An Appreciation of Maggie Smith

The death of actor Maggie Smith at age eighty-nine has led to an outpouring of appreciation for her great career. Though hers was primarily a theatrical life centered in London, she also made a notable impact on American film and television, especially late in life, playing formidable old women with sharp eyes and acid tongues in the TV series Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter film franchise.

Those performances brought her belated international fame and considerable fortune. “Harry Potter is my pension,” she once observed.

She’d had early success as a stage actor, moving smoothly from her childhood education at the Oxford School for Girls to performing at the Oxford Playhouse and then getting hired for professional roles. By the early 1960s, she was starring in the National Theatre as Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s Othello and swiftly became a leading light of the British stage. Her own summation of her life was typically pithy: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

But though she made a number of films, including California Suite, Travels with My Aunt, Murder by Death, Sister Act, A Room with a View, Gosford Park, and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, to take the measure of Maggie Smith’s brilliance, you don’t have to look any further that her incisive Academy Award–winning performance as the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), directed by Ronald Neame. That’s the one to see if you’d like to watch something dazzling in Smith’s honor. Among other wonderful things, this complex performance represents a damning portrait of naive “progressive” politics that’s the most unsung aspect of a highly praised film.

With a script by Jay Presson Allen (Marnie, Cabaret, The Verdict), which was based in the 1961 novel by Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about a charismatic schoolteacher at a traditional all-girls school called Marcia…