R.I.P., two-time Oscar winner Dame Maggie Smith

Six Oscar nominations, two wins

Maggie Smith had extraordinary fortune with second-hand roles.

She won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Vanessa Redgrave had played Brodie in the stage production, and was originally cast in the role. However, she was unavailable when the film production began.

Maggie would be nominated for another Oscar in 1972, for playing another eccentric role in Travels With My Aunt, and that time the industry scuttlebutt was that she inherited the role from Kate Hepburn!

Nudity wasn’t her thing. She turned 18 in 1952, which meant that she had no opportunities to get naked while still in her twenties. By the time nudity was commonplace in cinema, Maggie had already established her specialty – quirky, prim spinsters, the type of women who were old even when they were young. That era was followed by many years of playing women who really were old, ranging from slightly dotty ones to those with the panache of a grand dame.

She has been old so long that we don’t ever picture her as she appeared in 1958’s “Nowhere to Go.”

Here are her career nudity … er … highlights.

Variety’s obit

Sidebar discussion below: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and that dumb, ear-worm song that accompanied it.

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In October of 1969, at which time, there was a particularly syrupy movie song which was played several times per day on all Top 40 radio stations throughout the United States. In fact, although it was not a rock or R&B song, but a sappy love poem set to insipid music, it actually rose to #2 on the record charts, and stayed on the charts for 12 weeks, alongside The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, and Sly & the Family Stone. Can you guess what it was?

If you guessed “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” that’s a great guess, but wrong. “Raindrops” was an even bigger hit in the same period, reaching number one at one point, and appearing on the charts for nineteen weeks.

The correct answer is “Jean”, the theme song from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as sung by some sap named Oliver, and written by the even sappier would-be poet, Rod McKuen. Needless to say, if you were into real music at the time, the appearance of “Jean” on a radio was an occasion to throw your beer at the offending device, since the song consisted of the perfect combination of syrupy music which would cause any self-respecting elevator to eject its MUZAK cartridge, and lyrics which could have been written by a 12 year old girl. Except of course that a 12 year old girl could have written “Jean”, but would have thrown the poem away once she re-read it. Rod McKuen never had that much sense.

As Dave Barry once wrote, the lyrics to “Jean” should have been:

Mr Oliver and Mr McKuen, by the way, probably contributed as much to bad music as any two men in the 20th century. Two songs that often appear on All-Time Bad Lyrics lists are “Seasons in the Sun” and “Good Morning Starshine”. McKuen actually wrote the awful lyrics to “Seasons in the Sun” (“skinned our hearts and skinned our knees”), and Oliver had a big hit singing the even worse lyrics to “Good Morning Starshine”. (Actual lyrics: “Gliddy glub gloopy nibby nabby noopy, La la la lo lo, Sabba sibby sabba nooby abba nabba, Le le lo lo, Tooby ooby walla nooby abba naba”).

For these two giants of bad music to team together on one song, the aforementioned Jean, was a serendipitous concatenation of circumstances which may never be re-created, so we who were there can only marvel at our fortune.

The artist known as Oliver, known to his friends as Billy Swofford, had two or three more truly awful hits, then disappeared, but his name came into the public eye again in the ’90s when he became one of only three groups or artists (along with Paul Anka and the Captain and Tennille) to have more than one song named among the notorious “Worst 100 Singles of the Last 25 Years,” by David Browne and David Hinckley for The New York Daily News. Both “Jean” and “Good Morning Starshine” made the list.

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One thing that fascinated me about this quaint movie is the character of Miss Jean Brodie, because I knew a woman exactly like this. I mean EXACTLY like this. She was a teacher at an private women’s college in upstate New York in the late 60’s. She talked exactly as Maggie Smith did in this film – the same pompous and commanding pronouncements, the same diva persona and egocentricity, the same mannered and affected grande dame style. Precisely the same except for Jean Brodie’s Scottish accent. They both rattled on and on about Florence, Italy and Dante when it was irrelevant to their subject matter. In the main, they were both quite well loved by their students. They both repeated catch-phrases. The woman I knew preferred hyphenated Homeric epithets as her personal catch phrases, like “the great white-walled city of Florence”. She was just as eccentric and passionate and “progressive” as Jean Brodie. Her name was Francesca Guli. Francesca was just as certain of her convictions as Jean Brodie. Thankfully she had much less malevolent convictions, and was teaching university students. By the way, Francesca was semi-famous, in that she had a few books of poetry published in limited editions (I have one of her books, signed by her – it’s a children’s book about Dante as a child – what else?), and you can probably find some references to her somewhere on the internet.

What is my point? I’m getting there.

If I had never met Francesca, I would say that Miss Jean Brodie is an unrealistic over-the-top character. But I know, or knew, a woman exactly like her. I therefore conclude that one of two things must be true. Either (1) this actually is a realistic portrayal of a certain type of woman who existed in the middle 20th century, or (2) Muriel Spark’s novel, the source of the character, must actually have been based on Francesca. I do not think the second could be true, which leads me to conclude that the first is correct. There were others like Francesca. Perhaps many others.

The essence of the character of Jean Brodie is that she has strong, passionate opinions about everything, and they are usually wrong. She has contempt for any Catholic. She is an ardent supporter of Fascism. She encourages one young girl to die for Franco. When she’s not screwing up the girls with Fascism and bigotry, she’s leading them into having sex with older married men. She leads the girls with such certainty, delivers her pronouncements with such a complete absence of self-doubt, that many students seem to follow her willingly and unquestioningly, however silly her causes.

This creates an atypical film. In certain ways, it in the “caring teacher” genre. On the surface, it is one of those films where the renegade teacher fights against the repressive system to bring her students more enrichment and to give their lives more value. Beneath the surface, however, it subverts all of our expectations. This is no “To Sir With Love”, because in this case the system is acting in the best interests of the students, and the caring, renegade teacher is screwing the kids up.

To use the old cliché, Jean Brodie is a teacher who really cares. The problem is she cares about all the wrong things, and has all the wrong attitudes toward those things!

The film, by the way, is essentially a talky stage play that was brought to the screen with no particular cinematic flair. It is a good, solid play, typical of the times in British drama, but it has very little plot development and far too little humor, and is only for those of you who are really into the theater and in-depth character studies.