By Peg Aloi

Maggie Smith’s finest and most memorable roles drew on her genius for dramatizing the emotional complexity of outsiders.

The late Maggie Smith in A Room With a View.

To try and summarize the long and illustrious acting career of the late Dame Maggie Smith is a task for expert crafters of obituaries and biographies. She’s won numerous prestigious awards for her decades of work including Oscars, Emmys, BAFTAs, and a Tony award. Critics tend to bookend Smith’s career between two of her most memorable roles: the fiery, iconoclastic school teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which won her a 1969 Best Actress Oscar and, beginning in 2010, the dour, witty Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey. Of course, there were literally hundreds of performances in between, spanning a career of forty plus years.

Smith’s recent death at age 89 is generating fond appreciation for her performances over the last two decades, a rare occurrence given the reality that many actresses’ box office appeal and job offers taper off as they grow older. Not so Dame Maggie. She delivered some of her most enduring work in recent efforts on TV and in film, including Downtown Abbey, the Harry Potter movie franchise (playing a prim witchy headmistress), and an engaging 2015 art house film, The Lady in the Van. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the movie (Arts Fuse review) is based on the true story of playwright Alan Bennett, who, in the ’70s, allowed an eccentric homeless pensioner (played by Smith) to park her broken down van in his driveway.  This performance gave the actress an opportunity to shine in a type of role she wasn’t normally cast in. Her character, Miss Shepherd, did not hold wealth or prestige or authority. There was no finery, no luxury: only a woman who had lived a long life who found herself in old age with very little to call her own — except her memories, her uncompromising personality, and her survival skills. It’s an incandescent performance that’s full of pathos, pain, and humor.

In addition to this stellar performance, there’s another that’s long been my favorite for its subtlety, nuance, and outstanding artistic restraint: Charlotte Bartlett in 1985’s A Room with a View. Arguably the first Merchant-Ivory film to reach a widespread audience and enter the cinematic mainstream, it is the story of a passionate romance and the upheaval it causes in a young English woman’s life when she goes on a chaperoned holiday in Italy. In what many call her breakout role, Helena Bonham-Carter plays Lucy Honeychurch with delightful quirkiness and humor, a spirited girl come of age who’s forced to behave within the confines of her class-conscious English upbringing. Her chaperone, Charlotte. is portrayed as an elderly spinster, officious and put-upon, seemingly incapable of enjoying even life’s small pleasures, from food and drink to beautiful scenery. Charlotte seems constantly irritated during their travels, and constantly scolds Lucy for behaving in a fashion unseemly for a lady. When George (Julian Sands), a romantic young swain staying in their hotel, steals a kiss from Lucy one day in the golden Tuscan countryside, Charlotte is scandalized and determined to keep the two lovers apart.

The scene that really shines for me occurs just before the illicit, impulsive kiss in a sun-drenched meadow when George stumbles upon Lucy.  Prior to this pivotal moment, Charlotte meets up with her friend Eleanor Lavish (Dame Judi Dench), a writer of romantic novels who is also in Italy. The two have a picnic lunch in the fateful meadow. Charlotte is excited to be in Eleanor’s worldly presence, even though her prim nature would seem to be in sharp contrast to Eleanor’s knowing smirks and scandalous bits of gossip. Dench creates a rich character in the dilettantish novelist whose dabbling in prurient storytelling thrills the repressed Charlotte. When Charlotte refers to travels in her youth, Eleanor giggles, insinuating Charlotte had an “adventure.” Charlotte’s downward glance, slightly embarrassed, cannot hide a demure smile of remembrance.

For me, this scene conveys the film’s emotional essence: the sense of propriety imposed upon Lucy and George is one that their older counterparts resent but haven’t the courage to publicly challenge. In that golden field lit by filtered sunlight, the two older women confide in one another about romantic entanglements of days gone by, as a new romantic connection ignites only a few yards away from them. In her hasty, imperious efforts to drag Lucy away, one can see on Charlotte’s face — only moments before lit with youthful romantic reverie — a trace of curiosity, even excitement, at an attraction that sets the film’s romantic trajectory in motion. For Charlotte and Eleanor, romantic entanglements have been imbued with secrecy or shame: Charlotte buried this aspect of her life, while Eleanor exploits it vicariously in her novels. For such a brief onscreen encounter, the women’s shared intimacy lends a profound depth to the film’s larger emotional context. And that is largely because of the delightful chemistry between the two veteran actresses. A Room With a View is ostensibly a comedy about two young lovers, but Smith and Dench embody a tragic romantic sensibility that is, in its way, deeper.

For me, the role of Bartlett is Smith’s finest and most memorable because it encapsulates her genius for displaying emotional complexity, delving into the fascinating outsider status of older women. Not the one-note humor of the waspish older matron, for which she has become known, but dramatizing what it takes to live in isolation, sometimes with dignity, sometimes, in the case of teacher Jean Brodie, with a palpable self-righteousness. And yet there is redemption and transformation when these characters break free from the social confines that hold them back. Smith’s finest performances embody this spirit of courage and open-hearted action, her characters alight with dignity in the face of change and turmoil. Her memorable roles, her greatness, will not be easily forgotten.

Peg Aloi is a former film critic for the Boston Phoenix and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Alliance for Women Film Journalists. She taught film studies in Boston for over a decade. She has written on film, TV, and culture for web publications like Time, Vice, Polygon, Bustle, Dread Central, Mic, Orlando Weekly, Refinery29, and Bloody Disgusting. Her blog “The Witching Hour” can be found on substack.