Julian Fellowes: ‘I’ll never know another partnership equal to the one I had with Maggie Smith’

In Violet Grantham, Dame Maggie Smith created ‘a benevolent tyrant’ with a universality that Julian Fellowes ‘couldn’t have imagined’

I first became aware of Maggie in 1964, when I was 15 years old, and my mother had taken me to see Othello with Laurence Olivier, in a desperate attempt to inject some culture into me.

As we were leaving after the play, she turned and asked me what I’d thought of it. “Well,” I said, “it was Desdemona’s evening.” And so it was, in the hands of the young Maggie Smith.

Of course, by the time we came to work together, I had enjoyed her performances in many plays and films over the years, and so it was rather daunting to hear that she had accepted an offer from Robert Altman to appear in the first of my film scripts to get made, Gosford Park.

Altman had paid me the unusual compliment of asking me to be on set throughout, and a certain tightness of funding meant that we would spend the first week in the bedroom of Maggie’s character, Lady Trentham, while the crew prepared the rest of the house, in reality Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, for the remainder of the work.

From the first day, Maggie was a very impressive presence. She was already honoured and successful, of course, but it was more than that. She had a kind of built-in superiority, tempered by wit, which she could employ in her work if she so chose.

She was polite, precise and professional, always prepared, always meticulous. I remember she asked me a single question during the week: “What is it about bought marmalade that is feeble?”

I told her that a great aunt of mine had said that if a country house ran out of its own jams and jellies, either the cook or the still-room maid did not know what they were doing. “Got it,” she replied and delivered the related line perfectly, which resulted in my receiving a regular supply of home-made marmalade to this day.

Maggie always had a keen perception of character and what it was exactly that she was being asked to do. Above all, she never needed to have the humour of a line explained, and happily my brand of slightly ironic, under-stated comedy suited her to a T.

Sometimes she saw what others did not. In the film, the producer, Mr Weissman, talks about a thriller he is making. “And who turns out to have done it?” asks Lady Trentham, to which he replies that he can’t say as it would spoil the film for them.

“But none of us will see it,” she replies. The problem was that Bob Altman couldn’t understand why this was funny. People work hard to make a film. Why is it funny that no one will see it? Naturally, all the actors started to agree, as they do, and I was left on the edge of the set, watching one of my best laughs being excised, powerless in my misery to save it, when suddenly Maggie spoke up. “I think I can make it work, Bob,” she said firmly, and I was rescued. The line was used in most of the trailers.

This was a strange time for me. The film opened and my life as a screen-writer was entirely altered largely, I would say, by the performance of Maggie, who made my work shine.

We went through the success of the film together, when we were both nominated, partying in Hollywood and the like, and I will never forget her real delight, clapping furiously, as I walked down the aisle to collect my prize. When I think of it now, it makes me cry.

So naturally, when, some years later, Gareth Neame, the producer, approached me with the idea of going back into Gosford territory for television, somehow Maggie was already at the top of my list, even before the scripts were written. But this time the tone was different. I knew Maggie even better by then. I’d directed her in a family film, From Time to Time, and I remember she suffered from Shingles while we were making it, but when I said the word “Action”, that was forgotten until the shot was complete.

But Gosford Park had been quite a dark film, an angry one in fact, and I knew that people would not want to come back every Sunday for a telling-off. It was necessary for the new series, soon christened Downton Abbey, to be a kinder, warmer place, and I wondered at first if Maggie would be up for that different approach. But I needn’t have worried.

She brought the same mixture of wit and wisdom I had come to expect, in a subtler performance than many realised. The much-quoted moment, “What is a weekend?”, was a surprise even to me, as I think I had expected a sort of Lady Bracknell moment of astonished revulsion, when what we got was a bewildered throw-away, much less obvious, much funnier, than I had given her credit for.

Over the years, in Violet Grantham, she created a benevolent tyrant with a universality that I couldn’t have imagined.

Now, wherever I go in the world, I am often told that the speaker thinks I must have known their grandmother, their aunt, their mother-in-law, as they were so like Violet. Somehow Maggie created a type that cut across nationality or class or anything else, and by doing so she helped the show to cross those borders with her.

Obviously the series was very English, and Lady Grantham quintessentially so, but in Maggie’s hands the character became universal, too. I am sometimes asked to pick my favourite Violet moment, and I think it would be when she walks through the hall, going towards the drawing room, after hearing of the death of her granddaughter Sybil.

Maggie crosses the floor, facing away from the camera, a broken, elderly woman in the throes of grief, and then she pauses, stiffens her back, lifting her head to regain her authority, and goes forward to meet her family. This is the kind of acting that makes legends and raises the material to a level we could not have aspired to without her.

She was always fairly disdainful of the production, and carefully ambivalent about whether or not she enjoyed the increase of fame that meant she could no longer shop in Waitrose, or anywhere else, without being followed and confronted. I don’t know if she even watched the show, really, although I suspect her own perfectionism would have obliged her to watch at least some of it.

What I do know is that we gave her – and she gave herself – a final chapter that meant there had been no diminution to her career at all. Most actors who live long lives rely on memories to bring them back at the end, clippings from the 60s, 70s, 80s, to remind us of what they were once capable of. Maggie’s talent was a living thing that shone brightly to the very last. I remain unbelievably grateful for that, and I know I will never know another partnership to equal what I shared with her.

God bless her, and may she rest in well-earned peace.

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