Maggie Smith’s Ageless Dignity

Hook, 1991

Maggie Smith was “old” for my entire life.

The first time I saw her as a kid, she was playing an Granny Wendy in Hook. I didn’t know she was wearing prosthetics and was only in her 50s. She always seemed so comfortable in those older roles. Her Wendy was magnetic, with a sharp vitality but also a sorrow for her lost Neverland. She brought that quality to her most famous roles, a conservative Mother Superior in Sister Act, Professor McGonagall, or the matriarch of Downton Abbey—characters who yearned for and protected an old world, even as her eyes told us she knew the future was already here.

Actresses often go to drastic measures to look 35 well into their 60s, but there was an ageless, iron dignity to her wrinkles. In our youth-obsessed culture, it’s jarring when an artist who has been around this long dies. It feels like they take a piece of our youth with them when they pass. Maggie takes a peace about aging.

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More writing on aging, celebrity and death in POST, my collection of essays & poems.