Maggie Smith can't wait to take off her corset!

Los Angeles - Dame Maggie Smith insists wearing her Downton Abbey corsets is "agony".

The Oscar-winning actress and the rest of the cast will be waving goodbye to their roles in the period drama after season six wraps and she is looking forward to never having to squeeze her frame into the corsets ever again and she struggles to comprehend how women in the early 1900s wore the tight-fitting garments every day.

Maggie - who plays Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham - told website MailOnline: "It's not riotously funny to be in corsets and a wig from seven o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night. The cast are enchanting and all the young are really lovely, so it was all very enjoyable on that level. But, to tell you the truth, the corsets are agony. God knows how they lived in the days when they had to wear them all the time."

Smith, 80, previously admitted she thinks Julian Fellowes has made the right decision to end the show after the next series.

She said: "They say this is the last one, and I can't see how it could go on. I mean, I certainly can't keep going. To my knowledge, I must be 110 by now. We're into the late 1920s."

The 80-year-old actress might be calling it a day on Downton Abbey but she will continue to pursue acting.

She said: "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. But the bleakness of not doing it, and missing out on the friendships that you make, is too much to bear."