Have you seen The Miracle Club yet? Thaddeus O'Sullivan's comedy has been in theaters for a week, and it's bound to bewitch actressexuals, showcasing performances from a cadre of lovely thespians. There's Kathy Bates and Laura Linney in what Matt St Clair described as a work of "unwavering grace and sly tenacity." There's also Maggie Smith, one of my favorite living actresses, delivering another late-career turn to remind viewers they shouldn't take her for granted. Sure, her decade-spanning portrayal of Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey seemed like a congealment of the actress's greatest hits. However, that doesn't mean Smith is a one-trick pony, that her filmography is without risk or variety.
To commemorate, let's make the two-time Oscar winner our subject for list-mania. So, dear reader, will you join me down Maggie Smith's extensive repertoire, searching for the top ten highlights? It's a vast scope of roles, from scene-stealing supporting parts to titanic leads, from heartbreak to cutting pithiness…
;)
First, one needs to establish parameters and make the required honorable mentions. To keep things film-focused, Smith's many TV performances don't feature, though she deserves praise for plenty of them. Yes, even her work in Downton Abbey and its subsequent movies – for as much as the role didn't offer many challenges, the actress aced the material and always found space to show off when appropriate. I recall a brilliant phone call scene from season two, a one-person farce that even made her costars crack, and the quiet devastation of her grief in season three, disclosing everything with just a stumble in posture.
My House in Umbria earned Smith a well-deserved Emmy, completing her Triple Crown – Oscar, Emmy, Tony. She further received nods from the TV Academy for the Southern nightmare of Mrs. Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer, her Dickensian presence in David Copperfield, and the traumatized monologuing of Capturing Mary. Speaking of brilliant monologues, Smith deserves applause for her work with Alan Bennett, never better than in the Bed Among The Lentils episode of Talking Heads. Acting straight to the camera for 50 minutes, fourth wall be damned, she articulates an alcoholic's painful journey into sobriety through illicit affection, disappointment after disappointment.
Her stage work is left off the list, though some of those performances got recorded for the BBC's various filmed theater enterprises. Of those, I'd highlight Smith's spirited Portia in The Merchant of Venice as the cream of the crop. It's certainly superior to her Oscar-nominated Desdemona, shot for another Shakespearean project jumping from the wood proscenium to the screen. Some other awards magnets in her curriculum not featured here include Travels with My Aunt, where she's only good in flashback, an early femme fatale in Nowhere to Go, the emotional rigidity of Secret Garden, the broad comedy of Sister Act, and lovely work with bestie Judi Dench in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies and Ladies in Lavender.
Truly, Maggie Smith's career is so expansive one could go on forever just listing honorable mentions and the like. Hell, just her elevating work in undeserving blockbusters is worth studying at length. However, nobody has time for forever, so let's get down to business, starting at the beginning of Smith's movie career in the early 60s.
THE V.I.P.S (1963) Anthony Asquith
Margaret Rutherford won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this airport-novel-like flick, but it's Maggie Smith who earns the status of V.I.P.s MVP. Indeed, she shines brighter than anyone else in a superstar cast led by Burton and Taylor at the height of their powers. Smith accomplishes such feats by playing the shallow melodrama with such earnest sentiment you can't help but feel the character's plight, and yet, hers is also an exercise in restraint. As a secretary waning away in paroxysms of unrequited love, Smith commands the screen through what she keeps to herself - the fictional woman's integrity matters more than the actor's ego.
You must come closer to fully register her sorrow, breaking out of the torpidity Asquith's direction inspired. Richard Burton famously said about his costar: "She didn't just steal the scene. She committed grand larceny." He was right!
The V.I.P.s is available, to rent and buy, on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, DirecTV, and Spectrum On Demand.
THE PUMPKIN EATER (1964) Jack Clayton
In the current imagination, some people would struggle to picture Maggie Smith as a figure defined by youth, budding sexual desire, or erotic threat. To those folks, her slight supporting turn in The Pumpkin Eater must come off as a real shocker. You see, though she's in the movie for only a little while, Smith is like an electric jolt, a willful disruption any way you look at her. Director Jack Clayton is wise to predicate the actress' screen presence around the suspicion of illicit affairs, the lines her body draws a casual attack on a paranoid wife.
Acting against an Oscar-nominated Anne Bancroft, Smith somehow manages to overshadow her leading lady. She further destabilizes the tonal alchemy of the film, waking up the stern character study with the spiky joy of a troublemaker. It's essential work in a small package, not unlike the saucy energy she'd bring, years later, to a one-scene role in Oh What a Lovely War. There, too, Smith evokes sex with a sinister edge, embodying the siren call of wartime propaganda with a coquettish flirt, viciousness masked in a burst of plumes and grease paint.
The Pumpkin Eater is available to rent and buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, and the Microsoft Store.
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969) Ronald Neame
The inspirational teacher is such a tired archetype of the big screen it's easy to overvalue any work that dares defy the model. Be that as it may, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie remains prickly even to an audience of today, its curdling of the pedagogue idol into vampiric self-delusionist a gradual revelation that can still surprise. Part of the game depends on Smith's charisma bomb of a performance, a nuclear force deployed with braggadocio brio. She projects enough inward love to make on and off-screen audiences believe the lie before its forcefulness gets nauseating. She's so entertaining you'd let her ruin the world and applaud.
With such a character, repudiating subtlety is critical rather than erroneous. The actor should obliterate the quiet when the sound of one's righteous tones is such a vital part of the spectacle, sell the vocal mellifluousness like your life depends on it. Smith does it all, pouring years of theater training into a performance that calls for it, roaring her megalomania into the heavens while pulling you into hell. Every gesture a studied flourish, every monologue another opportunity to show a woman deceiving everyone, including herself - she embodies the dangers of romanticizing life to the point you think yourself heroic character rather than fallible person.
In other words, though she faced fierce competition, Maggie Smith's first Oscar win was richly deserved. It was also a surprise if the period's press is to be believed. In fact, Smith wasn't even in attendance to accept the award. She wouldn't make the same mistake with her subsequent victory.
Sadly, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie isn't streaming anywhere. However, there are some physical media editions available.
LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING (1973) Alan J. Pakula
Between her two Academy Award triumphs, Maggie Smith dedicated much of her time to the stage. She played Hedda Gabler under Ingmar Bergman's direction, graced the Stratford Shakespeare Festival multiple times, and worked for John Gielgud in a staging of Coward's Private Lives, for which she earned her first Tony nomination. TV also welcomed her with open arms, while cinema seemed less interested. Even so, she delivered one of her all-time best leading turns around this time, in Alan J. Pakula's oft-forgotten follow-up to Klute. Like that Jane Fonda vehicle and The Sterile Cuckoo before it, the film fashions itself a showcase for the great actress at its center.
It is, however, much less severe in tone, going so far as to face incoming mortality with little more than a shrug, a pragmatic refusal to wallow, and a will to live while there's still time. These choices don't circumvent complexity. Instead, they posit Smith with a challenging balance between portraying the character's self-sorrow and showing how she moved past it. Fittingly, when the time comes for her to puncture the Spanish-set rom-com shenanigans with a revelation, it's handled like a comedic beat and a with a no-nonsense jolt. Observe the interstitials between scenes, however, and you'll glimpse harrowing truths fated to outlive the laughs.
Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is currently streaming on Fubo TV.
CALIFORNIA SUITE (1978) Herbert Ross
A mosaic of failed farce, California Suite is a disappointment when taken whole. Break apart its storylines, and you might find something of value, especially in the realm of performance, watching actors doing their best to keep a sinking ship afloat. No team does this better than Michael Caine and Maggie Smith, who manage to rise above mediocrity so ferociously they can convince, whenever they're on-screen, that their movie's worth watching. Once one puts themselves through this mess, it's hard to categorize that as anything other than an acting miracle, the kind of feat that deserves never-ending admiration.
But of course, Smith's take on a surly Oscar loser on the big night is not just remarkable within the context of her picture. The actress' long day's journey into night and morning hangover is a sight to be seen, starting on notes of anxiety that escalate in arch frisson before deflating once more. The rhapsody shifts, explodes in drunk comedy after the ceremony results in another fiasco among many in a lifetime, shining ugly light on marriage teetering by the edge of complete collapse. And then, at the last moment, Smith transitions into something more heartfelt than expected, frail and cracked open, vulnerability damp in those big eyes.
Spinning Neil Simon straw into Oscar gold, Smith avoided her character's bad luck and took home her second Academy Award. This time, she was there to accept it.
California Suite is available to rent and buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, Spectrum On Demand, and the Microsoft Store.
QUARTET (1981) James Ivory
The 1980s were the best decade for Maggie Smith on the big screen, starting with the thespian's first collaboration with Merchant Ivory, the Cannes-competing Quartet. In this Jean Rhys adaptation, the audience follows an impoverished young woman who takes refuge in the house of a wealthy older couple. They are arts people, a dealer and a painter, entangled in the postwar Parisian life, drunk on jazz age decadence and emotional compromise behind closed doors. For their marriage to work, Lois has agreed to let her husband bed other women, bargaining her apparent tolerance for his unfaithful fidelity. The protagonist is just another among many, her destitute state making her vulnerable to their ploys.
A cruel canard with a nasty bite, the film explores the marital dynamic through the prism of their exploited lover, slowly peeling away the layers of social deception to divulge the toxicity beneath. As Lois, Smith is a vision of self-possessed libertinage, a woman lying to herself and others with every breath until the moment she breaks and it all comes spilling out, a torrent of rot. Around the release of Quartet's recent restoration, Ivory claimed no one wanted to play the part, and only Maggie Smith said yes. Only she was brave enough to plunge into her, realizing gangrenous glamour and the heartbreak within, ugly and ravishing, poison-tongued anguish.
Quartet is streaming on Kanopy, MUBI., and the Fandor Maazon Channel. You can also rent and buy it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, and Kino Now.
A PRIVATE FUNCTION (1984) Malcolm Mowbray
Maggie Smith played Lady Macbeth only once during the 1978 Stratford Shakespeare Festival. However, she did return to similar tonalities on her second go-round with Michael Palin, the delightful wartime satire on rationing and social climbing known as A Private Function. As a desperate housewife chronically disheartened by her husband's ineptitude, Smith is a stone-faced clown worthy of a silent movie classic. And yet, as funny as her surface-level fakery might be, it's the line deliveries that take this work over the edge into true greatness. Her timing sheer perfection, her diction dripping with clout-hunger, each line is laced with sick ambition.
For another s Smith-Palin pairing, check out The Missionary, where Smith trades priggishness for prurience. As an aristocratic spouse of humble origins, she's a horny menace, all the funnier for how nonchalantly she approaches the material. Sometimes, the key to hilarity is to treat lunacy as an everyday non-event, to provoke the audience by contradicting their demonstrative expectations.
A Private Function is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985) James Ivory
Between actorly obsessions and detailed, shot-by-shot recaps, I've written so much about A Room with a View here at The Film Experience that to retread seems superfluous. So, here's my blurb from the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1986:
Poor Charlotte Bartlett can feel like the archetypal spinster of British literature. She's annoying and always ready to weaponize a martyr complex, so molded by the rules of Edwardian decorum that her actions can't help but stifle passion. However, in the hands of Smith and a team of master filmmakers, Charlotte blossoms into a much richer figure. She's both a beacon of comedy and an unexpected source of romanticism. Since an early – easily dismissible - proclamation that she's a woman of the world, Charlotte drops hints of her attachment to the idea of love, its poetic power to overwhelm and redefine life. Smith performs such a facet in quiet reactions, stiff glares that gradually become engulfed by curiosity, some trepidation. The character's about-face near the end isn't nearly as shocking if one has been paying attention to her pitch-perfect performance. Thankfully, due to a tremendous thespian's skill, the camera catches all those complexities.
A Room with a View is streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also find it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, and VUDU, available to rent and purchase.
THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE (1987) Jack Clayton
In any other year other than 1987, Maggie Smith's lack of nomination for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne should have been an awards scandal. That year, however, even genius-level work could be left aside with little fanfare, so top-level was the Best Actress race. Even so, I mourn Smith's lack of accolades for a performance so viscerally felt it hurts to think about. Here's some of what I wrote about her work when the film first came to the Criterion Channel:
…For people used to seeing Maggie Smith as a prim lady, delivering bitchy one-liners with unflappable confidence, this performance might be quite the shock. While her aristocratic bearing is still vaguely evident, all the other Smith-isms are absent. In turn, there's a bruising openness to her looks, feverish anguish tainting the brightest of smiles for only when drunk does Judith seem unburdened by the permanent frown marring her expression. The panic upon spilling whiskey is animalistic and the fury at God is stentorious but made sad by the ragged exhaustion irradiating from her tired body. Like Garbo and Fontaine before her, Maggie Smith takes a weepy story and turns the dials to eleven, indulging in melodrama whilst keeping a foot in gritty reality.
With an aborted handshake and a swallowed smile, the smelling of cheap gardenias and the tossing of a crumpled paper, Smith sings rhapsodies of feeling and breaks the heart of the viewer. She's girlish when falling in love and grotesque when falling apart, stony when Judith gives up and appropriately skeptic when a new chance at happiness appears…
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
GOSFORD PARK (2001) Robert Altman
Some of Maggie Smith's most fun turns have been in classic whodunnits. There's her prim parody of the subgenre in Murder by Death, followed by butch excellence in Death on the Nile, and pure camp bewitchment in Evil Under the Sun, complete with a musical catfight via Cole Porter. Still, as delightful as they might be, none of those portrayals can hold a candle to Smith's last Oscar-nominated turn to date – Constance Trentham in the Altman-directed, Fellowes-scripted Gosford Park. Not only does she nail the hints of drama, socio-economic insecurities concealed by a thick lather of pride, the actress delivers a comedic masterclass as only she could.
One shouldn't underestimate the difficulty level of such tonal gymnastics, calibrating the aristocrat's snobbishness so it's razor-sharp to the point of absurdity, carving a smile on the viewer's face whether they want it or not. Later, she can give immense insight through a self-satisfied smirk, a conspiratorial sisterhood predicated on exploitative dynamics, or the sense that parts of Constance's superior airs are consciously performed. She is the upper-classes' cancerous vice and its corrupt charm rolled into one diva.
Gosford Park is available, to rent and buy, on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Video, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, Redbox, Spectrum On Demand, and the Microsoft Store.
What about you, dear reader? What are your favorite Maggie Smith performances?