Maggie Smith (1934-2024)
Maggie Smith, who died this morning at age eighty-nine, became a legendary actress in the 1960s. She kept broadening and deepening that legend. You can watch and listen to her recordings of plays by Shakespeare; generations will now know her from the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey series on television; when I was a child, people were imitating her Miss Jean Brodie; friends of mine still refer to the Noël Coward Private Lives she played onstage with her then husband Robert Stephens as the epitome of witty glamour. Too few know her television account of the monstrous hothouse matriarch in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Richard Eyre: other accounts of the role - Katherine Hepburn’s above all - fade into mere superficiality by comparison. Smith created leading roles onstage by Alan Bennett, David Hare, Edna O’Brien, Peter Shaffer, and others. She had come into her own alongside such diverse colleagues as Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Williams; her long career brought her to work beside Eileen Atkins, Michael Caine, Helena Bonham Carter, Bette Davis, Frances de la Tour, Judi Dench, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Palin, Daniel Radcliffe, Penelope Wilton, and innumerably more.
I first saw her onstage in O’Brien’s Virginia, in which her Virginia Woolf spoke with luminously, lyrically, with a quality of contemplation that stays, movingly, in the memory: she made thought dance, all while evoking a serenity that transcended our knowledge of Woolf’s own eventual tragedy. She became famous for her delivery of zingers and for her artful turns of the head, but her Downton dowager is actually her at her laziest and (yes) most superficial: the camp version of Maggie Smith that audiences were only too ready to love. Her Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series has actually more range and feeling, while its flashes of fun (“I’ve always wanted to use that spell!” near the ending of the final film) are delectable.
She was a supremely intelligent actress, known for having her nose buried in the script so as to find more and more directives. My favourite example of this was in her Lady Bracknell in Nicholas Hytner’s West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest: here, she kept her head and chin carried high, turning the head in those staccato switches she so enjoyed, in deportment that was hilarious in itself - until, in the final act, she proclaimed about the social possibilities of Cecily’s profile, “The head a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on how the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present.” She then turned her head - again - to illustrate the point, delighting the audience with the logic of how she had been behaving all along.
At her worst, Smith let audiences and colleagues know which of her colleagues she did and didn’t rate. Even though she was also at her best in that production of The Importance, she became notorious for referring to Richard E. Grant as “Richard E. Can’t”; I remember a performance at which she let the whole audience know she was in the same world as Alex Jennings (Jack Worthing) and Margaret Tyzack (Miss Prism) while refusing to look in the directions of Grant (Algernon) or Claire Skinner (Cecily). That obviously bad behaviour of hers made the newspapers, after which she was never so evidently reprehensible; but there were later productions in which some of her colleagues - while greatly admiring her artistry - were bruised and shocked by her manipulations of the play to suit her own purposes.
She was also a naturally funny woman. She once left this message on a colleague’s answer machine: “Well, darling, we’re off to see Long Day’s Journ- Jesus, it makes me tired just to say it!” The critic Jack Tinker once told me how, on his recommendation, she had booked a room at his favourite hotel just outside Stratford-upon-Avon to see her son, Toby Stephens, in Schiller’s Wallenstein. “Jack darling,” she complained to him, “I don’t see why you’re so fond of this hotel, I’m in a very indifferent room.” Jack then told her that the room to book was no 102, with its marvellous view; and to make sure the hotel understood who she was. When he went to the hotel staff to rebuke them for putting the great Maggie Smith in an indifferent room, they explained that she had merely booked as “Mrs Cross” (her second husband was Beverly Cross). Well, said Jack, “She’s Mrs VERY Cross now.” But he told me the story in a different spirit two years later, when Toby Stephens was playing Coriolanus and she was attending his opening night. Although Jack had arranged for the Daily Mail to book his room three months in advance, he had arrived to find it was taken by someone else - by “Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”
Her technique, usually well concealed, was formidable. Many can imitate the apparently nasal delivery of Maggie Smith lines, but in fact she had many voices; and her capacity for adding chest resonance increased, gloriously, with age. She had loved working in her youth with the director William Gaskill, who never ceased to admire her gifts of phrasing.
In the 1990s, when I began reviewing London theatre, I came to think of Smith, Judi Dench, and Vanessa Redgrave as the three miracle workers. All three, otherwise unalike, could and did do imperceptible and/or inexplicable things that transformed the drama in a moment and that cut through to other layers of character and feeling.
I especially recall her onstage in Alan Bennett’s monologue A Bed among the Lentils, where she is the alcoholic wife of a Church of England vicar. She had already played this, definitively, on television. She then played it live at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in summer 1996 (with Margaret Tyzack in Bennett’s Soldiering On, it became a superb double bill of Talking Heads) before transferring to the West End. At the Minerva, with the audience all around her, Smith immediately created laughter with her famous opening line: “Geoffrey’s bad enough, but I’m glad I wasn’t married to Jesus.” But when she played that line behind the proscenium arch of the Comedy Theatre, the angling of her head and body (sitting at an angle to the audience), her timing, and the acid colour of her voice were such that “Geoffrey’s bad enough, but I’m glad I wasn’t married to Jesus” immediately stopped the show for whole minutes, even on press night. This wasn’t an audience of tourists delighting in the bitchy side of La Smith, this was a superlative comic actress using all her science to weight, time, angle, and deliver a line to incomparable effect.
A Bed among the Lentils is a monologue with several scenes; Smith remained onstage between most of them. In the first scene, she seemed so gaunt and lined that my companion whispered her real concern for how ill Smith looked. Yet with every scene, Smith looked less haggard, physically lighter and calmer. Inexplicably, her very lines seemed to vanish. I’ll never know how she did this. Certainly it was one of her miracles.
Friday 27 September 2024
@Alastair Macaulay