How do you mourn someone you barely knew but loved enough to ache at their loss?
At 5’5”, Maggie Smith was no tall woman, but tower she did. All thanks to her talent, which was immense and wide-ranging, and personality―imperious yet endearing. She needed no dame in her name to command attention. All she had to do was walk on to a stage or show up on a screen near you.
She sauntered into my life, very cat-like (true to her animagus form), as Professor Minerva McGonagall from the Harry Potter series. The intimidating but kind-hearted Transfiguration teacher didn’t take long to transfix me. Those are the very adjectives her costars and directors used to describe her in their tributes to the British actor who passed away on September 27.
That and her acerbic wit. Her fans got a taste of it in Downton Abbey, where she played Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham. Her caustic comments, accompanied by her withering look and pursed lips, brought her international fame, much more than her two Oscars, a Tony, Emmys and BAFTAs.
While Harry Potter got her a different set of fans―“A lot of very small people used to say hello to me and that was nice,” she once said on the Graham Norton Show―Downton Abbey earned her a sort of recognition that she had never known before, something that she would have rather done without. For someone who described herself as “never shy on stage, always shy off it”, she lamented how she could no longer go catch a play or an exhibition. She didn’t even show up for her first Oscar award ceremony in 1970 for her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; funny, if you thought she would stop for a selfie. She would have probably told you what she told a little Potterhead when he asked if she were really a cat―“Pull yourself together,” with a glint in her eye.
An intensely private person, she came alive on stage and in front of the camera. Born in 1934, the year Hitler became the Führer, to a pathologist father and a Scottish secretary mother in Ilford, Essex, Margaret Natalie Smith started acting in the early 1950s. She kept at it for more than seven decades. She didn’t falter or fade as she aged, not even when she was diagnosed with breast cancer while shooting one of the Harry Potter films.
That is why, like author J.K. Rowling, who reportedly insisted on Smith playing McGonagall in the film adaptation of her books, I, too, thought that “she’d live forever”. Perhaps, she will. For, if there is one thing that she has taught me, it is: what you love most will keep you alive.