Maggie Smith (1934-2024)

Truly great actors always have an entry point for cinephiles, and with Maggie Smith, it really depended on your age.  For a generation of children, she was Minerva McGonagall.  A generation before that, she was Mother Superior or an aging Wendy in Hook.  And still before that, she was known for singing and dancing with Carol Burnett in one of the most memorable guest spots on Burnett's series.  But for me, she was always Jean Brodie.

I almost certainly had seen Sister Act and Hook before I saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie given the timeline of my life, but watching Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie changed something inside of me on a cerebral level.  It was one of those movies that you point to as being quintessential to your cinematic journey, one of those performances that is impossible to deny.  In perhaps the first witty rejoinder I ever made in a review, I remember once writing "she made fascism fashionable," and indeed, Smith did in that role.  The way she pronounced words, the callousness and broad hand she had, armed with the knowledge that she was always right, is such a specific character choice that Smith herself would never really top this performance...but to be fair, few actors could.  Other than those performances given by Vivien Leigh & Marlon Brando, I'd argue this is the finest performance that any Oscar winner has ever given onscreen...Smith is that good.

But let's face it-Smith was always good.  And she was always so specific.  For an actress that frequently played a trope (initially a sexually-aware woman-of-class, then eventually prim dowager types with a barbed tongue), she always brought such depth to her work.  There's a reason that so many people felt her as being one of "their actresses," and it wasn't just that she worked in series that were insanely popular like Sister Act, Harry Potter, and eventually Downton Abbey (the show that would become her chagrin as it made her more famous than she had ever wanted...and therefore the work most cited in her obituaries).  It was that she made them popular-she could deliver every line with such specificity that you knew only she could make it work.  She was nominated for six Academy Awards...which never felt quite like enough.

She was also one of those actresses it was impossible to imagine film without.  She worked constantly, starring in a film as recently as last year with Kathy Bates & Laura Linney called The Miracle Club, and like her contemporaries Judi Dench & Ian McKellen, was such a treasure you wanted to believe that the world would keep her around forever.  But even the most immortal of beings have to drift to the other side someday, and this week, to paraphrase the song that her character made famous, Smith came out to the meadow.