By Noel Murray
Maggie Smith, who was 89 when she died Friday, made her professional stage debut on Broadway in the 1950s, when she was still in her early 20s. In the decades that followed, she worked steadily in movies and television, while regularly returning to the theater.
Smith won her first Oscar for the title role in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), a charismatic and manipulative teacher who has a profound and, at times, destructive effect on the lives of the teenage girls in her charge. She went on to win another Oscar, a Tony and four Emmys, and became known in her later years for playing a particular type of Englishwoman: sturdy, smart, sharp-tongued and rooted sometimes stubbornly in the traditions of the past.
Audiences in the 21st century came to love Smith in two recurring roles: as the heroic Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies and as the coolly disapproving dowager countess Violet Crawley in the period TV drama “Downton Abbey.” But her career was long and eclectic, with a mix of serious and comic characters, in both supporting and leading roles. Here are 10 of Smith’s best performances that are available to stream:
1972: ‘Travels With My Aunt’
Though she was only in her late 30s at the time, Smith took an early step toward her most familiar screen persona — the dynamic and unforgettable older relative — in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s offbeat adventure novel. Filling in for Katharine Hepburn (who differed with the studio and with her old friend, director George Cukor, on how best to tell her character’s story), Smith ended up nabbing her third Oscar nomination, playing the eccentric globe-trotter Augusta Bertram, who enlists a stuffy, middle-aged Londoner in one of her illicit moneymaking schemes while hiding her true connection to him. Smith builds an outsize yet complex character via flashbacks that show how she learned to eschew conventional mores and to enjoy life on her own terms. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
1976: ‘Murder by Death’
Written by Neil Simon, this parody of country house murder-mysteries — the kind where a bunch of disparate folks gather for a weekend and someone winds up dead — has a cast of veteran actors playing spoof versions of some classic literary and movie detectives. Smith is paired with David Niven, who play Dora and Dick Charleston, a witty, high-society couple in the mold of Nick and Nora Charles from “The Thin Man.” Though the film is silly by design, Smith looks to be having a marvelous time swapping acerbic quips with her husband and the other guests. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
1978: ‘California Suite’
Two years after “Murder by Death,” Smith tackled another Neil Simon script and won her second Oscar, aptly, for playing a British actress who’s been nominated for an Academy Award. Based on Simon’s play, “California Suite” is made up of four short vignettes, each set in a ritzy Beverly Hills hotel. Smith’s segment has her opposite Michael Caine as her character’s not-so-secretly-gay husband. The role allowed Smith to explore some of the anxieties of being a respected middle-aged movie star, known more for small, arty pictures than blockbusters. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
1982: ‘Evil Under the Sun’
In the 1970s and ’80s, actor Peter Ustinov played Agatha Christie’s persnickety Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in a popular series of feature films and TV movies. Smith appeared in two of the big-screen outings: “Death on the Nile” (1978) and “Evil Under the Sun” (1982). Both are highly entertaining, but the ’82 film is superior both as a mystery — with a clever plot involving a murder for which every suspect seemingly has an airtight alibi — and as a showcase for Smith, who is wryly funny as a hotelier who has hilariously cutting comments to make about her more troublesome guests. (Stream it on BritBox; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
1984 ‘A Private Function’
Though Smith won only two Oscars (from six nominations), she was a regular at the BAFTAs throughout her career, often winning awards for movies that barely made a ripple in the United States. She took home the best actress prize for this small gem: a subtle social satire, set just after World War II, about a small English town where the locals are beginning to turn on one another over the government’s food-rationing laws. Smith plays an ambitious middle-class wife who’s fed up with living a life of enforced poverty, and who urges her timid husband (Michael Palin) to steal a pig. She excels in the role of someone who is both manipulative and sympathetic. (Stream it on The Criterion Channel.)
1985: ‘A Room With a View’
Director James Ivory, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant had an Oscar-winning box-office hit with their adaptation of the E.M. Forster’s charming romance set against the picturesque backdrops of rural England and Italy’s Tuscany region. The story is about a young woman named Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) whose carefully planned life is upended when she meets a freethinking hunk (Julian Sands). Smith plays a key role as Lucy’s dreary older cousin, whose fussy, gossipy nature ultimately helps drive the heroine to seek something more. (Stream it on Max, BritBox or The Criterion Channel; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
1987: ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’
In another BAFTA-winning performance, Smith plays an alcoholic piano teacher named Judith, living alone in a Dublin boardinghouse and still holding out hope she might meet and marry the man of her dreams. Bob Hoskins plays her latest prospect, James, a restless schemer from America, who mistakenly thinks Judith has enough money to invest in his business. Based on a Brian Moore novel, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” is a muted and melancholy film, featuring one of Smith’s richest, if saddest, performances. (Stream it on The Criterion Channel.)
1992: ‘Sister Act’
In the 1990s and beyond, Smith became an in-demand character actor, lending her withering glares and dryly disdainful line readings to more comic supporting roles. She had one of her most high-profile parts in the musical comedy “Sister Act,” playing a grumpy old nun who makes life miserable for Deloris (Whoopi Goldberg), a key witness in a criminal trial who hides out in a financially struggling convent. Smith’s turn as the Reverend Mother is remarkably well-rounded — both funny and poignant — as she plays someone whose authoritarian bent masks her worry that she’s become old and out of touch. (Stream it on Disney+; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
2001: ‘Gosford Park’
In Robert Altman’s lightly satirical and enormously entertaining murder-mystery, Smith is part of an ensemble of excellent British and American actors, all playing an assortment of 1930s aristocrats and servants gathered at a country house for a weekend of hunting and socializing. Nearly everyone in the film has something pithy or snide to say about nearly everyone else, but Smith has the keenest wit as a countess who coolly dissects the vulgar Americans in their midst. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.)
2010-15: ‘Downton Abbey’
This long-running TV and movie series was created by Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Gosford Park,” who used the project to expand on one of that film’s central themes: the huge changes in English culture in the 20th century, as members of the landowning aristocracy saw their power and influence over their servants and tenants wane. Smith plays a wealthy family’s irritable old matriarch: a dowager countess who vocally decries nearly every move toward modernity. Over the course of the long “Downton Abbey” run, Smith made the character more than just a collection of gripes, finding the relatable humanity within a woman watching the rapid decline of a world she once ruled. (Stream it on Amazon Prime, BritBox or Peacock; buy it on Apple TV, Google Play or Vudu.)
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