss of our idols, no matter their age, is always a form of heartbreak: the world was certainly a richer, livelier place with Maggie Smith in it, and now it isn't. In many ways, it helped redefine what it meant to grow older, especially for women. The face and body may change, but the spirit does not have to falter, the desire and ability to do what you love never has to diminish.
I didn't get a chance to see her on stage, but on the big and small screens she was unwavering and elastic: the radiant if misguided passions of “The Flower of Miss Jean Brodie,” the desperate wit of the aching-heart star. in “California Suite,” the dithering, half-hearted tyranny of the partner in “A Room With a View,” the spongy snobbery of the impoverished relative in “Gosford Park”… Honestly, one could go on and on (and on). In later life, she often complained about her frequent appearance in period pieces, but her roles defied any kind of category beyond the fact that once she played them, they belonged entirely to her, the genre of Maggie Smith.
It has become absurdly common for people who should know better to say that it was the “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey” franchises that brought Smith, already winner of two Oscars, a Tony, an Emmy and seven BAFTAs, international fame. , when, at least in the case of “Downton”, it was the other way around.
It's hard to imagine that “Downton,” even with its exquisite period-piece world-building, strong cast and deft writing, would have achieved surprising hit status without Smith at the center. As the tart-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, she was “Downton's” superpower: able to freeze a room with a look, break your heart with a shake of her shoulder and sum up the show's entire theme in just four words. “What is a week?end?” She was funny, formidable, and held the audience, like she held the family, in the palm of her hand. Other main characters might come and go, but without a regular dose of Smith's Violet, there would be no “Downton.”
Smith, who often claimed he had never seen the series and found the rigors of filming, not to mention the weight of all those hats, exhausting, by the end of his career had earned a reputation for being, if not difficult, yes certainly intimidating, on set.
In “Tea With the Dames,” some of that is evident, as she dismisses a photographer from the set or complains about uncomfortable seats or describes her often contentious relationship with Laurence Olivier during their days at the National Theatre. During one production, Olivier told him that he was delivering his lines so slowly that it “bored him offstage.” Then, during the next show, he said, he spoke so fast that “I didn't know if it was Wednesday or Christmas. … I made him really nervous.” He terrified her, she said, but “I think I scared the hell out of him from time to time.”
But there's also a moment where she and Dench are asked if the first few days on set are still scary. “Every day is scary,” Smith says immediately. “I don't know why people assume it's any other way. The filming is very scary because there are many people involved. Everyone waits with bated breath, and if you make a mistake, there are many who look at each other in silence and roll their eyes and there,” he sighs dramatically, “'are we really going again?'”
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone rolling their eyes or sighing if Maggie Smith got something wrong, almost as hard as imagining such an event actually happening. That's how good an actress she was. Whatever he does, he hits the perfect note with such confidence that even thinking it could be the result of multiple takes seems outrageous.
So one can only assume that if death came to Maggie Smith, it was only because she allowed it.
“Dead?” her homeless Mary Shepherd protests to Alex Jennings' worried Alan Bennett in “The Lady in the Van.” “You'll know when he's dead.”
Now, as nations mourn and tributes pile up, as her work is praised, characterized and categorized, as we face the fact that we will never get the chance to see what she would have done next, we really do.
