Michael Caine and Maggie Smith as a feuding couple in California Suite
British actress Maggie Smith, who won both a Best Actress Oscar and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and who had a long career working almost to the end of her life, has died at the age of 89.
Smith's first Oscar, the Best Actress nod, came for the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Smith plays the titular character, a girls' school teacher in 1930s Scotland whose actions cause controversy. This is a movie I got to see part of when it was on TCM quite a few years ago before I had the DVR, and didn't watch the whole thing because it was on a bit too late. Just Watch suggests it's not available on any of the trustworthy streaming services. A search of my Roku box did bring up one app that has it, although I don't know how sketchy that app is.
Smith's second Oscar, for Supporting Actress, came for the ensemble story California Suite, where she plays an Oscar-nominated actress traveling to Los Angeles with her husband (Michael Caine), with whom she's constantly arguing. I reviewed this one several years back, and had fairly substantial problems with Neil Simon's stories not really working in Los Angeles and with the characters in the various stories not coming together.
By coincidence, I put on one of the PlutoTV movie channels, and it was showing Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, which has an all-star cast including Maggie Smith. I may get around to watching that one and doing a review on it here in the not-too-distant future, although I've already got a couple of weeks of posts in the can.
In later years, Smith won a new generation of fans with her work in the Harry Potter movies, as well as on the smash British TV series Downton Abbey, although I have to admit to not being terribly interested in either of those.
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