Meeting the Remarkable Maggie Smith

Some people pass through your life like feathers on the wind, making no impression at all. But Maggie Smith wasn't one of them.

Maggie Smith, 1970. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

If I had met Maggie Smith some years later, I might have reacted differently. But in 1975, a younger version of myself was only just beginning the search. The one Walker Percy described like this in The Moviegoer:

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

This may seem irrelevant, but it’s not. Had I not become aware that there was such a thing as this search, I wouldn’t have been on the lookout for people who seemed to have made some headway along that path. Also, I was an avid moviegoer like the protagonist of Walker Percy’s National Book Award-winning novel. Had I been indifferent to film, I wouldn’t have known about Maggie Smith at all back then.

My first encounter with her occurred via celluloid years before we met in person. It was shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law. I was in high school. An all-Black Catholic high school. And for the first time in our young lives, we went as a group through the front door of Atlanta’s “Fabulous Fox Theatre” to see Shakespeare’s Othello, which featured Maggie Smith as the doomed heroine Desdemona.

The Fox Theatre had been off-limits to people like us during segregation—unless we wanted to climb the outdoor fire escape for the nosebleed seats known as “nigger heaven.” Fortunately, my parents refused to accept this humiliation. Thus, visiting that beautiful edifice for the first time to see Othello—of all things—etched the experience in my consciousness for the rest of my life.

We were not new to Shakespeare, having covered the requisite plays in class. Although we expected to find Elizabethan English challenging, we did not expect to be insulted by Laurence Olivier’s outrageous interpretation of The Moor.

Here was one of the great actors of all time giving us an Amos ‘n Andy minstrel-show Othello with a shiny black face and ridiculous red lips. It was over-the-top, and many of us doubled over with laughter. The New York Times condemned the performance for its insensitivity and stereotypical racism.

Fortunately, Maggie Smith’s Desdemona rescued parts of the film, evoking the pity and fear a tragedy is supposed to deliver. As in the 4-minute boudoir scene with her maid as she prepares for the marital bed that will soon become her deathbed. Not yet a celebrated Dame of the British Empire, Maggie Smith was 30 when she took on that role.

My next encounter with her came a few years later, also via film, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Her performance in that movie led to the first of her two Academy Awards. She was not your typical Hollywood beauty. But I was blown away by her emotional range and power.

She was white, of course, and very British, but her flashing anger in that film reminded me of my mother—who had refused to let us visit any theater’s “nigger heaven,” no matter how good the movie was. Like Jean Brodie, she stood up to power too with righteousness and indignation for most of her life. But then courage is not the exclusive province of any one race.

The next time I saw Maggie Smith, she was not in a movie, on a Broadway or London stage, or on TV. She was in San Francisco’s famed Ghirardelli Square.

It was my day off. I wandered leisurely through the touristy parts of the City as if I were a tourist myself. Eventually, I found my way into a place called The Kilkenny Shop, which carried authentic products from the historic wool factory founded in Ireland back in 1810.

It was the middle of the day. Very few people were shopping. Only one or two others beside myself. I picked out a thick white wool cardigan with brown leather buttons down the front and set about perusing the shop’s other merchandise. Shawls, throws, hats, scarves, skeins of soft rich wool in many colors. The kind of well-made stuff that becomes an instant heirloom.

I was entranced by the overall loveliness of the boutique, its shiny wood floors, the wool’s fragrant lanolin scent. So I hardly noticed when I happened upon the Oscar winner near one of the displays. She was shopping just as I was, examining the merchandise and selecting her favorites. The aisles were narrow, and I said Excuse me as I inched past her.

Not at all, came her reply as she continued to peruse the wool. Hearing that refined British accent, I turned to look at her. That face. Those big almond-shaped eyes with their slightly sloping eyelids—tailor-made for caricature. So I acted on reflex, something I might not have done years later.

“Excuse me, but are you Maggie Smith?”

And then those remarkable eyes were looking straight at me. Surprise written all over her face. Clearly, she had not expected to be recognized.

“Why yes. I am,” she said.

I’d be lying if I tried to recreate the rest of our conversation. This was a brief encounter with a movie star who wasn’t the least bit interested in drawing attention to herself. She didn’t even bother to wear a disguise. There was no need to.

But I do remember that she was kind. Also, unexpectedly down-to-earth. Dressed in ordinary street clothes, a shopping bag at her side. Not at all like the high-brow characters she was known for. Though of course, there was no escaping the refinement of her speech.

By this time in my career, I had met and sometimes interviewed numerous celebrities. I worked in television. Lots of celebrities came to the studio, hawking their books and movies, their causes, their politics. When they finished pitching their wares, they smiled at the camera, shook my hand, and disappeared through fame’s revolving door.

Only a few of those people made a lasting impression on me. James Baldwin. And James Earl Jones (whom I wrote about last time) come to mind immediately. But that fleeting encounter with Maggie Smith remains with me too. Why was that?

I was certainly a fan but not star-struck. She was not Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, or Farrah Fawcett. In 1975, Maggie Smith was 41 years old. Despite her unassuming plainness, she was radiant.

As I said at the outset, I was on the lookout for people who seemed to have begun the search and made some progress along its unpredictable path. The ones who stood out to me seemed lit from within.

It was just an impression. But years later I came across an NPR interview, which seemed to confirm that initial hunch about Maggie Smith. Asked her opinion about aging, she said she knew she was never a so-called “dish.” Which freed her from having to trade on her looks.

So she focused on becoming a character actor, which allowed her to age into roles as mothers and grandmothers while still developing her talents instead of losing them. Frequent trips to the plastic surgeon put no strain on her bank account. She didn’t just accept her widening girth and wrinkled face—she embraced them.

In a profession filled with phonies, she was anchored to her self. Her attitude toward aging suggests introspection, truthful self-assessment, and self-knowledge.

My initial sense that she really was surprised when I recognized her in San Francisco—was borne out years later after Downton Abbey made her instantly recognizable all over the world. Asked how it felt to be so famous at age 75, she said: “I’d been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey, and life was fine — nobody knew who the hell I was.”

But I did, Maggie. I did.

If you feel I make too much of that brief encounter all those years ago, I offer poet William Blake in my defense. If he could see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, why shouldn’t I detect a glimpse of Maggie’s search for authenticity during a fleeting moment in a San Francisco wool shop?

I believe Wordsworth got it right. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us is our life’s star. Each of us arrives here trailing clouds of glory. But many of us forget that. Others connect with that inner light while they’re still on Earth. And it radiates through everything they do. I believe Maggie Smith was one of those.

I like to think I received just a touch of that during our brief encounter at The Kilkenny Shop, the same year she appeared on The Carol Burnett Show to teach Carol how to speak the English language.

When she exited planet on September 27th of this year, Maggie Smith left behind plenty of her brilliant light for the rest of us. Enough to enchant us for a very long time.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
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