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Maggie Smith: Sorry, dear, but a dowager countess does not do selfies | The Sunday Times

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Maggie Smith: Sorry, dear, but a dowager countess does not do selfies

The actress delights in her latest film work but laments the demands of Downton Abbey fans and having to quit the stage, fearing her only roles now would be Chekhovian grannies feeding chickens

Joe Utichi Published: 1 March 2015

(Shooting Star / eyevine/Yoram Kahana)

Maggie Smith is feigning her own murder. It’s for the benefit of the CCTV camera she’s just spotted in the corner of the room. “Who’s looking at it?” she wonders. “If you murdered me, they could play it back on the news, couldn’t they? It’d all be on film. Should I act it out?”

And so she does, against my protests. We’re taking afternoon tea in the small library of a boutique hotel not far from Smith’s Chelsea home, and this isn’t quite how I’d imagined things would go. I’m not especially concerned that I’ll end up on the evening bulletin, of course, but the truth is, I hadn’t exactly expected her to be such easy company.

Smith’s reputation rather precedes her, after all; drawn perhaps from the kind of roles she has made her stock-in-trade. In her most famous part, in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she

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