voyager Posted September 27, 2024 Share Posted September 27, 2024 At 89. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilfrid Posted September 27, 2024 Share Posted September 27, 2024 I just heard from my daughter about this. She knows her from Harry Potter, Nanny McPhee, things I just haven’t seen. So she has a tween following mourning her. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 27, 2024 Share Posted September 27, 2024 Wait’ll she sees The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 27, 2024 Share Posted September 27, 2024 (edited) This is one of those deaths you were kind of waiting for. Edited September 28, 2024 by Sneakeater Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bloviatrix Posted September 27, 2024 Share Posted September 27, 2024 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 - Quote 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?” Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
voyager Posted September 27, 2024 Author Share Posted September 27, 2024 (edited) 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 September 27, 2024 by voyager Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilfrid Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 Well exactly. She was an icon when I was a kid. But great that she had so many more audiences to delight. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mongo Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 an icon, yes, but was she a star? no denying that the mass popularity came with the harry potter movies and crapton abbey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 @mongo has it right. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 (edited) 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 September 28, 2024 by Sneakeater Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 (Similarly, I remember, long ago, hearing one of the guys who worked in my law firm's cafeteria "knowledgeably" asserting that Dead Again had a "B-cast". Kenneth Branaugh, Emma Thompson, and Derek Jacobi: REALLY?????????) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilfrid Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 Maybe I am missing the point but she won a best leading actress Oscar. She had to do more to be a “star”? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 Emma "B-List" Thompson won a Best Actress Oscar. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sneakeater Posted September 28, 2024 Share Posted September 28, 2024 (edited) Would you call Ellen Burstyn or Louise Fletcher "stars"? Edited September 28, 2024 by Sneakeater Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
voyager Posted September 28, 2024 Author Share Posted September 28, 2024 I had completely forgotten this monologue which is one of my favorite pieces. Maggie Smith in Alan Bennett's "A Bed Among the Lentils". 49 brilliantly sardonic minutes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilfrid Posted September 29, 2024 Share Posted September 29, 2024 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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