Maggie Smith: A Biography (35 page)

Thompson had based her script on several of Christianna Brand’s
Nurse Matilda
books which were illustrated by her cousin, Edward Ardizzone. They had heard the stories about the hideously ugly nursemaid from their grandfather, and it’s interesting that Thompson makes no bones about making her grotesquely repellent, with a face full of warts and a straggly single tooth that hangs down over her lower lip like a stalactite.

It all makes for an unusual addition to the literature of children’s films, Nanny McPhee an obvious antidote to the saccharine ministrations of Mary Poppins, say, or Deborah Kerr in
The King and I
, and there’s no chance of a romantic entanglement. She’s got her good heart, her magic bike and powers, and her trusty raven, Edelweiss (and that name conjures another Rodgers and Hammerstein child-minder, Maria in
The Sound of Music
). Maggie’s Mrs Doherty is married to Sam Kelly’s air-raid warden, a likeable refugee from
Dad’s Army
, and there are nice cameos from Ralph Fiennes as an austere ‘high up’ in the Foreign Office, from Daniel Mays as a flustered chauffeur, comedian Bill Bailey as a neighbouring farmer and Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand as the henchwomen from hell.

It’s interesting that Maggie, like Judi Dench, often decides what to do on the basis of who else is doing it. Considerations of the script itself (that can be worked on) as well as the congeniality of the conditions, locations and general set-up come a little later. In
Nanny McPhee
she has far less to do than she has in either
Ladies in Lavender
or
Keeping Mum
but she adds a little sheen of class to the proceedings and confirms her place at the heart of new British comedy films. They may not have been all-time classics, these three, but they gave a lot of pleasure to an awful of people. And, she did sit on a cow pat (‘Very comfy!’) in the picnic scene.

‘Cast children you like,’ was Richard Eyre’s advice to his colleague Simon Curtis when the latter was casting
David Copperfield
. The Dickens television film happened in the first place because of Maggie’s desire to play Betsey Trotwood. And both Curtis and Maggie liked Daniel Radciffe very much indeed. One day on filming at a country house, Curtis recalls, ten-year-old Daniel wandered off on his own down to the fish pond and he thought it a good opportunity to dash after him and have one of those ‘arms round shoulder’ moments every actor needs now and again. Although he is the son of a literary agent and a casting director, Daniel had no definite intention, at that stage, of becoming a fully fledged professional actor. After
David Copperfield
he planned to resume his schooling. ‘Whatever happens,’ Curtis told him, ‘even if you do become an actor, you will never again play the title role in a famous novel with Maggie Smith in the cast, as well as so many other great British actors.’ Years later, amused at his own lack of wizard-like prophetic powers, Curtis says that it was Maggie’s advocacy of his talent and likeability with the Potter producers that led to Daniel making the move that changed his life.

Maggie donned her wizard’s hat for the Harry Potter movies in the very first of the series without knowing where she would end up. She was an instant hit, but Professor Minerva McGonagall – deputy headmistress of Hogwarts, head of Gryffindor House and Professor of Transfiguration – was never going to be one of her greatest roles, even though her association with the franchise gave it an initial credibility that its own runaway success soon transcended. There was no great story for her character and she herself said (and we could see) that she had less and less to do as the movies went on. She was less essential to the narrative than she was in
Downton Abbey
, which started filming as the Harry Potter series drew to a conclusion. These two mega-mythical blockbusters – boy beats monsters and bad wizards; monster madam rules the roost as queen of the country house castle – have dominated the last fifteen years of her professional life, and it’s a testament to her insatiable appetite and professional desire that she’s continued doing a whole lot of other decent, perhaps lower profile but more demanding, work in this period while investing both the
Harry Potter
high-jinks and the high-class soap suds of
Downton
with such wit, class and energy.

The appeal of Potter is partly to do with the reappropriation of ancient myths, from Beowulf defeating the dreaded Grendel (and Grendel’s mother) in the great hall – not dissimilar to the great hall at Hogwarts – to such other quest adventures as in Arthurian legend, the
Lord of the Rings
,
Oedipus Rex
,
Jason and the Argonauts
and the Famous Five of Enid Blyton. The saga taps every sort of childhood folkloric fantasy, with tragic undertones in the films, inflating them to a new level of cinematic weirdness and, in online quasi-academic circles, bulging critical perspectives. But over the eight films, what stays with you most is the roster of great performances, from Ralph Fiennes’s noseless Lord Voldemort (he looks at first like a head-stockinged bank robber with a voice problem, the ultimate baddie who’s responsible for wasting Harry’s parents), to Robbie Coltrane’s screen-filling, good old hirsute Hagrid, Kenneth Branagh’s narcissistic, hilarious, scene-stealing Gilderoy Lockhart, David Bradley’s embittered, scrawny ancient caretaker, Filch, Helena Bonham Carter’s horrid Bellatrix Lestrange, Miranda Richardson’s outlandish squeaky journalist, Rita Skeeter, Jim Broadbent’s carefully observed Horace Slughorn, a donnish eccentric and semi-retired Potions master, and, especially, Alan Rickman’s sinister Snape, stalking the corridors and back passages like Hamlet’s ghostly dad, smelling a rat and realising that smell is under his own nose all the time because it can’t go away.

Michael Gambon’s benign, Irish-inflected head of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, was a turn that developed unexpectedly, and beautifully, after the static, wispy dignity of Richard Harris in the role in the first two films. Bill Nighy was delighted to be cast, albeit belatedly, in
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
, because that meant he was no longer, he said, the only English actor not appearing at all in the series. He made up for his late entry by scarily filling the screen in his first shot as Rufus Scrimgeour, the new Minister for Magic, reassuring the nation that in dark times his ministry remained strong. There did indeed come a point when the nation of actors divided into those who had been in a Harry Potter film and those who hadn’t. And those who had, as in the case of, say, David Ryall (now dead, but a stalwart of the Laurence Olivier years at the National Theatre) or Frances de la Tour (a brilliantly distinctive artist with a long record of appearances at the RSC and the National), would always be tagged as
Harry Potter
actors; no harm done in de la Tour’s case as she’s a hilarious bonus in the
Goblet of Fire
episode as Olympe Maxime, head of the French girls’ school of wizards competing in the tournament, before she gets down and foxy with Hagrid at the Yule Ball.

The fans will have worked out where exactly Maggie’s Professor McGonagall fits into all this, and into the evolving friendship of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and their dependable, clever friend Hermione Granger (the entrancing Emma Watson). But from the start she’s a benign presence in her glimmering visage and curly high wizard’s hat. Her surname is that of the nineteenth-century Scottish bard of low-grade doggerel, William McGonagall, while Minerva, in ancient history, is the Roman goddess of wisdom. It’s she who welcomes the new pupils to the four houses of Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw (enunciating those names with a deadly precision that makes them sound funny), and she who tries continuously to keep Harry from danger and on the straight and narrow. She does a brilliant cat transformation in class in the first film (reminding us where she came from at the start) and orders the pupils back to their dormitories when told of their attempt to steal the Philosopher’s Stone. But she’s a helpful, transgressing presence, too, mixing her disciplinarian tartness with a softer, more positive side – this trait is repeated in Maggie’s portrait of the Downton dowager – for instance, sending Harry his first broom, a privilege not normally open to first-year students, and recommending him as the Seeker on the Gryffindor Quidditch team.

In the second movie,
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
, she teaches, in a lovely Miss Brodie-like scene, how to change animals into water goblets, and later on warns that Hogwarts will close if a stop is not put (come on, Harry!) to all these Petrification attacks. But with the incursion of Gambon’s Dumbledore, she recedes in the third film, Alfonso Cuarón’s
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
, to a tame role
in
loco parentis
. In a hazily filmed sequence in a pub with veteran Old Vic alumnus Robert Hardy as Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic whom Nighy succeeded, she merely fills in a bit of back story about Sirius Black (Gary Oldman, another supporting star, when allowed to crackle through the fiery furnace), Harry’s godfather, who supposedly betrayed his parents. Despite minimising Maggie, this is my own personal favourite of the series, followed by the next one, Mike Newell’s
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
.

Both these movies, in different ways, especially the Cuarón film, guard against repetitive production tropes and explore a new language of film and lighting.
Goblet of Fire
is particularly good, too, because the narrative outlines are so classic and clear. Harry – who is a boy, not a piece of meat, Maggie sternly reminds Dumbledore – is embroiled in a tri-wizard tourney of three Herculean tasks: the collection of an egg from a dragon, the underwater rescue of stolen treasure, and the recovery of the trophy in a dangerous maze. En route, Maggie’s Professor berates Brendan Gleeson’s eye-swivelling colleague, Alastor Moody, expert in Defence Against the Dark Arts, informing him that ‘we never use transfiguration as a punishment’ after he’s transformed the bully-boy Malfoy – the young actor playing this blond and nasty piece of work, Tom Felton, is like an embryonic Christoph Waltz – and announces the Yule Ball on Christmas Eve as a night of well-mannered frivolity. This is the scene where Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) and Jarvis Cocker make an appearance, so Minerva’s worst fears for the evening are probably justified, though not shared by anyone else; it’s a real blast, as opposed to a fictional one.

There’s even less for Maggie to do in the fifth film,
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
, though she does it quite well, even buttoning her lip in longshot during a new-term welcome. But she does spring back to life in a tasty face-off with Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge, the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and, eventually, reforming headmistress, questioning her ‘medieval methods’ as though she was the new media-unfriendly Mary Whitehouse. It’s a key moment in the running, subordinate fear that Hogwarts is going off the rails. And this is the film where Harry, Ron and Hermione edge towards their new pubescent relationships, Harry kissing Cho Chang under the mistletoe – the love of his life, Ron’s sister Ginny (the excellent Bonnie Wright), is warming up in the background – while Ron and Hermione form a new kind of submerged alliance that is sweetly approved of by their mutual friend Harry. It’s because of this development, and also because of Harry’s growing attachment to his dead parents, that Harry can announce confidently to Voldemort – their battle to the death coming into focus – that he, Voldemort, is the weak one: ‘You’ll never know love or friendship.’ There’s no answer to that. Ron and Hermione know, too, that they have something Voldemort doesn’t have, something worth fighting for. Increasingly, that something is each other.

‘Why is it,’ Maggie asks in the sixth film,
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
, ‘when something happens, it’s always you three?’ And she’s lost her hat, too. But it’s back on later as she mourns Dumbledore, everyone raising their wands as the sky rumbles overhead. Snape has killed Dumbledore with the time-honoured curse of ‘Avada Kedavra’ (which sounds suspiciously like the panto imprecation in
Aladdin
, ‘Abracadabra’) and Harry is now in hot pursuit of the Horcruxes. The last two films of the series are increasingly dark and violent, as Voldemort and his band of Death Eaters call the shots, Snape takes over (with a Voldemort agenda) as head of Hogwarts, and Harry goes in pursuit of his Excalibur, the sword of Gryffindor bequeathed to him by Dumbledore. Maggie’s not in the first
Deathly Hallows
, but turns up in the second one (at the point of its release, the third-highest grossing film of all time) to bolster Harry’s resolution. As all hell breaks loose, she promises to secure the castle and give Harry all the time he needs to do the necessary. She also mobilises the Gothic armed statuary around the place, with a wicked gurgle of ‘I’ve always wanted to use that spell!’

The key twist in the plot is the killing of Snape by Voldemort, which leads to the passing of the Elder Wand (which Snape took hold of when he killed Dumbledore) and of his memories (in a magic vial) to Harry. There follows the devastation and ruin of Hogwarts, with Maggie moving mournfully through the chaos like Clytemnestra in the palace at Thebes. Before the final battle, and the scenes of resistance, she stands alone, hair straggled down her right cheek, not involved. It’s one of the weaknesses of the series that she’s not given a story, and she fades away completely as Harry faces his near-nemesis. Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore, on the other hand, has grown in paternal stature through the films, even after his death, and there’s no end to the twists and turns of fate and fortune in the tales of Snape, Hagrid, Sirius – even Harry’s mum, who is so touchingly sketched in by Geraldine Somerville. Pottermania has taken over the world, the cinematic equivalent of the (to me) mysteriously long-running wizard musical
Wicked
. In that show, the best song is about defying gravity. In
Harry Potter
, the age-old trials of heroism are re-imagined in a school environment. That’s what’s so clever, and appealing, about the stories.

And on film we see the growing up and maturation of Harry, Ron and Hermione in a way we simply can’t, really, from the books. Daniel Radcliffe remains gawky and geeky throughout, but with a stillness and modesty that make his journey utterly enthralling. His post-Potter portfolio, already considerable, includes London and Broadway stage appearances in Peter Shaffer’s
Equus
(with the late Richard Griffiths, his loathsome suburban Uncle Vernon in the movies) as well as such unexpected film diversions as the atmospheric horror movie of
The Woman in Black
(2012) and as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg in
Kill Your Darlings
(2013). Rupert Grint manages to ring all sorts of changes to his fixed expression of horrified disbelief (his mouth is like a large, hyperactive oyster) and would prove himself a fine stage actor, too, in a West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s
Mojo
in 2013. And Emma Watson puts down her marker for future stardom in every move she makes, mixing a continuous career with taking an English literature degree, conquering the fashion and modelling world, training to teach meditation and yoga, and launching a United Nations campaign for women’s rights and gender equality. I guess after what these kids went through with
Harry Potter
the sky’s the limit, and perhaps not even that.

While these films were adapted from novels, what she really liked about
Downton Abbey
, said Maggie, was that it wasn’t an adaptation of anything at all and gave her ‘proper things to say’. The series launched in 2010 and was an instant hit, touching a television-watching nerve that hadn’t been tickled since the 1970s series of
Upstairs, Downstairs
, which attracted 300 million viewers internationally and won numerous Emmy awards in the United States. Whatever pious politicians say about the benefits of a ‘classless society’ we Brits remain absolutely obsessed with rank and hierarchy. What’s so funny about Maggie Smith’s dowager of Downton is that it’s basically a piss-take; but so good a piss-take that everyone takes it for real, because that’s how we’d like to view our decaying aristocracy.