Latest news with #MaggieSmith
Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Ben Bolt obituary, director behind Downton Abbey and Doc Martin
When Ben Bolt was sent the script for a television drama about an aristocratic family and their domestic servants in post-Edwardian England, his every instinct told him that it was a winner. As a director whose credits spanned the Atlantic and ranged from The Sweeney and Bergerac to Hill Street Blues and LA Law, he thrived on the challenge of taking a great story from page to screen — and as he read Julian Fellowes's outline for the first series of what was to become Downton Abbey, he almost purred with pleasure. The script had been sent to him by his old friend Gareth Neame, the executive producer on the project and with whom he made the 1998 thriller Getting Hurt as part of the BBC's Obsessions series. Would he be interested in directing a few episodes? At the time he was working on the fifth series of Doc Martin, the ITV comedy drama starring Martin Clunes, but the question was a no-brainer. Bolt went on to direct two of the first three episodes of Downton Abbey, setting up one of the most successful TV dramas of the 21st century. That first series won half a dozen Emmy awards, a Golden Globe and a brace of Baftas and included perhaps the most famous line of all in Downton Abbey's 52 episodes, when Maggie Smith as the dowager countess Violet Crawley demanded to know: 'What is a weekend?' Almost as memorable was her comment that 'No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else's house' after a Turkish diplomat suffered a heart attack while staying at the Abbey. The great dame, of course, was already famous for her portrayal of another dowager countess, Lady Bracknell, and her delivery of the famous 'handbag' line had entered theatrical legend. 'If there's an old bat to play, it'll be me,' she said when Downton Abbey launched in 2010. Tailor-made as the matriarch of the Crawley family, she perhaps needed little coaching, yet she worked assiduously with Bolt on getting exactly the right nuance of aristocratic battiness into her lines and characterisation. Bolt's dedication to his craft was a watchword and 'going the extra mile' as a director was not optional but mandatory. Whatever the amount of effort required, the only criterion was that the work had to be the best quality and if one more take was needed to get it exactly right, it would be done whatever the clock and the budget said. 'However hairy things got, everyone on set knew Ben would protect the integrity of the work,' one of the actors who worked with him noted. Yet at the same time he was the opposite of a stentorian martinet and coaxed the best out of cast and crew alike with a gentle charm and good humour. 'He always made the job fun, even when we were inevitably running over to get that one last take,' another of his actors recalled. When his wife Jo (née Ross), an actress, predeceased him in 2023, he was bereft without his life partner. He is survived by their daughter, Molly Bolt, a film producer with House Productions. She remembered as a young girl being embarrassed by his terrible singing when he was walking her to school. Before she married, he took singing lessons because he didn't want to embarrass her by singing out of tune in church on her wedding day. It was another example of him 'going the extra mile'. In turn, during the cancer that beset him during his final two years, she accompanied him to every appointment with his doctors and consultant. Devoted to his family, he was thrilled by the arrival of his first grandson, Leo, six months before he died. Away from the film set, he loved messing around on sail boats and was an enthusiastic tennis player. The actor Simon Williams, his long-term opponent and partner on court, recalled that he managed to be 'competitive and comedic at the same time' and when he played a poor shot would let out a frustrated cry of 'Ben-e-diiiict!' The record number of 'Benedicts' in a set was said to be only six, which suggested that his smashes and lobs found their mark more often than they missed. Benedict Lawrence Bolt was born in 1952, the son of Jo (née Roberts), a novelist, and Robert Bolt, in Butleigh, Somerset, where his father, who would go on to write the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons, was teaching at Millfield School. His parents divorced when he was ten and his father married the actress Sarah Miles. It meant he saw less of him than he would have wished but they retained a close relationship. After Robert suffered a stroke, he lived for a time with his son and daughter-in-law and when he died in 1995, he bequeathed the responsibility for protecting his work to him in his will. Educated at Brockenhurst Grammar School, Bolt went on to the Courtauld Institute of Art but left without completing his studies. He continued to draw all his life but he had caught the film bug while accompanying his father on sets as a boy, and keen to launch a career in the industry, he enrolled at the National Film School. In later life he returned to the school as a lecturer and is remembered by former students as a mentor with a bottomless well of encouragement and advice. His breakthrough as a freelance TV director came in the mid-1970s when he took charge of episodes of the ITV dramas Van der Valk and The Sweeney, and Target for the BBC. By the mid-1980s he had been headhunted by the American networks. He had flown to Los Angeles for a meeting out of little more than curiosity but when he was offered Hill Street Blues he stayed for the best part of a decade, setting up home in the Hollywood Hills. On his return to Britain in the 1990s he directed the acclaimed TV mini-series Scarlet and Black starring Ewan McGregor and Rachel Weisz as well as his wife, and Wilderness starring Gemma Jones as a librarian-cum-werewolf. There were also a number of made-for-TV films including a splendid adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw with Colin Firth. One of his greatest successes came with the long-running Doc Martin, shot on location in the Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac, and which he directed from its launch in 2003 over five seasons until 2011, drawing a viewing audience of more than ten million. He also turned his hand to writing scripts for episodes of the comedy drama, something friends and family urged him to do more. The shadow of a screenwriting father with a brace of Oscars to his name perhaps made him more reticent than he need have been. The final project he was involved in was the currently touring version of his father's play A Man for All Seasons, starring Martin Shaw as Thomas More and which is due to arrive in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre in August. Bolt acted as a consultant, attending read-throughs and rehearsals and with his daughter attended a performance at the Oxford Playhouse three months before he died. Ben Bolt, director and screenwriter, was born on May 9, 1952. He died of leukaemia on May 10, 2025, aged 73
Fast Company
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
5 mindsets on creativity to motivate anyone
Maggie Smith is a poet and a New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many other journals and anthologies. What's the big idea? We are all creative beings because making your life is the ultimate creative act. For those who choose to tune their senses as artists, there are 10 key principles to improving your craft. The societal value of dedicating oneself to a life creating art rests in our essential human need for hope, healing, and a search for answers about our world and ourselves amid a sea of ambiguity. Below, Maggie shares five key insights from her new book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. Listen to the audio version—read by Maggie herself—in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Creativity is our birthright as human beings. I think everyone is born a poet. Years ago, I agreed to visit my children's elementary school for a few days to talk to second graders about poetry and preparation. I got a sneak peek at the language arts textbook they were using in the poetry unit. The authors described poets as having a special ability to see the world in a poetic way. 'Poet's eyes,' they wrote, even suggesting that teachers wear an oversized pair of silly glasses during poetry lessons. On my first day, I told the kids that there's no such thing as poet's eyes. Every child is born with poet's eyes. We all have them. Poetry comes naturally to children because they haven't been estranged from their imaginations and their sense of newness in the world. As we age, we can become distracted and desensitized. We have to pay better attention, but more than that, we have to find ways to make the familiar strange again; to see the extraordinary tucked inside the ordinary. Poet's eyes are for all of us. After all, everyone is creative. Even if you don't make art, even if you're not a writer, photographer, or musician, you are creative every day in your work and in your life. Problem solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creative. Falling in love, leaving your job, and changing your mind are all creative acts. Creativity isn't just about making art. Making your life is the ultimate creative act. 2. Attention is a form of love. What we turn our gaze to feels that warmth and light. What we dedicate ourselves to feels cherished. And conversely, what we ignore feels slighted, neglected, and devalued. This essential part of creativity requires no pen, no paper, no paints, no canvas, no nothing, only your awareness. Your hands can be empty, but your mind should be open. As I was thinking my way into how to write Dear Writer and talk about creativity in a way that makes it accessible for everyone, I sat down and made a long list on a legal pad. That list included words like curiosity, courage, trust, patience, gumption, improvisation, love, and so on. Looking at this unwieldy list, I started winnowing it down, prioritizing the terms that appealed most to me and seemed the most expansive. I eventually narrowed the list to 10 principles of creativity. 10 Principles of Creativity Attention Wonder Vision Surprise Play Vulnerability Restlessness Connection Tenacity Hope All 10 are essential, but attention comes first for a reason. I can't think of anything more important for a writer or artist than to be a sensitive, finely tuned instrument in the world. Keep your antenna raised. We need you to be all in. Life's everyday activities create static—a constant hum of responsibility, news, reminders, and encounters. Our work is to dial past that static to hear the quiet voice inside us. Some artists call this voice the muse. You can call it whatever you like. For writers, the quiet voice inside might whisper a line of a poem or a bit of description or dialogue, but that voice has things to tell us about our lives too if we tune in and listen carefully. The world is a complicated place full of both beauty and horror. But even when the world lets me down, even when it isn't what I want it to be, I find things to love and to be grateful for. I pay attention. My kids and I do our best to focus on beauty. In our house, it's not unusual to hear one of us shout, 'beauty emergency!' A beauty emergency is what we call something that stops you in your tracks, something you have to look at right away before it's gone. It might be a fiery pink and orange sunrise or an albino squirrel in the sycamore tree or snowflakes that seem to be falling in slow motion. If you take your time getting to the window, the sunrise might be pale peach. The white squirrel might be gone. The snow turned to sleet. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. The wonder is the key here. There's no creativity without it. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. It's warm and enthusiastic. While cynicism is chilly and bored, wonder is shushing everyone. Wonder says wow, and cynicism replies so what? Creativity requires us to pay attention and approach the world with wonder. Many of my poems were made possible only because I took the time to look at my surroundings: listen to the wind and the birds, touch leaves to know their textures, breathe deeply to describe what the autumn air smelled like. Being sensitive, attuned, and observant. These things don't just improve your writing. They improve your life. 3. Art changes us. Above all, I think we come to art to be changed. We come to books, films, music, and visual art to be expanded. Unzipped like a suitcase made larger on the inside, able to accommodate even more living. Creativity is the great expander. When you read a poem or listen to a song or watch a play, you are not the same person. Afterward, you're slightly rearranged. Your DNA is still the same. Your fingerprints are still the same. You look the same in the mirror, but you aren't exactly who you were. 'Be careful,' I might tell someone when handing them a book or a record, 'You will be different after this.' Years spent with art are years spent in cocoon after cocoon, always emerging changed. Books are community gathering spaces where connection is inevitable. When I read a book, I enter a place another writer has made. I can leave, but not entirely. I take the place with me when I go. Once a piece of art is inside you, it will continue to do its work on you for the rest of your life. Think about the music you listen to, the films you return to, how they move you, help you see things in a new way, or just make your day better. Imagine if those musicians, actors, artists, and writers never shared that work. You would be different. Your life would be smaller, less vibrant. Without their art, your life would be diminished without the transformation that their art made possible. 4. Every no makes room for a yes. Once upon a time, when I first began submitting poems to journals, rejections arrived in the mail. These days, it's usually an impersonal email that an editor selects from a dropdown menu in the journal's online submission system. Working for a literary magazine has helped me see rejection in a new way. I know how much stunning, worthy work is in that submission queue, and I know how little room we have to publish it. The decisions are sometimes excruciating. A no is a subjective no to one specific batch of work at one specific moment in time by one particular reader for a variety of reasons. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. It's not even a rejection of your work as a whole or your worth as a writer. It's not a no to your talent. Every no makes room for a yes. I tell my students that almost all of my poems were rejected before they found a home at a magazine. 'Good Bones,' my most famous poem, was rejected by the first few print magazines I sent it to before it was published by the online journal Waxwing. Those early rejections stung, but those early rejections were a gift. If 'Good Bones' had been published in print, it wouldn't have gone viral. Meryl Streep wouldn't have read it at Lincoln Center. It wouldn't have been featured on the CBS show Madame Secretary. It would have had a much smaller life. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. We are all playing the long game, and the only way to fail at the long game is to give up. We keep going and remember that sometimes failures clear a path for something better. 5. Creating is inherently hopeful. I think of each poem, each essay, each book I write as a message in a bottle. I don't know when I toss it into the waves, what shore it might wash up on, or when, or who might be standing on the shore to receive it. I don't know if they'll pull the message out or if they'll overlook the bottle altogether. If they do read it, I don't know what they'll think. Will they understand? Will they receive the creation in the way I hoped anyone would? To make things that don't exist yet and don't need to exist is the very definition of art, and to send them out into the world is wildly and practically and gorgeously hopeful in harrowing times. And what times have not been harrowing? Sometimes I ask myself, what can a poem do? A poem isn't a tourniquet when you're bleeding. It's not water when you're thirsty or food when you're hungry. A poem can't protect you from violence or hate. It can be difficult to create—to paint, to sculpt, to compose—when your work feels like it's not doing enough, when it can't do the real, tangible work of saving lives or making people safer. But art can do real, transformative work inside us. Think about art that has become an important part of your life: the songs you love, the books you treasure, the films you quote line for line. Art isn't extra. It's necessary. Art can do real, transformative work inside us. Art isn't life's decoration, but its framework. I know what some people would say: Wow, she really thinks being an artist is as important as being a doctor, a farmer, a firefighter. But I have been fed and healed and saved by art, by someone else's hope sent out into the world, when it washed up on my shore. This is not hyperbole. Art is essential. Our work as artists isn't to solve the world's problems, but to articulate the problems. Not to answer every question, but to use wild hope to ask and keep asking. Only by engaging with ambiguity can we make art that feels true.
Perth Now
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Hugh Bonneville reflects on filming the Downton Abbey finale movie without Dame Maggie Smith
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale will act as a "proper tribute" to Dame Maggie Smith. The upcoming film is the final in the franchise and after the passing of the legendary 'Harry Potter' actress - who starred as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham throughout the initial series and then again in its first two spin-off films but died in 2024 at the age of 89 - and now her former co-star Hugh Bonneville has reflected on just how "poignant" it was to shoot it without her. Speaking on BBC's The One Show, he said: "It was quite poignant making the last film knowing that her character had passed away and then in real life, she passed away after we finished filming. "So, really, this final film will be a proper tribute to her and to the show, which is coming to an end after 15 years." The death of Maggie - whose 'Downton' alter ego, the Dowager Countess, passed away in the second movie, 2022's 'Downton Abbey: A New Era' - was announced on 27 September by her two sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. They said in a statement: 'She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September. An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother. The Grand Finale film is scheduled for release in cinemas on 12 September, and will be the final chapter in the Downton Abbey franchise. Writer Julian Fellowes has returned to pen the script, with much of the original cast reprising their roles, including Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan, Robert James-Collier, Joanne Froggatt, Allen Leech, Penelope Wilton and Lesley Nicol. Additional returning actors include Raquel Cassidy, Brendan Coyle, Kevin Doyle, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sophie McShera, Douglas Reith and Dominic West. New cast members for the film feature Paul Giamatti, Joely Richardson, Alessandro Nivola, Simon Russell Beale and Arty Froushan.
Globe and Mail
05-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Savvy businesswoman Sandy Stagg helped spark a hip Toronto scene
Running her Antique Clothing Shop on London's Portobello Road in the 1990s and 2000s, Sandy Stagg was particular when it came to the touching of dainty vintage garments for sale. 'This is a two-handed shop,' she would tell customers in no uncertain terms. 'Be gentle and put your bags down. If not, get out!' The rule applied to all, dames included. The great actress Maggie Smith entered the store in 2002 in full film-star disguise: hat, silk scarf and huge sunglasses. When she pawed one-handedly at a rail of Victorian blouses, Ms. Stagg read her the riot act. To which Ms. Smith lowered her shades, uttered 'Indeed!' and walked straight from the shop. 'Sandy was so impressed she laughed for hours,' said her friend, Jo Headland, a seamstress and salesperson hired by Ms. Stagg. 'Sandy was infamous for being rude to her customers, in a way that only a fabulously dressed Englishwoman could be.' Ms. Stagg, from London's working-class neighborhood of Shepherd's Bush, had come to Toronto in 1968 with a lot of nerve, a sewing machine and a Canadian husband who would not be her partner for long. She would establish herself as a savvy restaurateur, pioneer trader in second-hand garb, model and beautiful muse of the General Idea arts collective, cutting-edge scene starter, skilled gardener, pale gamine about town, dog lover, enthusiastic party person and patroness of the arts. She returned to Shepherd's Bush in 1988 to look after her ailing mother, whose landlord wanted her out of a rent-controlled flat. Ms. Stagg was having none of it. 'I'm here and we're staying,' she told him. Ms. Stagg stayed until 2008, when she sold the Antique Clothing Shop and returned to Toronto to live out the rest of her life. She died from the effects of a stroke at Toronto Western Hospital on May 28. She was 84. Ms. Stagg was different things to different people in Toronto. Some shopped at her popular Amelia Earhart Originals, a small vintage clothing store on Charles Street off Yonge Street (and later in Yorkville). Others dined and hung out at her hip restaurants: Peter Pan (which helped spark the Queen Street West art and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s) and Fiesta. The grooviest people did both. 'She dressed a lot of the people who came to eat at her restaurants,' said artist AA Bronson, the last surviving member of Toronto's groundbreaking General Idea trio. 'I don't think one can simplify Sandy, but above all she was interested in people and helping people make things happen.' When the General Idea artists would throw ideas around the dinner table, Ms. Stagg encouraged and facilitated their audacious notions. 'Next thing you knew, you'd find yourself in Vancouver or New York or on top of the CN Tower doing something,' Mr. Bronson said. 'Sandy was a magnifying glass. She took whatever was going on and blew it up into something bigger and more interesting.' At her clothing boutiques in Toronto and London, Ms. Stagg elevated second-hand attire to high-fashion status. She had a magpie's eye for lovely, discarded things and the entrepreneurial flair to exploit the finds. While in London, she would visit Toronto on shopping trips. Once, she found a disassembled dress at a boot fair that was made by French designer Madeleine Vionnet. Ms. Stagg purchased it for $13 and took it back to London where she and her assistant, Ms. Headland, pieced it back together with traditional couture stitches and vintage silk thread. The reconstituted garment graced the cover of a Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers catalogue and sold for $35,000, according to Ms. Headland: 'It was typical Sandy, saving something and building it back to money-spinning glory.' The reclamations of Ms. Stagg extended to cool eateries. She and two partners took the Art Deco greasy spoon Peter Pan Lunch, got rid of the grease and updated the spoon. The Globe and Mail restaurant critic Joanne Kates praised the just-opened place in 1976 for its rare marriage of trendiness and friendliness and its 'intelligently limited' culinary aspirations. 'It has obviously been very carefully put together by people who understand that the best way to exploit nostalgia is to avoid exploiting it,' Ms. Kates wrote. Though Ms. Stagg enjoyed vintage objects, old fashions and retro culture − she jitterbugged with the best of them − she hardly lived in the past. 'Sandy read about history for research purposes, not pleasure,' said her one-time romantic partner and longtime friend, the architect Paul Oberst. She not only listened to the new sounds of the day but supported and befriended the musicians. Ms. Stagg danced to disco, vibed to new wave, was pals with Rough Trade's Carole Pope and dated singers from influential Toronto punk bands the Diodes and the Viletones. 'She was interested in whatever was going on,' Mr. Oberst said. 'We went to see Roxy Music, Bob Marley and Elvis Costello, all at Massey Hall, I think.' The New York art rockers the Talking Heads were introduced to Ms. Stagg and the Peter Pan crowd through two influential Toronto modern art hubs, A Space and Art Metropole. 'Sandy took us under her wing and made us feel part of that world – a crazy and wonderful world that sadly no longer exists,' Talking Heads singer David Byrne said in a statement to The Globe. 'A reminder that a person, or just a handful of people, can be a catalyst that enables all sorts of people to come together and interact − at least for a while. What she did was special." In her later years, Ms. Stagg was a 'feisty old lady' devoted to her backyard garden, according to artist and close friend Charles Pachter. 'Sandy would beam and talk about her roses and peonies and the birds in her garden,' Mr. Pachter said. 'It made her happy.' Ms. Stagg cultivated scenes, friendships and flowers with a maestro's touch. Though a style icon, she believed that fashion should not be considered separate from food, furniture, music or politics. 'She takes an interest in observing how fashion functions as a code of being,' The Globe's David Livingstone wrote of her in 1984. 'Glamour, as a thing of the spirit; style, as a matter of soul.' She was born Sandra Penelope Newton on Oct. 3, 1940, in Dorset, England, at a manor converted to a maternity hospital for evacuated Londoners during the Blitz. Her parents were theatre carpenter Thomas Newton and seamstress Dorothy Newton (née Burke). They raised their only child − a much older stepbrother died in 1960 − in a rented flat in London that had a bomb shelter and a lemon tree in the backyard. Her dad was an air raid warden near the end of the Second World War. 'That is why they had a telephone, and she was always very proud of having one of the first telephones in Shepherd's Bush,' Ms. Headland said. 'Also, she loved sitting in the basket of her dad's bicycle and being taken to see the bomb sites.' She attended Godolphin and Latymer School, an expensive private day school for girls in Hammersmith, West London, that in 1951 became state-supported and ceased to charge fees to pupils. By 1960 she was married, in a gown she had made with her own hands, to John Stagg, a friend of her father's. 'He was much older and she only married him to keep her dad happy,' Ms. Headland said. They lived in the parents' flat in Shepherd's Bush until Ms. Stagg left her husband after four years of marriage. Though she would go one to enjoy a glamorous lifestyle, Ms. Stagg took pride in her gritty British upbringing and looked up to John Lennon, a lowly Liverpudlian who as a member of the Beatles became a celebrated person in a class-conscious society. Without him, she told The Globe in 1984, 'I would not be who I am today.' Though she is not known to have crossed paths with Mr. Lennon, the anti-establishment figure who released Working Class Hero as a solo artist was an inspiration to many of her generation. 'The world had changed somewhat in the 1960s,' Ms. Headland said. 'A working-class Brit could make their way in the world and not be ashamed of their roots.' In 1966, Ms. Stagg met and married a Canadian in London, Bud Petersen. Two years later, they moved to Toronto, where their suburb-dwelling marriage would dissolve. She headed downtown to begin her eclectic career. She made costumes for the maverick Global Village Theatre company and created one-of-a-kind shirts for the Brick Shirt House. At a flea market outside the Church of the Holy Trinity, now surrounded by the Eaton Centre, she sold clothing brought from London or bought cheaply at Salvation Army thrift stores. 'She could look at a huge mound of old clothes and spot a designer number from 50 yards,' General Idea's Mr. Bronson remembered. Gravitating to the city's nascent avant-garde art scene, she was a fashion designer for General Idea. Her image appeared in many of their projects. Ms. Stagg had a flair for the theatrical gesture. Intending to move her Amelia Earhart Originals boutique from Yonge Street to the ritzy Yorkville shopping neighborhood, she was informed by a city inspector that a bylaw prohibited the sale of second-hand goods in the former village of Yorkville. 'Sandy quickly made an appointment with the boss of the bylaws and went to his office on the 10th floor of City Hall,' Mr. Oberst recalled. 'She marched straight from the door to the plate-glass window, turned dramatically and said, 'I may as well throw myself through this window if I can't keep my business!' The stunned bureaucrat saw to it that the bylaw was changed. Her vintage clothing shop in London drew celebrity fashionistas John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen and model Kate Moss. Fashion designer Paul Smith was chased down the road by Ms. Stagg as he left with his purchase. Because his credit card didn't work, she grabbed back the bag containing a pair of men's brogues. 'He had to send someone the following Friday to pay and pick them up,' Ms. Headland recalled. 'I think he was terrified of Sandy.' In her final days, Ms. Stagg, who had no children, was looked after by a group of friends − dubbed Team Sandy − that included Mr. Oberst and Erella Ganon. One of the visitors was the great Toronto singer Mary Margaret O'Hara. 'She came to the hospital and the two of us sang songs to Sandy at her bedside,' Ms. Ganon said. 'It was beautiful.' You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here. To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@
South Wales Argus
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South Wales Argus
Downton Abbey fans 'work out' finale's plot from trailer
Universal Pictures uploaded the trailer to their official YouTube channel, prompting a number of fans to express how emotional they are about the arrival of The Grand Finale. Taking to the comments, one person said: "This made me weep," adding that they will miss Maggie Smith while watching the movie. Others on YouTube were quick to welcome the film, with one person writing: "So excited." Fans 'work out' plot for Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale after spotting major clue in trailer Other fans took to the Downton Abbey Reddit to discuss the trailer, with one person spotting a major clue. Responding to another user on the forum, the viewer said: "The fact that nobody else is wearing hats indicates that Robert and Cora are returning, rather than everyone leaving. "I reckon it might be a situation in which Harold has lost everything, Robert and Cora go to pick him up, but Downton is safe due to some kind of wise investment?" Another person wrote: "Very proud that, by the end of the series, the community has successfully figured out the plot of the finale by clocking that some characters weren't wearing hats." The time has come to say goodbye. #DowntonAbbey: The Grand Finale is only in theaters September 12. — Downton Abbey (@DowntonAbbey) March 27, 2025 Recommended Reading: When will Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale premiere? Earlier this year, the release date for Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale was revealed. The news was shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, along with the ominous tagline: "The time has come to say goodbye". The movie will come to theatres on September 12 and will be the first film since the sad passing of Dame Maggie Smith.
