Culture Slut: An Ode to Maggie Smith, the Actress Who Was So Much More than a Harry Potter Character
Words: Misha MN
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The noise of the internet buzzes incessantly, but every so often the funeral bells cut through and everyone pauses to memorialise the death of a beloved celebrity. Dame Maggie Smith died at the end of September and every generation mourned the woman who defined English acting for over sixty years. Celebrity deaths can be deeply personal, or totally irrelevant, it all depends on how much you invested in them as a person, how connected they were to your memories, dreams, hopes, if they were a figure you admired or were inspired by. The first celebrity deaths that made an impact on me was Eartha Kitt in 2008, and Elizabeth Taylor in 2011.
Both had been present in the pop culture of my youth (generally, and also in the tastes of my family specifically), both were very singular women who defied authority and became institutions in their own rights, both were the very best at creating electrifying performances of their unique personas, and both inspired me to live in my own truths. The same can be said of Maggie Smith. This week, an outpouring of love flows for Maggie, and it is easy to see how many childhoods she played a powerful part in, and how many people will miss her, despite never having known her.
My first encounter with Maggie Smith was in the incredible classical kitsch epic Clash of the Titans. Released in 1981, the last film ever to feature the work of special effects and stop-motion-animation legend Ray Harryhausen, the story roughly follows the ancient greek mythological hero Perseus as he travels across the world to slay Medusa, take on the monstrous Kraken and rescue a beautiful princess Andromeda. This film is a notable camp classic with interesting Hollywood gossip for multiple reasons, the most exciting being that a young Harry Hamlin met and fell in love with a 45 year old Ursula Andress, who he was then in a relationship with for many years. Andress was playing Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, and she famously speaks only one line in the whole film.
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The film’s depiction of the Gods on Mount Olympus was delicious, featuring such british theatrical and cinematic luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom and, of course, Maggie Smith. Maggie plays Thetis, a jealous goddess of the sea, filled with a desire for vengeance against the Gods who slight her, and the people who don’t worship her well enough. She was beautiful, petty, and powerful. One memorable scene shows her temple in Joppa where our young hero is about to marry Andromeda, and a giant statue of Thetis cracks in two, her head falls into the aisle where it opens its eyes and proceeds to curse the young newlyweds. It takes a lot of upstage Sian Phillips in any scene, but this is definitely one way of doing it.
As felt by every other millennial, Smith also hit home in our collective memories with her legacy work in children’s films, playing Grandma Wendy in Hook (1991), the housekeeper Mrs Medlock in The Secret Garden (1993), and of course, Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter series. By taking roles like these since the 90s, Smith has seemed ancient for the last thirty years, a notion further compounded by her projects like Gosford Park (2001) and Downton Abbey, both written by Julian Fellowes, both portraying her as an ageing and decaying countess, despite being filmed a decade apart. Even films like First Wives Club (1996) and Sister Act (1992) show Smith as, for want of a better word, a crone. In the harsh Hollywood world where women’s ages can only be defined as Babe, District Attorney or Driving Miss Daisy, Smith was constantly the latter.
Even in Smith’s earlier career, she was defined by age. One of my favourite film performances of hers is in 1972’s Travels With My Aunt, in a role originally intended for Katharine Hepburn of all people. The story is adapted from the 1969 novel by Graham Greene, where an eccentric, adventurous, amoral aunt shows her stuffy middle class nephew her past and present lovers in a grand sojourn across Europe. Hepburn was heavily involved with production, rewriting many of her lines to suit her own cadence and performance, but was eventually dumped by producers and replaced by Maggie Smith, who was almost half her age. The reason given was so that Smith could more convincingly play in flashback sequences, but still, this duality of age, the mystification of her as anything but an ancient wise woman became a consistent facet of her career. Despite the intention to feature Hepburn, Smith’s performance is not a pale imitation of a legend, but something different, something entirely her own, complete with all the comedy and wistful longing that became synonymous with all her most famous performances.
“Celebrity death has a peculiar effect on the public. They remind us that time waits for no one.”
I think one of the reasons Smith was able to gel so well with older characters and period drama comes down to her relationship with Kenneth Williams, who was her close friend, confidante and mentor. About a decade older than her, Williams was a star of stage and screen, a relic of old theatre, brought up in Variety and Revue. He found household fame in the 60s, camping it up in the hugely successful Carry On films, playing around in polari on the radio in Round The Horne, and taking any and every opportunity to show his vast intellect and arsenal of impressions and character voices, often seamlessly switching between them in his many interviews. Maggie credits Kenneth when asked about her proficiency in black comedy, she says that her performance is a direct take off of his delivery, and in some of her performances you can definitely hear an echo of his distinct voice. Smith’s dowager countess in Downton Abbey has a touch of Williams’ impression of theatrical grande dame Edith Evans about her. Her honking cockney comedy accent is indistinguishable from Williams’ hairdresser voice. In one television interview, Williams tells a story about going to Fortnum and Mason with Smith to buy a bra, and his impression of Maggie telling the grand assistant that she’d rather have her tits off than pay five guineas is so spot on that you can’t help but laugh.
Smith’s crowning glory will always be The Prime of Miss Jean Brody (1969). This is the first film of hers that I watched after I grew out of her more child-friendly fare, and it was life changing. Adapted for the screen by by Jay Press Allen - who also wrote the highly successful stage play - from the 1961 Muriel Spark novel, we follow Jean Brodie, a teacher in an Edinburgh girls school who values art, intellect, and wit above everything, and she inspires her girls to become like her, until her descent into Mussolini-Franco fascism leads to the death of one her students. In an iconic scene, Smith as Brodie faces of against the headmistress played by british cinematic legend Celia Johnson (1945’s Brief Encounter) and tells her that she is proud to be an influence on her girls, to allow them to experience all the possibilities of life, of beauty, honour and courage. Brodie, and therefore Smith, with whom she is inextricably linked, is a conduit for every lost and lonely student waiting to find something or someone that means freedom to them, someone to save them from the isolation of adolescence. She is the cosmic English teacher that holds the bullied gay student to her tweedy bosom and tells them that the world is theirs for the taking.
Celebrity death has a peculiar effect on the public. They remind us that time waits for no one. Lately, it seems that all the stars are falling from the sky, all the stalwart pillars of cinema are crumbling, that there has never been this many famous people dying before. Of course, that's not actually true. What is true is that we as an audience are growing up, and as we go further into adulthood, approaching middle age (gulp), the stars who meant things to us as children, or teenagers, or even as adults, start to die. The death of a star is the death of fantasy. Maybe you imagined yourself as that person, performing like Selena Quintanilla on the world stage, or meeting that person, singing and dancing alongside a legend like Tina Turner, or maybe even being handed your Oscar for Best Actress by an icon of Hollywood’s past. You ascend the stage as the music plays, you wipe the tears from your eyes and take your statuette from, oh my god, it’s Maggie Smith. What a dream come true. You never believed you would be here. Well, now you never will. That dream is over. Maybe you’ll get your award from someone else, or maybe you are just a balding 30 year old crying at an office desk, knowing you will never meet the woman who you never thought would be gone. That’s the most beautiful and the most painful thing about dreams; they end.
