Downton Abbey's Maggie Smith and Julian Fellowes on Harry Potter, the Oscars and playing "mean old bags"

It’s always hard to put one’s finger on why one actor is better than another. I remember watching a film with my father, who was not in the business. At the end, he asked me why Anthony Hopkins’s part was better written than everyone else’s. “It wasn’t better written,” I replied, “it was better acted.”

Maggie has this quality, of imbuing every line with a wit and a dimension it sometimes does not deserve. For a writer, this is an attractive gift in an actor. She also has a unique sense of comedy, based on a somewhat ironic view of real life, making it both funnier and more sad. But perhaps her greatest ability, or at least the one that most intrigues me, is how she can convey deep and powerful emotion, without a trace of sentimentality.

As a rule, actors are no different to the rest of the world in their desire to be liked, yet an anxiety to be liked can poison their work, reducing its effectiveness to nothing. Maggie is entirely free of it. She will find, and play, the core truth of a character and if we like, or dislike, her, that is up to us.

Gosford Park [the period whodunnit for which Fellowes won an Oscar in 2002] was a fairy story for me in many ways, not least because five of the actors I had imagined in the parts while I was writing it, ie in my wildest dreams, actually played the roles, chief among them Maggie as Lady Trentham, a character inspired by my senior great-aunt. I had the privilege of watching at director Robert Altman’s elbow while she demonstrated her immediate, and absolute, grasp of the workings of this woman’s mind, a woman to whom keeping up appearances was a matter of honour.

She asked me one question: “What is the significance of the marmalade?” I explained that my great-aunt had always felt you could tell when a house was badly run by a shortage of its own jams and jellies. “Got it,” she said, and that line was to be a universal favourite in what became, for many, a favourite film.

Maggie brought the same instinctive, essentially compassionate understanding to the role of Mrs Oldknow in From Time to Time, a film I directed from my own script, to be released this autumn. In it, she plays a grandmother who has failed in her relationship with her son and is determined not to fail again with her grandson. There is one scene in which she advises against quarrelling with your children that never fails to move me. Once again, it is potent because of the strength of its sentiment and the absence of sentimentality.

Now we are brought together for a third time on Downton Abbey. Here, Maggie plays the Dowager Countess of Grantham, the indomitable Violet, who sees it as her duty to protect her family from their own misjudgements. I would be lying if I were not to admit that I write for Maggie. I know she can play these women, opinionated and bullying, yet with a strong sense of reality and even justice underlying their prejudice. The point is, I grew up among them: my grandmother, my mother, my wife are, or have been, strong. It is weak women who make me nervous. And so, while I write them tough, I do not at all dislike them.

It is a complicated brief, and I cannot think of another actress who can play every inch of their iron desire for control, without ever making them unsympathetic, as Maggie can. She has that simple but essential gift of making us want her to return to the screen the moment she leaves it. And her wonderful performance as Violet is yet more evidence of this. In short, if we are to be considered a screen partnership, and I am the one who is flattered by the notion, then my only comment must be: long may it continue.

Julian Fellowes speaks to Dame Maggie Smith...

Julian Fellowes: When you started out, were you one of those people who was always putting on plays in the attic from the age of three, or did the business of becoming an actress creep up on you?

Dame Maggie Smith: It is truly so long ago that I can’t remember whether there was this blinding moment when I decided I was going to be an actress. I was never cast in any of the leading parts in plays at school. I was always in the back row. Except I do remember enjoying that enormously – I think I played some old page hanging about in Twelfth Night.

JF: Do you come from a theatrical background?

MS: No, not remotely.

JF: So what did your parents say when you told them what you wanted to do?

MS: They had sort of given up on me. I had twin brothers, who were older by six years and wanted to be architects and that had baffled my parents so much because that came from nowhere. When I said I wanted to be an actress they didn’t really react.

JF: You were quite successful from the start – you didn’t have to wait 20 years for it to happen.

MS: I wasn’t really. I left school at 16 and started doing stage management, but I didn’t really do anything until I was 21. There were bleak times and there have been since.

JF: Bleak times are part of it. Did you have any qualms when both your sons [Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens] went on stage?

MS: Well no, what can you do? They know how hideous it is, I have been complaining all my life.

JF: But they also saw the good times. You and Robert [Stephens, Smith’s first husband] were tremendously successful.

MS: They did, but it is a slog. When we were all in America for a play I was doing, I remember overhearing the boys talking. Toby said, “What’s wrong with her?” and Chris replied, “Leave her alone, it’s a matinee.” They knew how grim it was from a very young age. And that was stage work. I have done very little television and I had no idea how tough it is.

JF: You find Violet’s character in Downton Abbey wonderfully, right from the beginning. It’s our third collaboration now. The reason why I always write these parts for you is that some actors, as they get on, start to get sentimental, they soften everything and it becomes incredibly cuddly. You have this gift, which is wonderfully helpful to a writer, of being able to play great emotion without sentimentalising it.

MS: I think that is just me, not the way that I am acting – that is my personality.

JF: Well, our personalities are our tool, but you don’t seem, as a performer, to have that thing of wanting to be liked, which is incredibly freeing. Are you aware of that?

MS: No, I think it is because I very rarely play parts in which I might be liked. I am always cast as these rather mean old bags.

JF: I don’t think you are unlikeable in any of your roles but your characters go through a journey. You could say Lady Trentham is an old bully, but then again she is everyone’s favourite character in Gosford Park.

MS: I know what you mean but I think whatever you do you are put into a pigeonhole.

JF: Bette Davis said that the actor who isn’t typecast doesn’t work and there is something in that. I don’t think there are as many actresses in demand as you are.

MS: Joan Plowright once said to me, “There are so few parts around nowadays and Judi [Dench] has got her paws on them before anybody else can get to them.”

JF: I think everyone else would say Judi, Maggie and Joan have got their paws on them. If you are an older actress and you are not on everyone’s frontal lobe, it is a complete nightmare and the mere fact that regular work keeps coming in does make you one of the lucky ones.

MS: That is very true. I know I am lucky. I am also deeply grateful for Harry Potter.

JF: Do you enjoy the Harry Potter phenomenon?

MS: I do so little in it that I got to the point of thinking they could make do with just the hat. I was forever doing reaction shots. We’ve finished filming now and I can’t help feeling for the young actors who have spent half their lives doing it.

JF: I met Daniel Radcliffe when he was in [stage play] Equus and he was charming.

MS: He is lovely and I worked with him on David Copperfield before Harry Potter. I was the one who kept telling them that they must see this boy.

JF: He was very nice and very un-mad. You have also managed to resist this. What happens with most people who find success is that the shaping factors of their personality disappear.

MS: I think you are talking about people who are in a completely different sphere. I am certainly not in that area. There are people who can’t walk out of their door. Can you imagine that?

JF: I haven’t told you this before but you were one of my great éclaircissement moments. One summer my mother realised she was raising a barbarian and I was immediately booked in to see Margot Fontein, my first opera and Othello. You were playing Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier and it was extraordinary for me because the performance of the night was not Olivier’s – I think we were at the end of a white player blacking up to play Othello, even to my uninformed eye – you were absolutely fantastic. I cried and normally I only cried of boredom during Shakespeare. Was that a key role for you?

MS: It was my first, really. It was in the first season I was there [she became a fixture at the National Theatre in the early 1960s] and it was quite heavy stuff to go into from revue, which is what I was doing before. I was full of blinding fright. I was so frightened and alarmed by the thought that I initially said no. Beverley [Cross, Smith’s second husband] had to persuade me to do it.

JF: Well, he was right. There is something about those enormous chances... and of course the people who take that enormous chance on you.

MS: I think that is very important. I have never, ever had a desire to play a particular part because I can’t see what people see. I wouldn’t know what I could do, which is probably why I don’t work a lot. I need other people to see what possibilities there are for me. Although that doesn’t apply now because I am in this bracket of playing the aged ones.

JF: That’s extraordinary. I always imagined you read a script and said, “At last!” – especially with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

MS: When I first read the script it was for the play and I couldn’t do it – I was at the National doing The Master Builder – I didn’t even go to see it. The film followed that.

JF: I watched the film the other day as my son Peregrine had never seen it and I was very interested in the extent that it has stood up. There are some films you remember adoringly and then you watch them and they are rather flat. And that is not the case at all.

MS: I would much rather have done it at the theatre, actually...

JF: Well, now you could...

MS: ... now I would have to do it with a Zimmer frame.

JF: You talk about Desdemona being the day the door was opened for you. Gosford Park was the day the door opened for me. We went to the Oscars together that year...

MS: We did indeed. I did a lot of cheering when you won.

JF: You were adorable. I have still got the film of you clapping away. And you have won two of them, haven’t you?

MS: Not that night. Helen [Mirren, her Gosford Park co-star] and I were up together that night.

JF: If either one of you had been up on your own, you would have won.

MS: You are probably right, we must have split the vote. Winning an Oscar is very weird [she won best actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970 and best supporting actress for California Suite in 1979]. It is the oddest sensation.

JF: It is extraordinary. I am incredibly grateful when I win a cake in a raffle, let alone an award.

MS: But the Oscar makes no sense because it is so... out there. But I wasn’t there when I won. I wasn’t there for the biggie, for Brodie.

JF: No, but you were already very successful. What made it odd for me was the fact that the general public, especially in America, had never heard of me. It changed everything for me.

MS: Nothing changed for me after I won because I was stuck firmly in the theatre. I wasn’t the least interested in doing more film.

JF: Do you still prefer the theatre?

MS: I couldn’t do theatre now. The thought! I used to loathe Wednesdays; I have done since school when we had double Latin, then it was matinees. When Wednesdays come around now I am so relieved I don’t have to do a matinee.

JF: Do you have any ambition now?

MS: I don’t have ambition, I really don’t apart from to stay afloat.

JF: There is the element of being a survivor in this industry. Actors are tough.

MS: You have to be tough just to deal with what is said about you.

JF: And that is only by your friends! You always remember the bad notices.

MS: I don’t ever look at them but you know when they are bad, people can’t wait to tell you. What is worse is listening to them. I got so angry listening to the radio the other day that I nearly threw the damn thing across the room. And they rarely even know what they are talking about. Who are these people? They are not critics as
I remember them. But then the strange thing is, when you are not working it feels odd. Resting is horrid. It was always such a condescending remark, ‘Oh, she is resting’. I hate that.

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