Goodbye to Maggie Smith.

The wonderful actress was 89.

NYT obituary here.

ADDED: Sorry my embedded video doesn't put Maggie Smith in the freeze frame, but she does appear prominently in the clip, and it's a great clip from one of my favorite movies, "A Room With a View." Smith plays the stilted chaperone for the main character, who is an exuberant young woman, but feeling the emotion of the repressed older woman is crucial to the deepest understanding of that incredibly moving film.

"Did you have the impulse to ask anybody for permission, and were you concerned with how your ex-husband would feel?"

 A question for the memoirist, quoted in "Maggie Smith Tries to Make the Divorce Memoir Beautiful/Her new book, 'You Could Make This Place Beautiful,' is an exploration of what happened to her marriage after she became a well-known poet" (NYT).

I clicked on this because I thought I was going to read something about the 88-year-old actress, Maggie Smith, but it's about a 46-year-old writer with the same name. She's most famously the author of the "official poem of the pandemic," "Good Bones." The poem contains the line that is the title of the new book, "You Could Make This Place Beautiful." I think it's a pretty good poem, so go to the link and read it.

Anyway, having determined that this article was not about the actress Maggie Smith, I ended up wanting to blog it because of that question from the audience at one of her book-tour appearances. It's the classic ethics question for all writers who use their own life as material.

Smith answers: 

"Dreadnoughtus (meaning 'fearing nothing'...) is a genus of giant titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur..."

"It is one of the largest of all known terrestrial vertebrates, possessing the greatest mass of any land animal that can be calculated with reasonable certainty, using limb bone measurements."

Are you excited about the Dreadnought dinosaur? "Dreadnought" has a big "disambiguation" page at Wikipedia, with lots of ships, of course, and also trains and books and movies. The word goes back to the 1500s, used for ships. From the OED (which is unlinkable, even as a dreadnought might be unsinkable):

1587   F. Drake Despatch 27 Apr. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1904) VI. p. xiv,   A greate leake sprange uppon the Dreadenoughte.

There's also "A type of thick woollen cloth with a long pile; a coat or other outer garment made of this cloth, typically worn in stormy weather."

1834   R. Southey Doctor II. 197   One of those dreadnoughts the utility of which sets fashion at defiance.

"Dreadnought" can be an adjective, meaning "fearless" (or, alternatively, made out of that heavy cloth used to make those above-mentioned coats). It was used to mean "fearless" here:

1978   N.Y. Mag. 18 Dec. 18/3   What is the point of this dreadnought approach to a basically frivolous genre?

That quote comes from a short trashing of the film "Death on the Nile." The preceding sentence is "Bette Davis and Maggie Smith are fun together, but no one else in the huge cast distinguishes himself."



Loving the dinosaurs!