maggie smith Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It may be a bit early for this, but I wanted to get my two cents in on some of my favorite performances of 2007 so far, especially since most of these will probably get overlooked in the great Oscar crush of December. The awards almost always go to actors who are involved in biopics, message pictures, costume movies or epics, so let's start with the wonderful Alan Rickman, who has yet to earn a single Oscar nomination. This year, he can be seen toiling away once again in the small role of Severus Snape in the fifth "Harry Potter" film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (283 screens). In the third film, he practically stole the entire movie with the way he read the line "turn to page 394," but in this fifth film, he actually has a scene with some meat to it. In training Harry to block his thoughts, Harry takes a peek into Snape's own mind and finds a disastrously sad childhood. When the flashback ends, the camera lingers on Snape's face for a moment, and Rickman renders an astonishing expression of hurt and hatred that broke my heart and sent chills through my spine.

One costume movie, Becoming Jane (32 screens), was unfairly judged, perhaps because it was too much fun and not somber enough (or not based on a literary source of proper merit). The lovely Miss Anne Hathaway usually lends a kind of smart energy to her best performances, as if she were slightly ahead of the game, and she does so perfectly as the budding Jane Austen. She's playful, but tough, beautiful but restrained. And when she falls in love with her man (James McAvoy), she does so breathlessly and with her whole heart; the movie more or less explains through fantasy how Austen was able to write so passionately from such a dull existence. The real Jane was said to be rather plain, but I'd much rather imagine her like this. Add to this Maggie Smith's delightfully wry supporting performance as the wealthy aunt, who can't understand the impudent youth of today and fires off comically nasty barbs at their expense.

For those still unacquainted, Becoming Jane is the upcoming film -- it's already been released in the U.K., where the reviews were middling -- that takes the brief, documented dalliance between novelist Jane Austen and an Irishman named Thomas Lefroy and blows it up into the romance to end all romances. The only thing history really knows about their relationship is that Lefroy is mentioned in a couple of Austen's letters and their two families were known to each other. The best guess is that they had a brief flirtation, which was quickly squashed when no prospect of a real marriage proposal was in the offing. Austen died at age 41, but Lefroy lived until 94, and is said to have confessed to having a "boyish love" for the by-then-famous authoress shortly before he died.

The movie stars Anne Hathaway as Austen -- word is that she had a lot of trouble with the British accent -- and James "I don't want to play Scotty in Star Trek XI" McAvoy as Lefroy. James Cromwell and Maggie Smith also have roles in the film, but apart the casting, I don't know a hell of a lot about it. Here's hoping the film is somewhat restrained in using Austen's life as a jumping off point for a bodice-ripping romance that certainly never happened. After all, we're talking about a family-supervised, above-board acquaintanceship that happened between two society young people in the late 18th century. How much heat could you possible get out of that? Becoming Jane is set for release on August 10. Click on the pic above to see the full-sized image of the new poster.

I normally have a problem with movies about infidelity (there's just too many of them), but I rather enjoyed Separate Lies, the directorial debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park). Apparently enough people liked the film to allow the writer-director to be hired for yet another magical fantasy franchise. This one is based on a series of books by L. M. Boston called The Green Knowe Chronicles. The first novel, published in 1954, is titled The Children of Green Knowe, though the film has been renamed From Time to Time. The plot follows the adventures of a boy visiting with his strange grandmother during WWII. Somehow the boy ends up traveling backward in time -- but as a sort of ghost -- and visits with older generations of his family, who help him to solve an old mystery.

The film will feature another great crop of British actors, two of whom are no strangers to magical franchises (hint: they appear in the Harry Potter movies). And of those cast, I will take a wild guess and say that Maggie Smith is playing the grandmother. I would love to say that Timothy Spall plays the boy, but I'll go ahead and assume he plays some other character. Rounding out the ensemble so far is Hugh Bonneville and Annie Reid, neither of whom are likely the boy, either. It will be interesting to see how well Fellowes is able to work with children and youth-oriented material, because both Separate Lies and Gosford Park were pretty much films for grown-ups (and no, I don't mean they were "adult films").

While most of Hollywood's big shots are likely up in Toronto for the film festival, producer Brian Grazer is reportedly hanging around NYC for Fashion Week. According to Radar, he was in Bryant Park on Sunday taking in the shows of Diane von Furstenberg and Naeem Khan, and sources say he wasn't there to merely check out the new collections. Grazer may also be doing some research for a new film about Vivienne Westwood, the designer who helped pioneer the punk look in the late '70s with then-husband Malcolm McLaren. At this time we can only speculate as to whether the project will be a biopic or a documentary -- Grazer recently spotlighted '70s decadence with the doc Inside Deep Throat -- or even if it has anything to do with the punk movement at all. But, considering Grazer's own hair could be compared to Sid Vicious', I can only hope that he's curious about how safety pins and torn clothes were given their fashionable beginning.

In the event the film is a dramatic telling of her younger days, I can imagine a few actresses in the role, including Toni Collette, Kim Gordon, and my personal choice, Cara Seymour. Then, Grazer could have Judi Dench or Maggie Smith as the older Westwood. I'd love to see either one of them take on the hair and wardrobe for the part.

[via Hollywood Wiretap]

Muriel Spark, the Scottish author who died last Thursday, was probably better known in the literary world than in the movie industry. However, several of her novels were adapted successfully into movies in the 1960s and 1970s; the most popular and memorable of these adaptations was the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Jay Presson Allen adapted the 1962 novel into a stage play and later into the movie.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a breakout film for its 35-year-old star Maggie Smith (above), who received a Best Actress Oscar for her work in the title role. Decades later, Smith also starred in another adaptation of a Spark novel, the 1992 made-for-TV British film Memento Mori. Although The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was remade as a TV miniseries in 1978, Miss Brodie and Smith are inextricably linked for many of us. However, the book was partially autobiographical, so perhaps we should be thinking of Spark when we recall the free-thinking, domineering Scottish schoolteacher for whom the book and movie were named.