When we last saw Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, she was seated in a dimly lit room as her family waltzed the night away just outside the door. In the sobering twist towards the end of the first Downton Abbey movie, she requests a heart-to-heart with her granddaughter.
“I may not have long to live,” the Dowager Countess says plainly to Lady Mary, played by Michelle Dockery, her satin-gloved hand holding tight to her walking stick.
The thought of Downton existing without the biting wit of Smith’s character was both expected and devastating. I lamented the likelihood during my interview with the cast, for the cover of Town & Country, in the months ahead of the film’s release.
“If there’s another movie and she’s not in it,” I said, my voice trailing off. “I know, I know,” Laura Carmichael offered with Lady Edith’s signature dismay. Ever the practical problem solver, Allen Leech channeled Tom Branson with a solution: “That movie would just be us recanting the greatest lines the Dowager Countess has ever said.”
Downton Abbey: A New Era, in theaters now, is a fitting ode to the show’s unexpected breakout star. When the television series premiered in 2010, it was not a given that the elderly matriarch of the Grantham family would become the most beloved out of the sprawling ensemble cast. But in the hands of Maggie Smith, the Dowager Countess was no shrinking violet. Her zingers—succinct, often biting, always revealing—leapt out amid the show’s famously sparse dialogue. She had the ability to snap this long-ago world into perspective, either as so gloriously different (perhaps her most famous line is the delicious “What is a weekend?”) or very much relevant to today (social media would benefit from the reminder that “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.”) The Dowager had the final word, always; no family member would dare to respond beyond a raised eyebrow.
What’s more, in a period drama that convinced us to all like period dramas again, her lines were the quotable quotes, tweets from an era of telegrams. The Internet has delighted in “best of” lists, including “I never argue, I explain” or “Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class.” The quips through six seasons and a movie proved so memorable and prolific that they are strung together in montages of 10 minutes or more on YouTube. Violet’s exchanges with Cousin Isobel Crawley, played by Penelope Wilton, are among the most memorable. “How you hate to be wrong,” Isobel offers. “I wouldn’t know,” Violet counters. “I’m not familiar with the sensation.”
Downton’s creator-writer Julian Fellowes based the character on his eldest great aunt “who was quite a tough character. But she was no tougher on anyone else than she was on herself,” he said on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2013. He praised Smith’s “extraordinary skill to bring many different aspects of a character into her delineation, but they never seem contradictory… a lesser actor would, you know, find it difficult to be kind and cruel simultaneously or superficial here but quite deep here. But she manages to synthesize all these elements into a believable woman.”
Violet is a type Fellowes knows well, but even though some of his other characters—like Christine Baranski's Agnes van Rhijn on The Gilded Age—have some similarities, he's told T&C that Downton's dowager stands alone. “I don't know there's all that much point in comparing Maggie and Christine, except to say they're both jolly good,” he recently said. “But I’ll tell you what they can both do, is they can play high comedy and then one or two scenes later make you cry. They don't turn into someone else, they're true to their characters, but they can take you through that range of emotions.”
Downton has had quite an effect on the 88-year-old Smith herself. Although she boasts a storied career, with screen credits dating back to the 1950s, it was her residence at Highclere Castle that catapulted her into a kind of disruptive fame. (Well, that and the Harry Potter movies.) “I find it very difficult to do anything on my own now because people recognize me,” she told the same radio show in 2016. “This has never happened to me before because I haven't really done television before…I blame the whole thing on television.”
The thought of approaching Maggie Smith in public makes me anxious—who would dare!— perhaps because her on-screen presence had such a regal feel. She was often sitting on set, always being received in a chair or watching the drama unfolding before her. When she rose, with her walking stick in hand, it was with great effort and effect, prompting scurrying from those nearby. Her costumes added to the Queen-like feel, with a tiara perched high on her head or a sumptuous high-neck blouse framing her face.
But for as consistent as her presence was on screen, the question of how long she would continue on Downton bubbled up early on. In 2012, when the British tabloids reported on rumors she might not return for the fourth season, the outcry was as swift as it was fierce. “It’s hard to imagine the series without Maggie Smith,” an anonymous source told the Daily Mirror, to which the Guardian replied, “Massive understatement…She personifies the series’ inimitably eccentric combination of gravitas and hilarity. Downton would not be Downton without her.”
When the sixth season of the television wrapped, Fellowes floated the idea of a possible movie, which Smith shut down immediately. “I'm glad it's over, I really am,” she told the Graham Norton Show in 2015.“By the time we finished she must have been about 110. It couldn't go on and on, it just didn't make sense.”
How very Dowager of her. And yet, she returned. Not just for the first film but now the second, which provides a definitive and worthy send off. [Spoilers ahead!] A New Era offers updates on all the show’s main characters, but the Dowager plays a pivotal role in both of the major storylines. The film opens with the revelation that Violet has been bequeathed a villa in the South of France from a past paramour. While Lord Grantham and crew go off to investigate, and discuss her from afar but at length, Violet stays behind at Downton, where a movie crew has come to film.
The latter proves irresistible fodder for the Dowager Countess—and perhaps, the woman who plays her. “I’d rather make a living down a mine,” she says, viewing the set with disdain. When the movie shifts from silent to sound, Violet offers, “I should’ve thought the best thing about films is that you couldn’t hear them.”
But perhaps her best line is saved for last, for the goodbye nobody wanted but we all knew would come. As the family gathers around Violet’s bedside in her final moments, her lady’s maid begins wailing inconsolably. “Stop that noise,” the Dowager says. “I can’t hear myself die.”
Elizabeth Holmes is a New York Times bestselling author of HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style, an exploration of the power of fashion inspired by her popular Instagram series. A veteran multimedia reporter, Elizabeth spent a decade on staff at the Wall Street Journal. She is a contributing editor at Town & Country; her work has also appeared in a host of other outlets, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Elle. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three young children.
