The Lady in the Van: When Margaret Met Maggie Smith Walks a Girl’s First Step Toward a Prince, A Lady with a Little Help

Dame Maggie had upper-crust diction, and working class tenacity in a career that spanned seven decades, in which she almost never stopped working. She uttered a line that may have particular meaning to those of us who work this shift.

“You’re not doing me a favor, you know, I have got other fish to fry. I was told if I went south of the river I would get a warm welcome.

In the movie, “The Lady in the Van,” DameMaggie Smith playing Miss Mary Shepard, a homeless woman, sheltered for 15 years in the back of a van that Alan Bennett parked in his driveway. She is friendly, but resolutely ungrateful to him:

Dame Maggie Smith, the Mother Superior in “Sister Act” and “The Queen in the Van”, at the age of 89, was shocked when McKellen looked shaken

I encourage them to be aware of the possibilities of life. Of being beautiful, honor, and courage. I don’t try to influence them to look for it where it isn’t present. I’m going. When my class convenes, they will find me composed, and prepared to review for a succession of Stuarts.

Dame Maggie was Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies and the Mother Superior in “Sister Act,” a film that won her an Academy Award.

It is possible that the British critic Barry Norman was not joking when he said that he was always in corsets. “And I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots.”

She played the leading roles in Shaw, Ibsen, Stoppard and Shakespeare on stage and screen, including Desdemona to Sir Laurence Oliver’s Othello, and of course in recent years, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey.”

By the time Dame Maggie Smith left the stage yesterday, at the age of 89, a lot of people might have thought she’d been born with that honorific title.

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, crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van, and downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Though he’d been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that point, there was such venom in her declaration that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody,” that McKellen looked shaken. He might do that as well.

Amadeus, Equus, and Other Plays by Peter Shaffer, Evelyn Smith, from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to Peter Pan

There were contemporary playwrights who took note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He told interviewers that he wrote a letter for her about an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide. Her presence is witty and above all wit.

Smith had a third act when she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she’d known before. She was noticed by children when she was in one of the Harry Potter movies.

And while she was casting spells on 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, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.

All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite for playing multiple characters, including a scheming actress who is herself up for an Oscars, and who has a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point.

The character was not, in fact, in her prime, 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 Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Show, and on stage, held title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.

Early in her career, she learned about holding audiences rapt. She arrived on the professional stage in her teens, and graduated 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 it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.

Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey’s formidable Lady Violet.

Smith was so slender and delicate as Desdemona that it was difficult to smother her with a pillow. Nobody would have dared to try to do her job at the end of her career.