Dame Maggie Smith – Bons Mots
“One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one’s still acting.” — Dame Maggie Smith
It was a career that took in the classics, Oscar-winning performances (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), dark comedy (A Private Function) and sheer populism (Downton Abbey).
- Simon Callow: “Once I found myself on a plane sitting across the aisle from her and her husband, Beverley [Cross]. She told me they’d brought with them the first volume of my rather hefty newly published biography of Orson Welles. ‘We’ve checked it in as excess baggage,’ she said.”
- Maggie Smith had a wicked way with nicknames: she called Ben Kingsley ‘Sir King Bensley’ & dubbed Dame Vanessa Redgrave, ‘The Red Snapper’.
- Michael Palin recalling a meal with the late Dame Maggie Smith and Alan Bennett at a Yorkshire restaurant. Palin discovered a piece of glass in his mixed salad. To the manager, with a frown, she said: “A very mixed salad”.
4. Maggie revealed that she regularly clashed with Laurence Olivier, who was quick to criticise her acting. After one show, Olivier told his young co-star that her pronunciation of vowels was not up to par. Before the next show, when it came time for Smith to help Olivier—in full, blackface—glue on his eyelashes, she went into his dressing room and said: “‘How now, brown cow?’”
Smith says Larry would hit her on stage every night when she was Desdemona: “It was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre,” she said.
5. Nick Hytner on her final stage role A German Life: “She arrived in the rehearsal room for a day, she had a director she trusted (Jonathan Kent), and it must have felt too easy. So she fell ill and took herself off to hospital for nearly two weeks. Maybe she was properly ill; maybe she persuaded herself she was. But she left herself next to no time to rehearse.
By the time she came back, she’d made it nearly impossible for herself to go on, and she was happy. Her performance was as radically naturalistic as anything I’ve ever seen, though her timing was still as precise as if she’d been playing Wilde.”
6. During a Q&A for the film Quartet, in which she co-starred with Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins, a young man raised his arm and declared: “Dame Maggie, in my country we have a sandwich named after you.” The panel looked at each other with some bemusement before Dame Maggie, retorted breezily: “Might that be ham, dear?”
7. Maggie went on holiday with Judi Dench for a month back in the late 90s. Installing themselves in a hotel near Oban, Scotland, the pair drank constantly, all day, every day, from breakfast Bloody Marys till bedtime.
8. Ol Parker, The writer of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel “We made the first movie with absolutely no expectation that anyone would ever see it, let alone that there would be a sequel. But when we were out in India for the second time, someone brought up the idea of a third film. “I’ll only do it,” said Mags, “if you call it Marigold Hospice.”
9. Artist James Lloyd painted the late Oscar-winning actor Maggie Smith as a commission for London’s National Portrait Gallery, Lloyd remembers being asked by the actor to shut a door in her flat during one of their sittings.
“I went to pick up the doorstop and realised it was her BAFTA [award]! She was using it to hold the door open.” Amazing.
10. During an appearance on Graham Norton Ian McKellen recalled bumping into Maggie at the Oscars, where he wore a good luck green gem necklace from New Zealand. Breaking into a brilliant impression: “What’s that thing around your neck?” “It’s my pounamu, Maggie,” he replied, to which she said asked what it was for.
“At then the end, of course, everyone else wins the Oscar apart from you. And a bit dejected, you come out and you’re looking forward to a drink, and you bump into Maggie Smith and she points at you and says, ‘Didn’t work, did it?’”
Dame Maggie Smith CH, DBE, actress, was born on December 28, 1934. She died on September 27, 2024, aged 89.
By the way, BBC 2 will air brilliant documentary “NOTHING LIKE A DAME” in tribute to Dame Maggie Smith: Sunday 13 October at 8pm.
*BONUS BON MOT*
When acquaintances of Maggie Smith asked whether she missed being in the Harry Potter film series she said not really. She’d “run out of faces to pull”.
