Sir Ian McKellen dishes on Maggie Smith: ‘She’s got a tongue on her’
Sir Ian McKellen has dished a few juicy anecdotes about the Grand Dame of British acting herself, Dame Maggie Smith.
Delivering a monologue, ‘Women I’ve Filmed With’, at LA’s Fine Arts Theatre earlier this month, McKellen opened his discussion of Smith with this tidbit: “Maggie’s got a tongue on her.”
But he said her bone-dry wit is a “defence mechanism. She’s so popular and so admired, but so shy with it, that she repels praise and attention with a cutting remark.”
He then went on to describe an Oscar ceremony in which Maggie enquired early in the night about a piece of jewellery he was wearing – he told her it was a good luck charm, and she responded with the expected Maggie Smith level of unimpressed scepticism. The best was yet to come, though.
“At the end of the evening, everybody but me had won an Oscar. I bumped into Maggie and she said, ‘Didn’t work, did it?'”
Amazing. Check out McKellen’s full Dame Maggie gossip below:
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