No words

It's the end of an era.

RIP, Dame Maggie Smith.

We adored you.

"The Jones Boy"

Dame Edith Evans


Joyce Grenfell


Princess Diana


Rupert Everett


Gary Lineker


Tom Stoppard


Dame Maggie Smith


Dame Janet Baker


Princess Margaret

Photography by Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, GCVO, RDI (7th March 1930 – 13th January 2017)


[with Andre Leon Talley]

RIP.

A rather dusty icon

“I think there is an accepted way that a face should be, and I’m not like that.”

“It’s what turns up, quite honestly. When I started out I didn’t have any of this in mind. Not a scrap of it. I just thought it was going to be all theatre and wonderful.”

"Old, old mad women... they seem to be the one thing I can do now. You know, it's funny to be pigeonholed so late in life, but there we are."

“If you have been around long enough you are an icon. A rather dusty icon... or a national treasure.”

Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, CH, DBE (born 28th December 1934)

How, now, brown cow

Maggie Smith once went with Kenneth Williams to Fortnum & Masons to buy a bra. Upon being told the price, she replied "Seven Guineas! It'd be cheaper to have your tits off!"

Flying for the first time in a helicopter, she observed: "I never thought I’d look down between my legs and see Guildford."

As Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello, he, in full make-up, criticised her pronunciation; she faced off to him with a stentorian "How, now, brown cow!"

On completing her most famous role after six series: "I think the wig I wore in Downton is more tired than I am!"

As Serena McKellen has it, "Maggie's got a tongue on her."

Ian McKellen on Maggie Smith - Women I've Filmed With

Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith CH DBE (born 28th December 1934)

I am old and I am scary

"There's a difference between solitude and loneliness."

"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes."

"I've been playing old parts forever. I play 93 quite often. When you've done it more than once, you take the hint."

"People think of you differently if you've been in their homes. They think they own you because they watched you while they were eating dinner, or they can turn you up or down, or even freeze you."

"I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing."

"I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen."

"Old people are scary. And I have to face it. I am old and I am scary."

Many happy returns today to another of our most revered goddesses of the acting profession, Dame Maggie Smith - she, too is 80 years old. Long may she reign, and long may she continue to be scary...

Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith, DBE, CH (born 28th December 1934)

Oh no, how will we cope..?

It's the last episode of this series of Downton Abbey on Sunday!

Good job some queens are keeping the spirit alive...





And dykes..





...and even Cecil Beaton's channelling Lady Mary!

Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness

by Lewis Morley, 1970


by Graham Wood, 1974


by Cecil Beaton, 1955


by Arnold Newman, 1978


Statue in tribute to Sir John at St Pancras station, one of the buildings he helped to save from demolition.

"How much more interesting and worth writing about his subjects are than most other modern poets. I mean, whether so-and-so achieves some metaphysical inner unity is not really so interesting to us as the overbuilding of rural Middlesex." - Philip Larkin

In celebration of what would have been the birthday today of Poet Laureate, foe of "modernism", saviour of beautiful buildings, railway fan and "national treasure" Sir John Betjeman, here is a marvellous reading - to the delight of the great man himself - by none other than Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith (on the Parkinson show in February 1973) of his poem Death in Leamington:

Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith - Death in Leamington

Sir John Betjeman, CBE (28th August 1906 - 19th May 1984)