Many Maggie Smiths

December 28 was the birthday of Dame Maggie Smith (1934-2024).

For someone of my age or younger it’s impossible to imagine she was ever not an old, crusty, imperious dowager. Only in retrospect does one realize that her dignity and reserve (and one might add her hauteur) made it natural for her to be cast in such roles when she was only in her 40s (even younger, in fact, considering the Fascistic old maid she played in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). Yet, only 4 years before that, she had played Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello…in the 50s and 60s, she was downright beautiful. Ah, but later she was just the RIGHT person to interpret rich-women-wearing-pearls in Agatha Christie, Henry James, etc etc…and more recently Julian Fellowes and J.K. Rowling. She was already doing self-parody by the time of Neil Simon’sMurder by Death (1976); she won an Oscar for doing the same in his California Suite (1978). I am a particular fan of her performance in Evil Under the Sun (1982), especially in her scenes with Peter Ustinov. They were clearly having such fun together!

This rather incomplete post is a placeholder, published originally in 2012, a dozen years before Dame Maggie’s passing. As it won’t do it all for a memorial, I’ll return to it soon, and pay her the kind of tribute she deserves.