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Remembering Maggie Smith, Whose Biting Wit Deliciously Improved With Age

Maggie Smith's trademark biting wit laced with sarcasm and vinegar both deepened and mellowed with age in roles like 'Downton Abbey.'

A shrill and tragically short-sighted instructor at a school full of impressionable-aged girls, Jean Brodie proved to be the defining credit of the English stage legend’s screen career, to the extent that her strict-but-caring Harry Potter character, deputy headmistress Minerva McGonagall, could be the selfsame martinet, curdled by several more decades of disappointment. Rather, playing the self-righteous Miss Brodie accentuated so many of Smith’s strengths — myopic arrogance, precise comic timing and the spite-mitigating impression that something vital had escaped her characters earlier in life — that the Oscar-winning performance echoed in practically every subsequent screen part. Apart from the Harry Potter movies — in which the wings were crowded with a Who’s Who of British acting royalty — she avoided franchises and dedicated herself instead to small productions where she might make a big impression, like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (a chance to reunite with “A Room With a View” co-star Dench) and last year’s “The Miracle Club.”

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