Among So Many Other Good Things, Maggie Smith Looked Her Age
Of the many good professional decisions that Dame Maggie Smith made in her life, one of the best was skipping plastic surgery.
Smith, whose death on Friday at the age of 89 diminished the performing world, became a popular and acclaimed actress in her 20s. She debuted on Broadway at 21 and won her first major British best-actress award at 27, in 1962. When Sir Laurence Olivier formed a new company for the British National Theater that year, he recruited her to join.
She won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in in 1969, when she was 34, and got her first Tony nomination in 1975, for Private Lives. A few short clips of her Private Lives performance have circulated over the years, and just that glimpse makes those of us who missed it feel like we have a hole in our own lives.
What we did get to watch was Smith’s characters growing up and eventually, yes, growing old along with her.
Exhibit A for most fans would be Downton Abbey, in which she played Dowager Countess Violet Crawley. The octogenarian matriarch of an aristocratic family, Violet lived in a state of perpetual exasperation at people unappreciative of the simpler and superior world that came before.
Her dry observations, delivered deadpan with total self-awareness, quickly became a signature of the show. Random sample: “Principles are like prayers. Noble, of course, but awkward at a party.”
Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes, who had worked with Smith before, quickly saw the harmony among Smith, Violet and those lines. He spent six seasons and two movies finding spots in which to sprinkle them, like periodic sips of a good wine.
Smith herself downplayed Violet, as she downplayed all her roles, saying she never watched herself on screen. She often answered questions about Violet by grumbling that Downton Abbey’s popularity made it difficult for her to live a normal life. Fun fact 1: She was particularly un-fond of strangers asking for selfies.
We fans appreciated her sacrifice. We also appreciated the seeming ease with which she made herself and Violet indistinguishable. Fun fact 2: Smith’s first stage role, six decades earlier, was playing Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
All of Smith’s older characters weren’t Violet, which doubtless pleased Smith. The title character of The Lady in the Van had far different challenges. Breath of Life, a play she did in London with her friend Judi Dench, was more wistful. Her museum docent in Lettice and Lovage, for which she finally won her Tony, ended up liberated and exuberant. Her Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films was a brilliant, resolute career woman who focused much of her life on navigating and helping others navigate the complex world of wizardry.
In one of her final performances, the 2023 movie The Miracle Club, she played a woman who near the end of her life confesses a dark truth that had haunted and shaped her for 40 years.
She looked old and worn in The Miracle Club. She played old and worn. She was a character in a character drama, the kind of movie that doesn’t get made much any more and should.
What probably aided her in becoming so many characters on screen was avoiding, at least until Downton Abbey, many of the public consequences of celebrity.
But what really helped was her clear belief that an actress did not have to stay young to stay employed.
That can be a radical stance, because the entertainment business often sends the cold signal that the first wrinkles mean you’ve forfeited the young featured parts and now you’re standing in line when some producer needs a mother or an aunt.
Many actresses, not illogically, try to buy more youth time with a trip to the cosmetic surgeon. Which sometimes works for a while and sometimes just goes sideways.
Maggie Smith was in the group that looked at the wrinkles and said “Bring it on.” She was clearly confident that there would be roles for women of 50, 60 or 70 who looked 50, 60 or 70. Like most women.
She was right. For one thing, had she tucked and tightened, she would never have become Violet Crawley.
In a 2016 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Smith was reminded by Renee Montagne that a reviewer back in the ’60s had called her “a dish.” Montagne then asked why Smith had never embraced that image.
Smith deflected the term while acknowledging the accuracy of the premise.
“That never was me,” she said. “The ‘dish’ department didn’t apply. … I think it’s got something to do with one not being a ‘dish’ … because then you become a character actor and you have much more chance of developing and going on.
“I mean, God knows it must be lovely to be beautiful, but that’s a really difficult thing to lose. If you’ve been into character acting really all your life, it’s an easy transition. You just go from one to the other and you suddenly realize, ‘Oh, I see I’m somebody’s mother this time. And I’m somebody’s grandmother.’ And so it goes on.”
And so it did.
