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Maggie Smith Rejected Irrelevance
In matronly roles that suggested their own replacement, the late performer shone from the margins.
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. 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 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.
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