Her acerbic wit improved with age

“She always looks so extreme,” a fellow teacher remarks about Maggie Smith’s characteristic rigidity in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), putting the finger on the snooty, nose-high audience members that the audience more than half cares about Century delighted for an hour.

Jean Brodie, a shrill and tragically short-sighted teacher at a school full of impressionable-aged girls, proved to be the defining asset of the English stage legend’s film career, to the extent that her stern but caring Harry Potter character, Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall could be the same Martinet, curdled by several more decades of disappointment. (Children who grew up with JK Rowling’s film adaptations will certainly appreciate Prime when they’re older.)

That doesn’t mean she never got better. In fact, Smith, who died Friday, never put in a bad performance, and just as fine wines get better with age, the same goes for the legendary actress’s acrid vinegar, which became the most delicious ingredient in her career as the dying widow of “Downton Abbey.” .”

Rather, the role of the self-righteous Miss Brodie highlighted so many of Smith’s strengths—short-sighted arrogance, precise comedic timing, and the spiteful sense that her characters had missed something important earlier in life—that the Oscar-winning performance resonated in virtually every part of the screen.

It’s there in Augusta, the flamboyantly manipulative spinster who constantly finds herself the center of attention in Travels with My Aunt (an Oscar-nominated role she inherited from Katharine Hepburn, who was too old to be that). playing flashbacks). And it flares up in “Murder by Death,” “Death on the Nile” and “Evil Under the Sun,” three brash locked-room crime thrillers in which Smith’s caustic delivery inevitably kills.

Among her gifts, Smith used sarcasm like a deadly weapon. She struck down opponents with a flickering glare or suppressed them with the gymnastic range of her voice, which ranged from a stiletto-like whisper to a high, nasal harpoon. She won her second Oscar for losing in “California Suite,” in which she played an insecure movie star married to a bisexual ex-actor (Michael Caine). Her bossy quips come through easily in this film, although she breaks your heart when she looks into her husband’s eyes and pleads, “Let it be me tonight.”

On stage she could hold her own against Laurence Olivier, as evidenced by her radiant Desdemona in Othello – just one of many roles she played at London’s National Theater. In Roger Michell’s delightful “Tea With the Dames,” Smith sits with Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Olivier’s widow Joan Plowright, who admits that her forceful husband was intimidated by Smith.

Smith and Olivier starred in several productions, including the Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer and Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder. But during “Othello” he gave her a particularly hard slap in the face on stage. “It was the only time I ever saw stars at the National Theater,” quipped Smith, who was known for being as clever (and salty) in her demeanor as so many of her characters. When she received her honor, she was told that the title didn’t need to change: “You can still swear.”

Aside from the Harry Potter films – which packed theaters with a who’s who of British acting royalty – she avoided franchises in favor of small productions where she could make a big impact, like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (a chance at a reunion with “A Room With a View” co-star Dench) and last year’s “The Miracle Club.”

It’s not a perfect equation, but her characters seemed to become increasingly wealthy as their careers progressed, to the point that the aristocrat she plays in “Gosford Park” (a dry run for the Violet Crawley character in “Downton Abbey”) ), anything but seems indifferent to the feelings of others. “It must be so disappointing that something like this flops,” she tells an American film producer (Bob Balaban), later emphasizing: “I have no snobbery in my body.”

But snobbery was Smith’s specialty, which she wielded with the precision of a sniper. “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit,” she complained in “Downtown Abbey.” She’s been so consistently snarky on this show that if the character unfreezes even for a moment, people around her might ask, “Have you changed your pills?”

Even when she portrayed working-class characters, like the vicar’s wife she played in The Bed Under the Lenses, she showed a flair for the well-placed insult. This piercing one-woman show – an hour-long televised monologue written by Alan Bennett, whose “The Lady in the Van” gave Smith one of her indelible final roles – reveals the kind of regret so often unspoken in Smith’s performances stayed.

“At 50, I was ready to transform myself into a wonderful woman,” remarks Mrs. Vicar, and we are inevitably reminded again of Miss Jean Brodie: how tears welled up in her eyes during this extraordinary Italian slideshow, she gives lessons, and we are made clear that what she wants most from her “Gels” (as Miss Brodie pronounces it) is that they avoid the mistakes of their own youth.

“I expected my prime to last at least until I was 50,” an incredulous Miss Brodie tells young Judas, who betrays her at the end of the film. While the character’s window closed much sooner, Smith’s film endured for decades, delighting audiences until he was 89 years old.