Downton Abbey star Maggie Smith, deliverer of the hit show’s most memorable lines as the Dowager Countess of Grantham, has said that the next season of the British period drama will be her last — but she’s not retiring.
The show has just screened its fifth season, and there has been speculation that the series will stop after the sixth. But even if it continues, Smith says her part won’t.
Speaking to the UK’s Sunday Times, Smith pointed out the advancing age of her character. “They say this is the last one, and I can’t see how it could go on,” she said. “I mean, I certainly can’t keep going. To my knowledge, I must be 110 by now. We’re into the late 1920s.”
The actress herself is 80.
“When you’re not working it’s scary, and when you are working it’s scary, because you don’t know if you’ve got the energy to get through the day,” she said. “But the bleakness of not doing it, and missing out on the friendships that you make, is too much to bear.”
She’s currently starring in the The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a sequel out in the UAE on March 19, and has just finished shooting The Lady in the Van, in which plays an elderly homeless woman, reports Variety.
