Lifestyle
Sharp-tongued, indomitable, and beloved actress Dame Maggie Smith dies at 89
Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and traversed the stage and screen – has died at age 89. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Friday morning, her publicist confirmed.
Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would’ve dared try.
Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey‘s formidable Lady Violet.
Act One: Precise diction in her prime
What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early. She arrived on the professional stage in her teens, and graduated quickly to Britain’s National Theater, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of restoration comedy, and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.
Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 — her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
“Give me a gherll at an impressionable age,” she purred, “and she is mine for life.”
The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including Travels With My Aunt and Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Show, and on stage, held title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.
All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn’t want to “sob all over Burt Reynolds.”
No sobs in Smith’s actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.
Act Two: Best exotic roles, some written just for her
All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith’s career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in A Room with a View, primly comic as the mother superior in Sister Act with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van, and downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Though he’d been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that point, there was such venom in her declaration that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody,” that McKellen looked shaken. As well he might.
Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and Lovage specifically for her, about an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide “to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And above all wit — her presence is witty. ”
Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton
And then Smith’s career — for which she’d been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and later a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor — had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she’d known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).
And while she was casting spells on kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV’s Downton Abbey, where for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloof, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.
That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess’ most famously clueless question — “what is a weekend?” — might almost have been her own.
Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: An LAX flirtation had me on cloud nine. Could we land the plane?
My brother dropped me off curbside at Los Angeles International Airport and yelled, “Run!” Our timing getting to LAX was thwarted by the kind of notorious L.A. traffic that airline change fees and crushed dreams are made of. Departure to Newark, N.J., was at 8:05 a.m.
It was 7:25 a.m.
I raced through the terminal and up the escalator, two steps at a time, with a carry-on and boots that were not made for running. The line to get through security was a mile long.
“Am I going to make it?” I deliriously asked the TSA agent as I handed him my boarding pass, shaking from the mad dash.
Without a word, he whisked me past a serpentine of travelers and straight to the metal detector. I was baffled. Maybe he was psychic. I thanked him profusely and kept running.
I couldn’t miss this flight.
My mother insisted I fly “home” to New Jersey for my birthday — her treat. I was deep into a drifting divorce, disillusioned, depressed and avoiding the other “D” word … dating. I also was hiding from the unwelcome advances once the word got out. I felt perpetual dread and I felt wobbly. “Snap out of it,” Cher kept telling me in my mind.
By the time I got to Gate 40, I was giddy from shock and out of breath. I looked around and exhaled.
To my left was a tall, bald man wearing glasses and a tweed blazer. He looked familiar. “Who is that?” I whispered to the also tall, handsome man to my right, holding a coffee cup and wondering if I was talking to him.
He looked at me quizzically and squinted: “Isn’t that the guy who wrote ‘L.A. Confidential’?”
Bingo. Impressive. But neither one of us could remember his name. It was fun trying.
Suddenly, I felt compelled to tell this lovely man how close I came to missing the flight, how much traffic there was, how fast I ran, in boots with a heel, and how I imagined he‘d probably experienced the same exact thing minus the boots.
No. He had gotten there hours before, breezed through security and was on his third cup of coffee.
Boarding started. It felt like we both wished there were more time. “It was nice talking with you. Have a great trip,” I said and meant it.
“You too,” he said, smiling back.
Sparks flew.
After the in-flight movie ended, I looked up, and there he was. I waved; I was glad to see him again. I thought he was on his way to the restroom. He wasn’t. He‘d come to find me. It was good I had an aisle seat.
For the next two hours, we dove in, surrounded by strangers.
He’d spent the last few years in L.A. dating around since his divorce. He seemed as universally disillusioned as I was and had told his mom a few days before that he was giving up.
At one point, he knelt down in the aisle to get closer. His salt-and-pepper cool felt warm. He touched my shoulder a few times. I didn’t mind. He was confident, funny and very much a grown man who also seemed impervious to heavy turbulence.
People in the rows nearby could hear everything we were saying. Some were staring. Some climbed over him. Then the beverage cart came butting in. We made plans to have dinner when we returned to L.A. He gave me his card.
“That was incredible,” said the woman next to me, who had pretended to be asleep to give us some privacy. It was incredible. A big cloud lifted. I couldn’t stop smiling.
When I got to baggage claim, there he was again. I told him my mom was coming to pick me up. “Can I meet your mom?”
Her SUV was waiting exactly where we exited. She ran out to hug me and open the liftgate, wondering who this guy was carrying my luggage.
“Mom, this is Mark. We met on the plane,” I said.
“Hi, I’m your daughter’s new boyfriend,” he said as if it were already true.
Without missing a beat, she shot back: “Good, because you’re very handsome.” We said goodbye in a flurry.
“What happened to you on that flight? You’re different. You’re going to marry him,” my mom said emphatically.
I stuttered. I kind of believed her. I was different. Over the next week, we texted and decided on Terroni for dinner, a mutual Italian favorite.
He was waiting for me out front. We spent five hours in a booth drinking, eating and laughing. When we were in the middle of dessert, fireworks went off from the Christmas tree lighting nearby at the Grove. Everyone ran outside. He sat next to me when we came back in for the first kiss. We closed the place down. We didn’t want the night to end.
He made me an engagement ring out of a plastic swizzle stick a few nights later at a sushi bar. We didn’t feel like we were moving too fast. We felt like we couldn’t move fast enough.
With that, I had to move my divorce from stalled to finalized. Quick.
Both of our marriages had come to screeching halts very unexpectedly. He had years of healing under his belt. I was still in the thick of it. I was stuck in quicksand, and he helped pull me out. His patience was steady as I cut cords and untangled myself.
We had planned to get married at a rooftop L.A. restaurant, with skyline views past the smog, to symbolize how we met and fell in love. Exactly two weeks beforehand, however, my mother was rushed to the ER with critical embolisms. We flew a red-eye back East with my brother and his wife.
Miraculously, my mom recovered but couldn’t fly. We canceled the wedding. She was adamant that we still get married on the day we planned: July 8. It was July 7.
Because my brother was going to marry us anyway, we thought: Why not get married on the plane? Flying back to L.A. from New Jersey, the same way we met but in reverse?
And we did. Flying over Tulsa, Okla.
United Airlines published an in-flight magazine story about our on-the-fly midair ceremony with the headline, “On This Flight, I Thee Wed.” Ring-size steel hose clamps from the hardware store served as stand-in wedding bands. A flight attendant crafted a bouquet out of tissues.
“Do you believe in life after love?” I do now, Cher. I finally snapped out of it.
The author is a creative writer and producer who is directing the music-based documentary “Play That, Teo.” She’s a recovering stand-up comic, proudly from New Jersey and now residing in Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @olanadigirolamo
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Lifestyle
Dear Life Kit: My wife wants to use the last of our savings for a 4th round of IVF
Have a question you want to ask Dear Life Kit anonymously? Share it here. For our next episode, we’re looking for your queries on crushes or drama in the workplace.
Dear Life Kit is NPR’s advice column, where experts answer tricky questions about relationships, social etiquette, work culture and more.
This question was answered by marriage and family therapist Moraya Seeger DeGeare. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dear Life Kit,
My wife and I have tried and failed to have a child via in vitro fertilization three times, and we are now scraping the bottom of our savings. We’re both heartbroken.
She wants to use the last of our savings to try one more time. But I want to move on and try to adopt a child.
She focuses on how she may never have a child. She often cries or gets angry if someone plays a movie on TV with pregnancy or childbirth in the plot. Our daily conversations veer into crisis as our focus returns to babies. I don’t know how to help her. — Baby Blues
My heart truly goes out to both of you. I’ve worked with couples working through this, and there’s no right and wrong.
We’re looking at several questions: How do I support this person I love? Should we try IVF again? And how can I tend to my grief when my partner is weeping next to me?
The first thing to do is calm your bodies down. There is a lot of pain here. Come together as a couple to bring less stress to your life. Work out together, meditate, go to therapy.
Once you both get to a place of calm, have a conversation about your emotions regarding the decision to try IVF again. One partner may be driven by practicality or the fear of losing money. Another may be driven by the desire to experience pregnancy. You may find that you have the same fears, but are expressing your feelings very differently.
Ask yourself some hard questions. Is the clock ticking in terms of a potential pregnancy? If we spend the money on IVF, how are we going to recoup the savings? What fears does your partner have about fostering and adoption?
Then talk about what a meaningful life looks like for the both of you. We often attach ourselves to what the future is going to look like. When we do that, we attach to so many factors outside our control, like having a baby. But there are some aspects of the future that you do have autonomy over, like financial stability and healthy relationships. How can you flourish and create a beautiful life together? Create a plan around that.
Don’t forget to allow yourself to grieve. It’s easier to hold onto hope for a pregnancy when we allow ourselves to accept the idea that it might not happen, but also say it’s OK to try.
This story was written by Malaka Gharib. It was edited by Beck Harlan and Andee Tagle. The visual editor is Beck Harlan.
We’d love to hear from you. Email us at LifeKit@npr.org. Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter.
Lifestyle
Steelers Need To Formally Name Justin Fields Starting QB, Ryan Clark Says
TMZSports.com
Ryan Clark no longer plays for Mike Tomlin, but if he did … he’s making it clear he’d tell the Steelers head coach he needs to officially name Justin Fields the starting quarterback ASAP.
The former Pittsburgh defensive back said in an interview with TMZ Sports this week he believes a formal announcement would help his ex-team immensely going forward.
Of course, Tomlin has yet to do it … as he still appears to be debating on whether or not the team should stick with Fields, or flip to Russell Wilson whenever the former Super Bowl champion is 100 percent healthy.
Fields, though, has been very good through the Steelers’ first three games — leading Pitt to a 3-0 record — and Clark says it’s now about time the 25-year-old signal-caller gets control of the reins fully.
“I loved the fact that every week I knew we were going to line up with Ben Roethlisberger and if he threw an interception and if it went bad that he was our guy and we were sticking with him,” Clark said.
TMZ Studios
“Having that indecision and not necessarily knowing that it’s going to be Justin Fields the rest of the season or it could be Russell Wilson, that’s a little difficult.”
Nonetheless, Clark praised Fields for handling the situation super well.
As for if he thinks the Steelers can keep up the hot streak with or without the formal naming of a QB1 — Clark said definitely … as long as the team continues to get solid play from the quarterback position.
TMZSports.com
You can catch Clark talking more about QBs and the rest of the NFL’s hot topics on this week’s episode of “Inside the NFL” — which airs on the CW later Friday.
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