Dame Maggie Smith’s trophy cupboard mirrored her extraordinary achievements throughout theatre, movie and tv – and within the largest arenas of British and US tradition, from the BBC to Hollywood, the West Finish to Broadway. A measure of her versatility and sturdiness is that, within the Sixties, she performed 9 main roles within the adolescence of the Nationwide Theatre, but additionally, from the beginning of the 2000s, appeared in 5 collection of Downton Abbey, the ITV Sunday night time collection that turned one of many largest well-liked hits of the brand new millennium.
Her function in that present was Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, who lived in such a bubble of unique consolation that, in trademark one-liners, she would drawl in mystification, for instance: “What is a ‘weekend’?” That acerbic superiority was a signature all through Smith’s profession, together with the half that introduced her first Academy award in 1970, in opposition to a shortlist additionally that includes Liza Minnelli and Jane Fonda, for the title function in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tailored from Muriel Spark’s novel a few maverick, smug schoolteacher in Edinburgh.
Smith constantly had the braveness and expertise to do sudden issues. Her second Oscar, in 1979, was for California Suite, with a script by Neil Simon and a forged of excessive Hollywood expertise together with Alan Alda and Walter Matthau. Introducing a component of postmodernism to a mainstream comedy, Smith performed precisely what she had been in the beginning of the last decade: an English actress up for her first Academy award.
One other shock on her CV demonstrated a capability to play it straight and darkish. In 2019, after 12 years away from the stage, Smith, on the age of 84, carried out a 100-minute monologue on the Bridge theatre in London. A German Life was tailored by Christopher Hampton from a documentary film interview given, on the age of 102 (the present was a uncommon case of an octogenarian ageing up for a component), by Brunhilde Pomsel, who labored for the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels throughout the Holocaust, however who continued to disclaim complicity or guilt. With typical meticulousness, Smith refused to just accept the half till she had proved to herself at residence that she may memorise an prolonged solo. Combining enduringly impeccable method with the center to check it once more at such an age, it was a late triumph in an astonishing profession.
Margaret Smith – she most popular her full first identify, the “Maggie” imposed on her to tell apart from one other performer on the Fairness register – was born in Ilford, Essex. Her mom, who labored as a secretary, was Scottish, so helpful for the creation of the Brodie brogue. Her father, Nathaniel, was a pathologist, whose educational posting to Oxford led to his daughter attending the town’s ladies’ highschool.
Regardless of becoming a member of the Oxford Playhouse Firm at 16, fairly than going to varsity, Smith benefited from the native varsity theatrical privileges, forged in Oxford College Dramatic Society productions, together with revues, which, on the time had been attended by nationwide critics.
Such was the affect she made in comedy skits and songs that, aged 21, she was a part of an ensemble recruited to look on Broadway in a revue known as New Faces of 1956. In London, throughout the next two years, she appeared, with co-stars together with Kenneth Williams, in an English present, Share My Lettuce, billed as “a diversion with music”, with a script by Bamber Gascoigne.
At that time, Smith appeared set to be a sketch-and-music comic, particularly when Strip the Willow, a play concerning the survivors of a nuclear battle within the UK, didn’t switch to London from a UK tour. It was written by Beverley Cross, whom Smith had met on the Oxford Playhouse. He wrote the play for her as an tried seduction, the primary description of her character being “stunning. As elegant and complicated as a prime worldwide mannequin. An incredible sense of enjoyable. A marvellous lady.’’
Nonetheless, at that stage, no lasting relationship occurred. And Smith’s critical dramatic profession was launched when she appeared, once more paired with Kenneth Williams, in a double invoice of performs, The Personal Ear and The Public Eye, by Peter Shaffer, in 1962. These gained Smith her first Night Normal greatest actress statuette, on the age of 27, and caught the eye of Sir Laurence Olivier, then establishing, at Chichester, the primary try at a Nationwide Theatre. Crucially to the event of her repute, Olivier trusted her not solely with comedy – similar to The Recruiting Officer, George Farquhar’s early 18th-century farce – but additionally tragedy: she was Desdemona to Olivier’s efficiency within the title function of Othello.
Additionally on the Nationwide, Smith fashioned a relationship with the actor Robert Stephens, who turned her first husband, and father of her sons, who, as Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, adopted their mother and father into appearing.
Dramatic Exchanges, a set of correspondence from the Nationwide Theatre archives, exhibits the shut inventive relationship between Olivier and Smith. A recurring nicknamer, he addressed her as “Mageen”. He had lengthy instructed her that her excellent function could be Millamant, a strong-willed lady conspiring to realize a desired marriage, in William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Method of the World. However, in 1968, with Smith having left the corporate following her marriage with Stephens and pregnant with their first youngster, Olivier proceeded to stage the play with Geraldine McEwan as Millamant.
Olivier’s letter of apology to Smith contained elaborately verbose admiration. Smith wrote a reply of pained remorse concluding: “Properly, what’s the purpose of attempting to inform you my emotions. They clearly rely for thus little or no. It was good of you to say you’ll commit your energies to my return however actually I don’t assume it could be sensible of me to consider that both. Margaret.”
There’s a waspish, unforgiving tone in that letter that was a part of Smith’s character; a few of those that labored together with her, particularly youthful actors battling their roles, had been wounded by witty however merciless putdowns.
That unhealthy casting luck on the Nationwide, although, was greater than balanced out. Had Julie Andrews, in the identical yr, not turned down the Jean Brodie film, Smith would by no means have performed the half that redefined her profession. Together with her American bankability elevated by a US tour of Noël Coward’s Personal Lives, Smith used it to enter a type of theatrical exile from Olivier and Britain. From 1976 to 1980, she performed 4 summer season seasons on the Shakespeare competition in Stratford, Ontario, conceived as a form of ex-pat RSC-Nationwide, the place she lastly performed the a part of Millamant and different roles that may have been anticipated in London, similar to Woman Macbeth.
Smith fell into a cheerful rhythm of filming gigs break up with Canadian appearing sabbaticals. Whereas she rehearsed or acted, Beverley Cross wrote to her, having turn out to be Smith’s second husband in 1975 following her divorce from Robert Stephens.
When Smith returned to London theatre, she took over from Diana Rigg because the troubled fashionable colonial spouse Ruth Carson, in Tom Stoppard’s Night time and Day. She confirmed her resurgence with two extra Night Normal awards, in 1981 and 1984, for London runs of exhibits she had premiered in Canada. In Virginia, by Edna O’Brien, she was the author Virginia Woolf, for whom Smith’s reward for haughty wit made her pure casting. Then, 16 years after the frustration with Olivier, she lastly performed the coveted function in The Method of the World in her personal metropolis.
Smith, in contradiction of the usual skilled graphs, had, after that slight mid-career dip, a 3rd act much more superb than her first. Shaffer wrote for her Lettice and Lovage, a comedy maximising her command of sardonic superiority, as Lettice Douffet, a tour information who begins to decorate historical past. She took the play to New York, the place she gained a Tony award. Smith additionally turned an Alan Bennett specialist. She co-starred with Michael Palin within the film A Personal Perform in 1984, as a Yorkshire lady utilizing a black-market pig to stop wartime rationing thwarting her upward mobility. Within the 1988 first collection of Bennett’s Speaking Heads monologues for tv, she was a vicar’s spouse, anxious about personal sins, in A Mattress Among the many Lentils. On stage (1999) and display screen (2015), she was memorable as The Woman within the Van, a fictionalised model of Miss Shepherd, a Catholic evangelist tramp who for some years lived in a caravan on Bennett’s driveway.
There was a trio of West Finish appearances in performs by the good American dramatist Edward Albee: because the oldest (90-something) of three variations of the author’s imperious mom in Three Tall Ladies (1994); taking part in a vicious drunk in a household menaced by an unnamed “plague” in A Delicate Steadiness (1997); and a mysterious matriarch visiting a deathbed in The Woman from Dubuque (2007), a uncommon flop that put Smith off theatre.
Another excuse for her retreat from theatre was, unusually for a septuagenarian performer, an unlimited demand from film studios. Between 2001 and 2011, she appeared in seven of the eight Harry Potter movies, as Professor Minerva McGonagall, transfiguration trainer at Hogwarts, her embodiment of the formidable Scottish educational seeming to comprise affectionate nods to Brodie. The half introduced Smith appreciable wealth – she joked concerning the “Harry Potter pension fund” – and an unlimited new fanbase that, she complained, made it inconceivable for her to buy in Waitrose any extra.
Her cinematic renaissance had additionally included Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001). On this English nation home drama, written by Julian Fellowes, Smith’s character was at the very least a primary cousin to her Downton Abbey countess. Showing in a TV collection with a mean viewers of 10 million made it even tougher for Dame Maggie (as she had turn out to be in 1990) to buy groceries. However this late superstardom, half a century or extra after her first main theatre and film successes, confirmed that she was an actor with the uncommon capacity to do something she needed wherever.
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