On ‘Downton Abbey,’ Maggie Smith Made an Icy Aristocrat Irresistible

The hit melodrama brought Smith the kind of fame she never wanted, but it is easy to understand why it happened.

In retrospect, Maggie Smith’s brilliant, high-wire career can be seen as a protest against celebrity.

As an actor, Smith, who died on Friday at 89, favored characters into which she could disappear, and the rare interviews she agreed to were awkward, unrevealing, sometimes deliberately uningratiating. In a 2013 “60 Minutes” profile, she seems almost physically racked by the journalist’s curiosity. There was one personal detail, though, that she had no problem sharing in her final years: how much she despised the fame that her most recognized part had brought down on her.

“It’s ridiculous,” she told one reporter. “I was able to live a somewhat normal life until I started doing ‘Downton Abbey.’ I know that sounds funny, but I am serious. Before that I could go to all the places I wanted and see all of the things that I like, but now I can’t, which I find incredibly awful.”

“Flattering,” she added, “but awful.”

Did she protest too much? Or was it the peculiar nature of the attention that afflicted her? As someone who began following her from my first viewing of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), her Oscar-winning drama, I can say I would have recognized Maggie Smith on any street anywhere. (Among other mass-cultural acts, she guest-starred on “The Carol Burnett Show.”) But would I have hailed her? What was it about “Downton Abbey” that inspired perfect strangers to lay claim to her?

We can start with the show itself. From the beginning, “Downton Abbey” was conceived as a Tory fantasy — a make-believe past in which aristocrats take a searching interest in their servants’ personal lives and subsidize their eye surgery — but it came to us through the democratic medium of broadcast television. To watch it in the United States, you had only to fire up your local PBS station, where it played every Sunday night at the same time, leaving you instantly positioned to spill tea the second it was over. (As The New York Times’s “Downton” recapper, I can attest to this.)

Few TV shows achieve that kind of instant saturation, so we might all be excused for thinking that these characters were ours. But how exactly did we warm to Violet Crawley, the wary and imperious dowager who despises any intrusion of democracy (America, Ireland) or modernity (telephones, swivel chairs) and who sincerely wants to know what a weekend is?

She fails to realize, of course, that her entire pampered life has been a weekend. This may be the one time the joke was on her, because you don’t hire Maggie Smith to play a character unless she’s on the joke’s giving end.

The internet has faithfully preserved Violet’s epigrams. “In my day, a lady was incapable of feeling physical attraction until she had been instructed to do so by her mama.” “I know several couples who are perfectly happy. Haven’t spoken in years.” “Principles are like prayers: noble, of course, but awkward at a party.”

But so much of Violet’s wit is a riposte to somebody else’s sincerity. “I take that as a compliment,” says her daughter-in-law, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern). “I must have said it wrong,” Violet answers.

When sanctimonious Cousin Isobel (Penelope Wilton) admits to being “a feeble substitute for the entire Crawley family,” Violet’s response, as scripted, is “Mm. Yes. But you’re better than nothing.” By the time Smith has finished with that line, no more than two or three seconds have passed, but the initial pause and the gradually sorrowing declension of head and voice have spread the news. Better than nothing is actually the same as nothing.

Decades of theatrical training had refined Smith’s comic timing down to the finest grain, but the many Violet Crawley memes generated by “Downton Abbey” underscore just how much her face contributes to the final effect. The saucer eyes of her ingénue days are now missiles, and the looks range from bemusement to soft derision to soft smirk to straight-up basilisk. In every case, a delicious barb becomes more delicious.

For all intents and purposes, Smith had already played Violet — or, at least, in Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” an agnostic take on the same character. In that film, a highborn, small-minded aristocrat gloats over how little she pays her maid and, in the opening sequence, fails to register that this same maid is being drenched head to toe by the same rain she is being shielded from.

When it came to creating “Downton Abbey,” the “Gosford Park” screenwriter Julian Fellowes stripped away any possibility of Marxist judgment and created a world in which the rich and the poor are all in it together. As a direct consequence, Violet Crawley becomes not a spoiled brat but a steely matriarch, barring the gate against a chaotic future.

That sleight of hand only worked, I think, because Smith was doing something like it. An actor steeped in the traditions of the Old Vic and the National Theater, she carried in her bones a rich legacy that was now, at this stage of her career, on the verge of disappearing, and she made us feel that something would be lost when it was gone. Like the Countess of Grantham, she was a tough broad who wasn’t ready to accept obsolescence.

“I’m not old,” Violet once declared. “I’m vintage.”