Dame Maggie Smith, who died on Friday aged 89, was described by Simon Callow yesterday as “the complete actor”. She had several phases of popular success during a long stage, film and television career, as new generations rediscovered her talent.
But the spiky Ilford-born redhead, who went on to be loved equally by fans of the 1969 film of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey ITV series and of cinema’s Harry Potter franchise, was first hailed as an important new theatrical star in the early 1960s. Critics then saluted what they thought must be her permanent move from cabaret and revue into serious drama at The Old Vic and the fledgling National Theatre.
This golden era, in which she performed as Desdemona in Othello and in Miss Julie opposite Albert Finney in Strindberg’s play, came when the company was run at The Old Vic by its leading actor Sir Laurence Olivier, later abetted by his literary manager, Sir Kenneth Tynan, a renowned former theatre critic for the Observer.
Speaking to the Observer Magazine in January 1966, on the brink of this life-changing period, Smith explained how, following her hit performances in the plays The Public Ear and The Private Eye, Olivier had unexpectedly asked her to dine with him at The Ivy.
“What we had, God knows! I didn’t eat, I’m sure. He asked me to play Silvia in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and Desdemona in Othello and I thought he was raving mad. I was absolutely terrified and I told him, ‘No!’ Then I went home and about two o’clock in the morning I sent him a hysterical telegram saying I’d do it.”
She went on to tell her interviewer, Stanley Reynolds, that she did not plan to shift fully away from playing comic roles. “I just want to go on and on. I don’t see myself doing only serious parts. That would be mad. I want to keep myself varied.” Asked how she saw her future, as she started to be offered major film roles, Smith said: “I really should stay with the theatre. I haven’t worked hard enough. … Time is so limited.” She was 32.
In a December 1965 edition of the Observer Magazine devoted to Olivier’s performance in the title role in Othello, Tynan left space to note how Smith’s performance had also defied expectation and caught at the heart. Praising her instinct to stand tall and face her husband when a jealous Othello publicly slaps her face, he wrote: “Her reaction … is not the usual collapse into sobs; it is one of deep shame and embarrassment, for Othello’s sake as well as her own.
“She is outraged, but tries out of loyalty not to show it. After the blow, she holds herself rigidly upright and expressionless, fighting back her tears. ‘I have not deserved this’ is not an appeal for sympathy, but a protest quietly and firmly lodged by an extremely spunky girl.”
Writing in the Observer in 1966 the author and playwright John Mortimer was a little more restrained in his praise of Smith’s Desdemona. Reviewing Stuart Burge’s film version of the tragedy, he wrote: “Maggie Smith admirably subdues her mannerisms. Her Desdemona is simple and direct.”
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Smith went on to appear at the National opposite her future first husband, Robert Stephens, father to her two actor sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, in an acclaimed and unconventional 1967 Franco Zefferelli production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, with a script updated by the poet and author Robert Graves.
The Observer was delighted: “Not for years has the human substance of Shakespeare been [reflected] like this.” The public agreed. After a month in repertory, the production was reportedly still selling out right back to the standing room behind the stalls.