Maggie Smith thought she was famous after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in 1969; she gave a glorious, Oscar-winning performance in her mid-30s in the movie based on the Muriel Spark novel, and no actor ever intuited Spark’s world more brilliantly. Smith became the Edinburgh schoolmistress (and, oh dear, the term “schoolteacher” won’t do at all). Her Miss Jean Brodie is imperious, haughty, vulnerable, sexually attractive, prone to admiring fascism and terribly lonely. Her delicate, open face registered a kind of wounded and delusional idealism and poignantly absurd conceit, a complicated, funny portrayal that went above and beyond a hackneyed comedy of “spinsterism”.
Nearly 20 years later, in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne from 1987, she played a rather Brodie-esque woman being courted by the unreliable Bob Hoskins; it was a more serious performance, and in 1993, she received a special Bafta for her remarkable screen career.
