Dame Maggie Smith: Stuck playing too many “orrible old women”
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When Dame Maggie Smith heard about the possibility of a Downton Abbey film, she thought it should start with a funeral – her own.In Dame Maggie’s mind, Downton could put Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham to rest, echoing Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, where Lord Marchmain comes back to the family home only to die.
“I thought it would be a bit like that,” she explained during an appearance at the Radio Times Television Festival. “I could croak it. It would just start with the body. But I don’t know. They talk about there being a film, but who knows? Who knows.”
It was a moment where fans were reminded why they love the actress who is famous for her witty, sharp-tongued portrayal of an English aristocrat in changing times. Downton Abbey was a critically-acclaimed fan favourite but Dame Maggie is more than ready to say goodbye to it.
On the subject of the movie, she told fans: “I just think it’s squeezing it dry, do you know what I mean? I don’t know what it could possibly be. It was so meandering, what would you – ?Anyway that’s not my problem. That’s the Lord’s [Julian Fellowes’] problem.”
Dame Maggie has previously confessed that Downton had changed her life – and not always for the better.“It’s ridiculous. I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” she said. “I’m not kidding. I would go to theatres, I would go to galleries and things like that on my own. And now I can’t. And that’s awful. [Even] the Fulham Road’s dodgy…And it’s all through television. I had been working for a very long time before Downton Abbey and life was fine, nobody knew who the hell I was.”
Born Margaret Natalie Smith, Dame Maggie moved to Oxford aged four with her father, a pathologist, and her mother, a secretary who thought young Maggie would never work on stage “with a face like that”. Actually, Smith says, she benefited from not being a “juve”, or ingénue, and has worked constantly, though latterly she’s been stuck playing “’orrible old women”.
She’s appeared in more than 50 films and is best known to American audiences for her roles in the “Harry Potter” films and of course her performance in Downton. She won an Oscar for best supporting actress for “California Suite” and the best actress award for “The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie” – in total she has been nominated for an Oscar six times. She was given a Bafta fellowship in 1996 and won considerable acclaim for her screen reprise of her Olivier-award winning turn in The Lady in the Van.
When asked by journalists if there was a film she looks back on fondly, Dame Maggie does not talk about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, or A Room with a View, or the exuberant Sister Act, but The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, because she admired the director, Jack Clayton, so much.
She didn’t particularly relish the extra attention that Potter and Downton brought her: kids asking her to turn them into cats, Americans asking for selfies. But when it comes to the young co-stars in Harry Potter, she is full of warmth.
It might surprise some who know of her formidable on-set reputation. She says it’s down to her own nerves. “The awful thing is, I’m very aware when I’m being difficult, but I’m usually so scared. And that’s shaming, at the age one is.” She says each time she hopes to be more like the calmer, more contained Judi Dench, but it never works. For better or for worse, it now has become a part of who she is.
“It’s gone too far now to take back,” she said. “If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work – it would frighten people more if I were nice. They’d be paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to.”