JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Dame Maggie Smith, the British actress who won Oscars, Emmys and a Tony in a career spanning seven decades, has died at age 89. Smith began her career playing wistful ingenues in Shakespeare. She graduated to strong-willed heroines in everything from "The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie" to the "Harry Potter" movies, and she spent six seasons delivering withering put-downs as the matriarch on "Downton Abbey." Critic Bob Mondello offers a remembrance.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: She was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona...
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MAGGIE SMITH: (As Desdemona) What is your pleasure?
LAURENCE OLIVIER: (As Othello) Look in my face.
MONDELLO: ...That Laurence Olivier's Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would have dared try. She excelled at being indomitable, whether as "Harry Potter's" Professor McGonagall...
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SMITH: (As Minerva McGonagall) His name is Voldemort. So, yes, you might as well use it. He's going to try to kill you either way.
MONDELLO: ...Or as "Downton Abbey's" formidable Lady Violet.
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HUGH BONNEVILLE: (As Robert Crawley) I can handle her.
SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) Really? Well, if you can, you must have learned to very recently.
MONDELLO: What Maggie Smith learned, she learned early, arriving on the professional stage in her teens, graduating quickly to Britain's national theater, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of Restoration comedy and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in "The Millionairess," and she was unstoppable.
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SMITH: (As Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga) If I questioned your solvency, that would be a libel. If I suggested that you are unfaithful to your wife, that would be a libel. But if I say that you are a rhinoceros, which you are, a most unmitigated rhinoceros, that is only vulgar abuse. I take good care to confine myself to vulgar abuse, and I have never had an action for libel taken against me. Is that the law, or is it not?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Julius Sagamore) I really don't know. I will look it up in my law books.
SMITH: (As Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga) You need not. I instruct you that it is the law.
MONDELLO: Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a best actress Oscar in 1970, her deluded teacher in "The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie."
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SMITH: (As Jean Brodie) Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life. You girls are my vocation. I am dedicated to you in my prime, and my summer in Italy has convinced me that I am truly in my prime.
MONDELLO: The character turned out not to be, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including "Travels With My Aunt" and "Death On The Nile," triumphed on TV in everything from "The Merchant Of Venice" to "The Carol Burnett Show" and did 20 parts on stage, mostly title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan, all before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon's "California Suite" for playing multiple characters, including a conniving actress...
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SMITH: (As Diana Barrie) Joe, darling.
MONDELLO: ...Who is herself up for an Oscar.
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SMITH: (As Diana Barrie) I know how much this film means to you. And I want so much to win this award for you, Joe. If I win tonight, darling, it's not going to be an Oscar. It's going to be a Joe Pickman. You're an angel.
MICHAEL CAINE: (As Sidney Cochran) That was very sweet.
SMITH: (As Diana Barrie) Did you like it? That's going to be my acceptance speech. You and I know I don't have a hope in hell, but you have to prepare something. You can't just stand there, sobbing all over Burt Reynolds.
MONDELLO: No sobs in Smith's actual acceptance speech. She thanked her writer, director and co-star. All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith's career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in "A Room With A View," primly comic as the Mother Superior in "Sister Act" with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky in the "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" movies...
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SMITH: (As Muriel Donnelly) That flight made my ankles swell.
DEV PATEL: (As Sonny Kapoor) Sunaina.
TINA DESAI: (As Sunaina) Sonny.
SMITH: (As Muriel Donnelly) You know what? Don't mind me. I'm just standing here on my ankles.
MONDELLO: ...Crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett's driveway in "The Lady In The Van"...
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What are you doing in Broadstairs?
SMITH: (As Mary Shepherd) I am minding my own business.
MONDELLO: ...And downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen's king in Shakespeare's "Richard III."
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SMITH: (As Duchess of York) You came on Earth to make the Earth my hell. Touchy and wayward was your infancy, your school days frightful, desperate, wild and furious, your prime of manhood daring, bold and venturous, your age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly and bloody. What comfortable hour can you name that ever graced me with your company?
IAN MCKELLEN: (As Richard III) If I be so disgracious in your eye...
SMITH: (As Duchess of York) Oh, hear me a little, for I shall never speak to you again.
MONDELLO: McKellen looked shaken, as well he might. Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of "Amadeus" and "Equus," remembered he was once asked by Smith why he kept writing plays about two men talking and responded by writing "Lettice And Lovage," about two women, one an extravagantly overimaginative tour guide.
PETER SHAFFER: Oh, yes, that was written for Maggie - yes, completely written for Maggie, to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing and wit, above all wit. Her presence is witty.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Action remains merely dishonest.
SMITH: (As Lettice Douffet) I cannot accept merely. I do not do anything merely.
(LAUGHTER)
MONDELLO: True that. And then the career of Dame Maggie, for she'd been made a commander of the Order of the British Empire by this time, had a third act, one in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she'd known before. Children recognized her on the street from the "Harry Potter" movies.
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SMITH: (As Minerva McGonagall) Piertotum locomotor.
MONDELLO: She was in all but one of them.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2")
SMITH: (As Minerva McGonagall) I've always wanted to use that spell.
MONDELLO: And while she was casting spells on the kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV's "Downton Abbey," where, for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life - aloof...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) Here we go.
MONDELLO: ...Entitled...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) Oh, really. It's like living in a second-rate hotel where the guests just keep arriving and no one seems to leave.
MONDELLO: ...Undiplomatic...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) When I'm with her, I'm reminded of the virtues of the English.
DAN STEVENS: (As Matthew Crawley) But isn't she American?
SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) Exactly.
MONDELLO: ...Impatient...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) You're a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining, and find something to do.
MONDELLO: ...Argumentative...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) I never argue. I explain.
MONDELLO: ...Hidebound...
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MICHELLE DOCKERY: (As Mary Crawley) Sybil is entitled to her opinions.
SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) No. She isn't until she is married. Then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.
MONDELLO: ...And so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn't get enough of her. That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess' most famous question...
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SMITH: (As Violet Crawley) What is a weekend?
MONDELLO: ...Might almost have been her own. I'm Bob Mondello. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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