Remembering the Miracle, Maggie Smith: NPR

English actress Maggie Smith at the Evening Standard Theater Awards, London, 25 January 1962.

Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

Hide caption

Toggle label

Evening Standard/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

When Dame Maggie Smith left the stage yesterday at the age of 89, many may have thought she had been born with this honorary title.

She has played leading roles in Shaw, Ibsen, Stoppard and Shakespeare on stage and screen, including Desdemona to Sir Laurence Oliver’s Othello and of course, in recent years, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey.

“I always wear corsets,” Maggie Smith joked to British critic Barry Norman on the BBC in 1993 – or perhaps wasn’t joking at all. “And I always wear wigs and always these button-up boots.”

But Dame Maggie was also Professor Minerva McGonagall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter films; and the Mother Superior in “Sister Act,” starring Whoopi Goldberg as a nightclub singer on the run hiding in a convent; and she won an Oscar for her portrayal of a free-spirited teacher at a real British girls’ school in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”:

“I influence them to become aware of all the possibilities in life. Of beauty, honor, courage. I, Miss McKay, am not influencing you to look for slime where it doesn’t exist. I’m going there. When my class gets together, they will find myself composed and ready to review a series of the Stuarts for them.”

In the 2015 film The Lady in the Van, Dame Maggie Smith played Miss Mary Shepard, a woman who would be considered homeless if she wasn’t taking shelter in the back of a van parked in the playwright’s driveway Alan Bennett was parked for 15 years. She is kind to him but decidedly ungrateful:

“You’re not doing me any favors, you know, I have other fish to fry. A man on the sidewalk told me that if I went south of the river I would be welcomed with open arms.”

Dame Maggie had a sophisticated diction and working-class tenacity throughout her seven-decade career, during which she almost never stopped working. Those of us who work this shift may particularly appreciate a line she uttered as the Dowager Countess: “What’s a weekend?”

In the theater it can be when you turn on the stage lights and amaze people. As Maggie Smith so often did.