Maggie Smith, star of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Harry Potter and Downton Abbey
A generation grew up with Maggie Smith as the strict deputy head at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft, Professor Minerva McGonagall, in the Harry Potter movies of the early 2000s. And that generation moved on with her to the recurring role of the redoubtable Dowager Countess of Grantham in the hugely popular Downton Abbey period drama series.
But my own memories of Smith go back to the 1960s and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which shot in Edinburgh and which won Smith the first of her two Oscars. She played another teacher, the self-confident, supposedly liberated Miss Brodie, determined to share her passion for Italy, Giotto and Mussolini with her chosen few.
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Hide AdMy father took me to watch the filming at Henderson Row in Stockbridge. I was about ten at the time and fascinated by seeing a film actually being shot. When the film came out, it was hugely annoying to discover it had an X-certificate because there was a scene with nudity in it and I would have to wait years to see it.
The film shot in numerous locations around Edinburgh, including Greyfriars Kirkyard, which was overlooked by the Elephant House cafe, where years later JK Rowling sat in the window writing the Harry Potter books.
When the author needed a break or inspiration, she would wander around the cemetery among the gravestones. She borrowed the name McGonagall from the famously bad poet William McGonagall, who is buried near a side gate of George Heriot’s School, which influenced the portrayal of Hogwarts over the series of Harry Potter books.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted from another celebrated novel, written by Muriel Spark, about a teacher who sees herself as a beacon of culture and sophistication in a stuffy Edinburgh private school, but is as much of a snob as anyone else there. Her promotion of fascism to her chosen favourites, “the crème de la crème”, ultimately leads to tragedy and to Jean’s own downfall.
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Hide AdIn between Jean Brodie and Harry Potter were a string of other notable films, many of them classics, including Death on the Nile, A Room with A View, Gosford Park, Sister Act – in which she and Whoopi Goldberg were nuns – and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
She could play tragedy and comedy and won her second Oscar for her performance in the comedy California Suite in 1979. Uniquely, she won an Oscar for playing a woman who is nominated for an Oscar. Smith won, her character lost.
As Smith grew older her characters seemed to become increasingly formidable, a quality perhaps accentuated by a distension of the eyes caused by a hyperthyroid condition. But at the same time there was sometimes a touching vulnerability or loneliness behind the stern facade.
And before Jean Brodie there were the beginnings of a theatre career that many might argue was even more distinguished than her film career. She regularly co-starred and sparred with Laurence Olivier.
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Hide AdShe often played aristocratic or upper-middle class characters, but Smith actually came from a fairly modest background. On one occasion Olivier mocked her provincial vowels and she retaliated by popping her head round the door of his dressing room as he blacked up for Othello and perfectly enunciated “How now brown cow”.
She was born Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford in Essex in 1934. Her mother was a secretary from Glasgow. Her father was a laboratory technician. When she was about four, the family moved to the Oxford area when her father got a job at the university there. She left school at 16, studied acting at the Oxford Playhouse drama school and worked with the Oxford Repertory Players.
Her rise through the ranks was fairly rapid. She co-starred in the 1957 West End revue Share My Lettuce, with the comic actor Kenneth Williams, whose clipped vocal mannerisms may have influenced her own style. Offstage she shared his waspish sense of humour.
In 1959 she co-starred with Judi Dench in William Congreve’s 17th-century Restoration comedy The Double Dealer, at the Edinburgh Fringe – long before the Fringe was taken over by stand-up comedians. It subsequently played at London’s Old Vic, where she impressed Olivier sufficiently for him to invite her to become a founding member of his National Theatre company.
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Hide AdShe married the actor Robert Stephens in 1967, they co-starred in several plays and were briefly British theatre’s golden couple. He also appeared in a supporting role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but while Smith’s film career took off with Oscar glory, Stephens’s own career crash-landed in a haze of booze. It was always a tempestuous relationship.
They divorced in the 1970s and she married the writer Beverley Cross, whose screenplay credits included Jason and the Argonauts, Half a Sixpence and the original version of Clash of the Titans. Cross had fallen in love with her back in the Oxford days when he was a student and she was still in her teens. His patience eventually paid off and they remained married until his death in 1998.
When her marriage to Stephens collapsed, she and Cross headed across the Atlantic and she picked up her stage career in Canada, playing some of the great Shakespearean roles at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, including Lady Macbeth, alternating theatre with big paydays in Hollywood movies.
Smith received the honour of CBE more than half a century ago. She was made a Dame in the 1990 New Year Honours and was appointed to the elevated position of Companion of Honour in the 2014 Queen’s Birthday Honours, only the third actress to receive that honour after Judi Dench and Sybil Thorndike.
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Hide AdAs well as two Oscars, Smith won no fewer than five Baftas, the last being in 2000 for Tea With Mussolini, in which she co-starred with Judi Dench and her National Theatre contemporary and rival Joan Plowright. She completed the Triple Crown of acting with Emmy and Tony awards.
She is survived by two sons from her first marriage, both of whom followed their parents into acting, Chris Larkin – who chose his stage name to distance himself from his famous parents – and Toby Stephens.
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