By Peter Bradshaw
Maggie Smith thought she was famous after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in 1969; she gave a glorious, Oscar-winning performance in her mid-30s in the movie based on the Muriel Spark novel, and no actor ever intuited Spark’s world more brilliantly. Smith became the Edinburgh schoolmistress (and, oh dear, the term “schoolteacher” won’t do at all). Her Miss Jean Brodie is imperious, haughty, vulnerable, sexually attractive, prone to admiring fascism and terribly lonely. Her delicate, open face registered a kind of wounded and delusional idealism and poignantly absurd conceit, a complicated, funny portrayal that went above and beyond a hackneyed comedy of “spinsterism”.
Nearly 20 years later, in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne from 1987, she played a rather Brodie-esque woman being courted by the unreliable Bob Hoskins; it was a more serious performance, and in 1993, she received a special Bafta for her remarkable screen career.
But it was only in the 21st century, and in the next stage of her life, that Maggie Smith realised that there was a whole new level of screen-celebrity to which she had ascended. For director Robert Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes she became the toweringly difficult Countess of Trentham in his prewar country-house drama Gosford Park in 2001, a role that morphed (without much change) into the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Fellowes’s global TV smash Downton Abbey.
Added to that, in the same year, Smith became the kindly teacher Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Professor McGonagall in fact lasered Smith into the minds of children; crotchety, haughty Lady Grantham impressed her (again) on to their parents’ and grandparents’ attention and Smith was now recognised all over the world. She could once go shopping in peace and quiet at her local Waitrose, but then would recount her dismay at being pestered for selfies in New York. Perhaps only the queen herself had a higher icon rating, especially in the United States.
