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Meeting the Remarkable Maggie Smith
Some people pass through your life like feathers on the wind, making no impression at all. But Maggie Smith wasn’t one of them.
If I had met Maggie Smith some years later, I might have reacted differently. But in 1975, a younger version of myself was only just beginning the search. The one Walker Percy described like this in The Moviegoer:
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
This may seem irrelevant, but it’s not. Had I not become aware that there was such a thing as this search, I wouldn’t have been on the lookout for people who seemed to have made some headway along that path. Also, I was an avid moviegoer like the protagonist of Walker Percy’s National Book Award-winning novel. Had I been indifferent to film, I wouldn’t have known about Maggie Smith at all back then.
My first encounter with her occurred via celluloid years before we met in person. It was shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law. I was in high school. An all-Black Catholic high school. And for the first time in our young lives, we went as a group through the front…
