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Maggie Smith


voyager

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In the NY Times obit, they talk about how Downton Abbey really made her star - previously she had her anonymity. But for the younger set -

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The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films, from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011).

McGonagall, wearing high-necked Victorian-style gowns, a distinctive Scottish brooch and upswept hair beneath a tall, black witch’s hat, was a striking onscreen presence. Yet Ms. Smith did not find herself constantly pursued in public, except by children.

“A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice,” she recalled on The Graham Norton Show in 2015. One boy carefully asked her, “Were you really a cat?”

 

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5 hours ago, bloviatrix said:

In the NY Times obit, they talk about how Downton Abbey really made her star - previously she had her anonymity.

 

I can hardly believe I'm reading this from the NYT.     Smith was acclaimed 50 years ago.   She was knighted in 1990, for God's sake!    Where were these people in the interim?

Edited by voyager
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Like Ian McKellen.  As far as I'm concerned, the best Western actor of his generation.  But was he a star before X-Men and Lord of the Rings?

(I was once in a coffee shop where it really chapped my ass to hear some self-appointedly "knowledgeable"  Pop Culture Guy at another table loudly bloviate to his [female] companion that Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth was "stunt casting", because as a Pop Culture Guy he wouldn't know that Patrick Stewart was a leading Shakespearean before he was a Star Trek character.  Those people make me furious.)

Edited by Sneakeater
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We could do semantics about what “star” means. We really could. The simple point is that she was a big deal, in movies and elsewhere, long before the late career stuff.

The Ian McKellen comparison kind of makes the point. He was an acclaimed stage and (British) TV actor for years, but unknown in movies (unless I am missing something) until he ventured into the blockbusters around 2000.

Smith had decades of high level movie work, nominations and awards, before she did the same thing. More star-ish I would say.

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