I continue to struggle my way back to regular posting. I hope to get there very soon! Deepest apologies for my extended absence.
The truly great Maggie Smith passed recently. She was known to younger audiences for her showstopping turns in the Harry Potter film series — as Professor Minerva McGonagall, head of Gryffindor House — and in the Downton Abbey TV show and films — as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, she of an “entertainingly wicked tongue.” But of course, her career as an actor not just onscreen but onstage was already long and legendary before she took on those roles.
One great way to remember her might be to (re)visit her Oscar-winning performance in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie… but good luck finding it anywhere: it is, criminally, out of print on DVD and not streaming anywhere. Instead perhaps spend some time with the spitfire elder artist she was with director Roger Michell’s 2018 documentary Tea with the Dames (in the US)/Nothing Like a Dame (in the UK). Here, Smith — along with her fellow grandees Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins — reminisces on her work, what it took to succeed as a woman in the deeply misogynistic film and theater industries, and what it continues to require to stay active as an older woman in realms where youth is valued perhaps even more so than in our culture at large.
It all sounds so serious, but it’s actually great fun. (Read my 2018 review.)
US (Tea with the Dames): stream on Kanopy; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK (Nothing Like a Dame): stream on BBC iPlayer (for 30 days); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Tea with the Dames (aka Nothing Like a Dame) at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
