Before she was the Dowager Countess, Maggie Smith won an Oscar, for the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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14 Comments

  1. February 25, 2014

    Ah, I got to see her in Noel Coward’s Private Lives in London in 74 (or possibly 73). Front row seats. memorable!

    • February 26, 2014

      What the! I lived there then, Dad was working, I was shuttling back and forth by train and bus to school with legions of other children trekking across London every morning. Were you one of them? I think we’re about the same age…

      • February 26, 2014

        No, I didn’t live there. I visited with my high school acting group for a week and saw some magic on stage. Magic.

      • February 26, 2014

        That’s some high school! You might have seen Ingrid Bergman in The Constant Wife (on stage with a bandaged sprained ankle) around that time and John Gielgud… in a play I can’t remember the name of! Maybe it was “Home”, I don’t recall much of it, only thinking: that’s John Gielgud!

      • February 26, 2014

        I DID see Ingrid Bergman. And Rex Harrison and Jeremy Irons and Vanessa Redgrave and Alistair Sims. Pure magic I went twice — quite a field trip !

  2. February 25, 2014

    Love Maggie Smith.

    • February 26, 2014

      She is the crème de la crème 😉 .

  3. February 25, 2014

    I much prefer her as the Dowager Countess. “What is a week-end?”

    • February 26, 2014

      Monica: She makes history seem like the cinema.

      Sandy: No. Not the cinema. More like Shakespeare.

  4. February 25, 2014

    a very Fine Film indeed.

    • February 26, 2014

      I haven’t seen it in…probably decades! Time to review.

  5. February 26, 2014

    She is absolutely one of the best. I saw her in an absolutely dreadful passengers-stuck-in-an-airport movie (starring the fab Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton) but she (Maggie) was wonderful. If the movie centred on her character, she could have made it a decent movie.

    • February 27, 2014

      You’ve got me going on old movies now! “Hot Millions” (1968) Maggie Smith and Peter Ustinov — I wonder if I can find it?

  6. George Kaplan
    March 3, 2014

    Another favorite. Flame-haired Maggie (once married to Robert Stephens, an fine actor driven to a near breakdown by Billy Wilder during the making of the sublime Private Life of Sherlock Holmes). I must admit I’m sick her playing the duchess as it’s a role she can play in her sleep. Watch her in the Gosford Park version of that role, Altman’s film is excellent and that’s enough. Far preferable to seeing Gosford screenwriter Fellows draw the idea out in his Upstairs, Downstairs rip-off! What? I was *ranting*?! Sorry!
    Maggie has been fantastic in so many things, there’s one sequence in Spielberg’s Hook that redeems that whole film (there’s another too but I doubt many would agree with that one!), in which we see the story of Peter Pan’s life, his loss of his mother, spiriting away to Neverland (not the Jackson version. Thank God!), meeting Wendy, etc. and at the end of it he flies in the window to discover that Wendy is now aged, “I’m ever so much older than…” Oh, it makes me cry. So sad! Dame Maggie sells it. So fine.

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