Smith: Good riddance, Downton
You may bemoan the end of Downton Abbey, but Maggie Smith doesn’t mind a bit.
The actress, who plays Violet Crawley, told TV interviewer Graham Norton: “I’m glad it’s over, I really am. By the time we finished, she must have been about 110. … It couldn’t go on and on. It just didn’t make sense.”
She’s had a long, distinguished stage and movie career but, she added, “it’s only since Downton that people seem to recognize me. That’s television for you.”
Smith also said she’s never watched an episode, although “I’ve got the box set.”
Her next big deal will be the movie version, coming soon, of Alan Bennett’s play The Lady in the Van. The trailer is promising. (I saw her do this role on stage in England, back in the day. As always, she was a commanding presence. But I digress.)
The final season of Downton Abbey is airing now in the U.K., and will debut on PBS in January.
Smith is 80.
Speaking of British actresses, Keira Knightley underwhelmed in her Broadway debut the other night. She has the title role in Thérèse Raquin, based on an 1867 Émile Zola novel about lust and murder.
She wasn’t terrible, exactly, most reviews agreed, though the Telegraph’s reviewer was tougher: “I began to wonder during the first act whether the two-time Oscar nominee wasn’t wishing she could be somewhere else.”
Overall, the play was “curiously lacking in tension of any kind” (New York Times), “confoundingly dreary” (Washington Post) and a “lugubrious dud” (the Guardian).
As for Keira and co-star Matt Ryan, “there’s a detachment between the stars I can only describe as fatal. … Thérèse Raquin is a sexless bore” (Deadline.com).
When he married Amal Alamuddin, George Clooney already had two dogs, Einstein and Louie. Now the family has added Millie, a four-year-old mutt, mainly basset hound.
This vital news comes from the San Gabriel Valley Humane Society, in California, where the Clooneys acquired Millie. The society says her “gorgeous looks ... would land her on any Hush Puppies commercial.” The N.Y. Daily News had the story.
George really likes dogs. In 2011 he told Esquire about rubbing turkey meatballs on his shoes so the dog he wanted would like him. That’s when he got Einstein.
Thanks to several readers who reminded me that Montreal’s Gabe Aubry was not Halle Berry’s first husband, as I had said. They were never married — and anyway, she was divorced twice before she got to him. She was with Aubry from 2005 to 2010. She married Olivier Martinez, from whom she’s now splitting, in 2013.