NOTHING LIKE THIS DAME

Maggie Smith returns to the big screen sequel to Downton Abbey to reprise her role as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey: A New Era.

Dame Maggie Smith has been famously lukewarm about her star turn as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. In several interviews she’s been quite frank about the fact that she didn’t really consider the role as “really … acting”. (She’s been similarly unenthusiastic about her blockbuster role as Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise, another iconic role she doesn’t take altogether seriously.)

“I am deeply grateful for the work in Potter and indeed Downton but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying,” she told the Evening Standard. “I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.”

Indeed, she was one of the last members of the cast of the original DowntonTV show, which took the world by storm between 2010 and 2015, to agree to appear in the 2019 film, which saw the Granthams preparing for a visit from the royal family. In fact, in one interview she said she thought the film should begin with her funeral! “I just think it’s squeezing it dry, do you know what I mean?” she said in an interview with the British Film Institute at the time. The film went on to gross $194.2m worldwide, so there was clearly an appetite for the upstairs-downstairs drama after the series wrapped.

Although Lady Grantham is ill at the end of the first film, and Smith was again reluctant, Downton fans will be relieved and delighted to see that she is once again among the original principal cast members who reprised their roles for the sequel. (The director of the sequel, Simon Curtis, has worked with several members of the cast before, and is actually married to Elizabeth McGovern who plays the part of Lady Cora opposite Hugh Bonneville’s Lord Grantham. In another little aside, Imelda Staunton, who played Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first film, is married to Jim Carter, otherwise know as Carson the butler.)

Highclere Castle, the main setting for Downton Abbey.

Details remain a well-kept secret, but it is good to know that the script was written by Julian Fellowes who created the original series – crafter of the fantastic oneliners and zinging put-downs the Dowager Countess is loved for. The likes of “I never argue, I explain” and “What is a weekend?” appear on coffee mugs the world over!

Members of the cast and producers of Downton Abbey with Julian Fellowes (second from right) at the 2011 Emmy Awards.

“Maggie is wonderful to write for because she always gets it,” Fellowes told Town and Country magazine. “She understands why the line is funny. She understands why the scene is moving. She understands why the speech will make you cry even though it isn’t about what they’re talking about. You never have to explain any of it to her – she really gets it.”

While she might be dismissive of the acting chops required by her role in Downton Abbey, the template for her character was actually laid 20 years ago in another film scripted by Fellowes, the Oscarwinning Gosford Park, which was directed by Robert Altman and co-starred Helen Mirren, another famous British Dame of stage and screen. In many ways, the Dowager Countess is an evolution of Smith’s Gosford character, the Countess of Trentham – not least her withering put-downs and sharp wit. (The film’s Oscar was for best screenplay, won by Fellowes, who has clearly never tired of crafting zingers.)

While Smith was already a highly respected actor, having taken starring roles on both sides of the Atlantic by that stage in her career, Gosford Park undoubtedly ratcheted up her fame and exposed her to new and wider audiences around the world. Her appearances in Hollywood blockbusters like Harry Potter is in some part a result of that definitive breakthrough, and her turn in Downton remains a direct descendent of that earlier role. In fact, Downton Abbey was originally conceived as a direct spin-off of Gosford Park, although ultimately it developed its own distinct character.

At the age of 86, however, Smith has such depths of experience to draw on, that, with a career going back six decades, she’s had more than enough time to hone her craft so that perhaps Downton does seem unchallenging. At the same time, she’s always had a taste for lighter roles. Alongside her serious film and stage roles, she’s also had a bit of fun, letting her hair down a little in Hollywood. Let’s not forget her role as Mother Superior in Sister Act with Whoopie Goldberg in the early 90s.

Literary adaptations run throughout her career; in fact, too many to mention. They range from EM Forster’s A Room with a View andHenry James’ Washington Square (which the reviewer Peter Bradshaw calls “one of her bluechip ‘aunt’ performances”) to Graeme Green’s Travels with my Aunt, a much earlier incarnation of the typology dating back to the early 70s.

Perhaps because of these precedents, playing the Dowager Countess of Grantham simply seems effortless to Smith. It’s a character she’s honed over an entire career and reprised aspects of at intervals for many years. Whether she likes it or not at this stage of her career, her legion of fans, and all the devotees of Downtown Abbey more generally, could not be more delighted that she hasn’t had the character killed off just yet.

We will, however, have to wait a little longer than we’d hoped to enjoy her latest turn. While the Downton sequel was originally intended as a gift for Christmas 2021, it’ll now only be out in March 2022. Luckily, in the meantime, there is another new film coming out this year featuring Dame Maggie as part of an ensemble cast in A Boy Called Christmas, based on the book by Matt Haig, which reimagines the story of Father Christmas.

As the Dowager Countess of Grantham once said, “At my age, one must ration one’s excitement.” So, it seems, must we all.