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Early in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the 1969 film starring Maggie Smith in an Oscar-winning performance, Smith stands in front of a classroom of young teenage girls and informs them that they are her priority. Even if she were to get a proposal of marriage, she tells them, she’d decline it. “I’m dedicated to you in my prime … And my summer in Italy,” she adds, “has convinced me that I am in my prime.” In another story, and in the care of a different performer, Miss Jean Brodie’s dedication to her young children would be presented as heartwarming and sacrificial. She would become a stand-in mother for orphaned student Mary MacGregor, offering her all the warmth and unconditional support we expect from our maternal guiding lights. But that is not The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and it’s not the legacy of the piercing roles created by Maggie Smith.
Smith, who died September 27 at the age of 89, captured something alarming, tense, and ultimately freeing in her portraits of women who exist outside the traditional boundaries of a nuclear family. Her characters were women whose roles often implied their own eventual replacements: teachers, fading former love interests, fuddy-duddy old-fashioned relics. Yet Smith’s presence immediately becomes a declaration of refusal. Not a glowing, loving godmother nor a witch, either, her caretakers and elders became more complex and magnetic, women who never lost sight of their own ambitions and desire. These often relatively minor characters would not become irrelevant. They would not disappear into the woodwork.
Harry Potter’s Minerva McGonagall, perhaps Smith’s best-known work for viewers under the age of 40, is a relatively familiar type. An older, unmarried teacher and distant parental figure, she’s demanding but fair. She is not your mom, and she will not coddle you the way a mother should. She’s not giving unearned compliments, but her praise and approval are more valuable because of that. Harry is cautiously optimistic that she probably cares about him, but it’s not a fondness he can safely exploit. On its own, Smith’s work as McGonagall might look like an especially effective re-creation of a character mostly defined by J.K. Rowling’s work, a vision of McGonagall already well established in the novels and Smith’s least distinctive performative transformation.
Seen from the larger arc of Smith’s career, though, McGonagall appears as an extension of characters she has already portrayed. Smith is fantastic and terrifying as Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden, the stentorian nurse and housekeeper whose domineering overcautiousness feeds into all the self-pitying inclinations of her poor weakling charge Colin Craven. She’s a villain; she’s the worst version of what happens when nurturing goes awry. But in a few moments, as Smith flies down a hallway in a moment of crisis and gasps at Colin’s recovery, all her own terror and pain becomes visible. It’s never just the character on the surface, either the simplistic good maternal figure or the bad, wicked one. There’s always some glimmer of her underneath — not Smith, but the character of this woman, whoever she is, who existed before she was in charge of a child, and who has not fully smothered all of her own weaknesses and desires just because she’s now their substitute mom.
Smith has a relatively small role in the wildly uneven family movie Hook, but her presence as the elder Wendy to Robin Williams’s self-denying Peter Pan is what shapes the entire emotional arc of the movie, and her performance makes it clear that being Wendy sucks. She’s forced into a motherly role too soon, thanklessly tasked with dragging these obnoxiously juvenile boys into the cruel reality of adulthood, then while she ages and gives up her own Neverland dreams, Peter’s still out there living his best, unburdened life. The Wendy of J.M. Barrie’s work is wistful and resigned. Smith’s Wendy has steel buried underneath her soft cardigans and clouds of white hair. She is tired of Peter’s bullshit. She loves her daughter and granddaughter and wants to save them from her own fate. Like Mrs. Medlock and Minerva McGonagall, she’s no longer chiefly a mother but someone more interesting and thorny, standing just off to the side of center stage. Many of Smith’s most potent roles are like this: marginal, secondary characters who are all the more powerful for how fully they draw your attention away from what’s supposedly the central story.
Downton Abbey’s snappish, cartoonish Dowager Countess of Grantham goes almost too far. She is the bumper sticker version of Smith’s typical, not-quite-maternal figure, sweeping into rooms, making grandiose judgmental pronouncements, then sweeping out again so the younger generations can hold their mouths agape for a second before carrying on with their lives. But she’s effective because Smith plays her with an unshatterable straight-faced sincerity. Of course she knows that lines like “what is a weekend?” will be played for laughs, but Smith’s own obvious sense of humor remains subterranean onscreen. This woman, this towering figure, does not find it funny. She will not be reduced to a catchphrase or a fond, patronizing toast at Christmas. She is unnerving, and no one is allowed to forget it.
Miss Jean Brodie remains the most complicated and frightening version of Smith’s near-maternal characters. By the end, the viewer is stuck with the horrified realization that Brodie’s influence has been irredeemably damaging. It’s not a story about a kindly older woman supporting her young students; it’s about a woman who cannot squeeze herself into the social role she’s expected to play, with tragic results for her students. She tells them early in the film that she will not submit to “petrification,” and Smith’s performance makes it impossible to cast Brodie as either villain or martyr. Like all of Smith’s best roles, she is sharp and irrepressible, most especially because she’s pushing against a system that insists she be something more gentle: a traditional, conformist role model. Smith’s characters are fueled by the friction between the vague female archetypes we expect her to fulfill and the constant awareness that she is always also a person underneath, with all of her energy and intensity coming through. She is unignorable, and it has made Smith unforgettable.
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