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Even if she were to get a proposal of marriage, she tells them, shed decline it.
Yet Smiths presence immediately becomes a declaration of refusal.
These often relatively minor characters would not become irrelevant.
They would not disappear into the woodwork.
An older, unmarried teacher and distant parental figure, shes demanding but fair.
She is not your mom, and she will not coddle you the way a mother should.
Shes not giving unearned compliments, but her praise and approval are more valuable because of that.
Shes a villain; shes the worst version of what happens when nurturing goes awry.
The Wendy of J.M.
Barries work is wistful and resigned.
Smiths Wendy has steel buried underneath her soft cardigans and clouds of white hair.
She is tired of Peters bullshit.
She loves her daughter and granddaughter and wants to save them from her own fate.
Downton Abbeys snappish, cartoonish Dowager Countess of Grantham goes almost too far.
But shes effective because Smith plays her with an unshatterable straight-faced sincerity.
Of course she knows that lines like what is a weekend?
will be played for laughs, but Smiths own obvious sense of humor remains subterranean onscreen.
This woman, this towering figure, does not find it funny.
She will not be reduced to a catchphrase or a fond, patronizing toast at Christmas.
She is unnerving, and no one is allowed to forget it.
Miss Jean Brodie remains the most complicated and frightening version of Smiths near-maternal characters.
By the end, the viewer is stuck with the horrified realization that Brodies influence has been irredeemably damaging.
She is unignorable, and it has made Smith unforgettable.
