Her Biting Wit Improved With Age

“She always looks so extreme,” a fellow teacher observes of Maggie Smith’s trademark rigidity in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), putting her finger on the straight-backed, nose-high hauteur audiences enjoyed for more than half a century.

A shrill and tragically short-sighted instructor at a school full of impressionable-aged girls, Jean Brodie proved to be the defining credit of the English stage legend’s screen career, to the extent that her strict-but-caring Harry Potter character, deputy headmistress Minerva McGonagall, could be the selfsame martinet, curdled by several more decades of disappointment. (Kids who grew up on the J.K. Rowling adaptations will surely appreciate “Prime” once they’re older.)

That’s not to say she was never better. In fact, Smith, who died Friday, never gave a bad performance, and just as fine wines improve with age, that also goes for the legendary actor’s biting brand of vinegar, which became the most delicious ingredient in her run as the withering dowager of “Downton Abbey.”

Rather, playing the self-righteous Miss Brodie accentuated so many of Smith’s strengths — myopic arrogance, precise comic timing and the spite-mitigating impression that something vital had escaped her characters earlier in life — that the Oscar-winning performance echoed in practically every subsequent screen part.

It’s there in Augusta, the conspicuously manipulative old maid who’s constantly making herself the center of attention in “Travels With My Aunt” (an Oscar-nominated role she inherited from Katharine Hepburn, who was too old to play the flashback scenes). And it flares up in “Murder by Death,” “Death on the Nile” and “Evil Under the Sun,” three cheeky locked-room mysteries in which Smith’s acerbic delivery inevitably kills.

Among her gifts, Smith wielded sarcasm like a deadly weapon. She’d cut down adversaries with a flickering look or lay them low through the gymnastic range of her voice, which went from a stiletto-like whisper to a high, nasal harpoon. She won her second Oscar for losing an Oscar in “California Suite,” playing an insecure movie star married to a bisexual ex-actor (Michael Caine). Her imperious bons mots come easy in that film, though she’ll break your heart when she looks her husband in the eye and pleads, “Let it be me tonight.”

On stage, she could hold her own opposite Laurence Olivier, as her smoldering Desdemona demonstrates in “Othello” — just one of a great many roles she played for London’s National Theatre. Half a lifetime (and one investiture ceremony) later, in Roger Michell’s delightful “Tea With the Dames,” Smith sits with Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Olivier’s widow, Joan Plowright, who acknowledges that her force-of-nature husband was intimidated by Smith.

Smith and Olivier co-starred in several productions, including the Restoration comedy “The Recruiting Officer” and Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.” But it was on “Othello” that he dealt her an especially hard slap on stage. “It was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre,” quipped Smith, who was known for being as clever (and salty) in person as so many of her characters. When she received her honorific, she was told the title needn’t change anything: “You can still swear.”

And she did, falling back on words like “horrid” and “ghastly” in polite society. But Smith loved a good barb and shares more than a few in the “Dames” documentary — including a sly snipe toward Alan Bates, where she implies the closeted actor “wanted to play Cleopatra” (a role she was shrewd enough to play abroad, as she “didn’t have the courage” to do so in London).

If you were to compose a portrait of Smith — or better still, a caricature — you’d have to begin with the eyes: commanding attention magnets that they are, their lids diagonally half-drawn and strategically accentuated by false lashes. Her lips would surely appear tight, pinched in proud disapproval. Her nose, long and slender like her cheekbones, gave the 5-foot-5 lady the illusion of stature, such that she loomed large, the way a sunflower does above lesser weeds.

Apart from the Harry Potter movies — in which the wings were crowded with a Who’s Who of British acting royalty — she avoided franchises and dedicated herself instead to small productions where she might make a big impression, like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (a chance to reunite with “A Room With a View” co-star Dench) and last year’s “The Miracle Club.”

It’s not a perfect equation, but her characters seemed to get wealthier as her career went along, to the point that the aristocrat she plays in “Gosford Park” (a dry run for the Violet Crawley character in “Downton Abbey”) seems all but indifferent to the feelings of others. “It must be so disappointing that something flops like that,” she tells an American film producer (Bob Balaban), later insisting, “I haven’t a snobbish bone in my body.”

But snobbery was Smith’s specialty, which she deployed with a sniper’s precision. “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit,” she fired in “Downtown Abbey.” She was so consistently caustic in that series that, when that character thawed for even a moment, those around her might ask, “Have you changed your pills?”

Even when embodying working-class characters, like the vicar’s wife she played in “Bed Among the Lentils,” she displayed an instinct for the well-placed insult. That piercing one-woman show — an hour-long televised monologue, written by Alan Bennett, whose “The Lady in the Van” gave Smith one of her indelible last roles — reveals the kind of regret that so often went unspoken in Smith’s performances.

“At the stroke of 50, I was all set to turn into a wonderful woman,” Mrs. Vicar observes, and we can’t help being reminded of Miss Jean Brodie again: how tears welled in her eyes during that extraordinary Italian slideshow she gives her class. In that moment, we were made to understand what Miss Brodie wanted most for her “gels” (as she pronounced the word) was for them to avoid the mistakes of her own youth.

At the end of that film, the incredulous educator faces the young Judas who betrayed her, puts a quavering hand to her forehead and sighs, “I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least 50.” While Miss Brodie’s window closed much sooner, Smith’s prime went on for decades, gracing audiences until the age of 89. How fortunate we were that she never stopped working. How rare to see such a talent undiminished right up until the end.