Maggie Smith was an actor of legendary wit and style who, even off stage, seemed to have the capacity to deliver a one-line zinger. There’s a lovely moment in Roger Michell’s TV film Nothing Like a Dame in which the assembled quartet (including Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) are asked to talk about the difficulty of living with a title. Joan Plowright says it’s worse for her because she not only has the handle of a Dame but that of a Lady through her marriage to Laurence Olivier. With exquisite timing and hitting the perfect verb, Maggie looks at her old friend and says: “Joan, darling, you’ll just have to grapple with it.”
Smith’s achievements on stage and screen are well documented, but I was lucky to witness a less well-known side of her work: her seasons at the Festival theatre in Stratford, Ontario, from 1976 to 1980. She once told me that she went to work in Canada because of her private life. I wondered if it was also because of her Private Lives which, although a great West End success in 1972, led to accusations that she was becoming the prisoner of her comic mannerisms. Whatever the motivation, her work in the Canadian Stratford had a directness and sincerity that amounted to a reinvention of self.
I sadly missed her opening season, in which she played Cleopatra and Millamant in The Way of the World, but I was there in 1977 and was bowled over by what I saw. Among her roles were Titania and Hippolyta in Robin Phillips’s beautiful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I have rarely seen them better played. Her Hippolyta had the sadness of a conquered queen and her Titania was no fluttering fairy, but a conscience-stricken figure. Resisting Oberon’s claims to the changeling child in her possession, she recalled how his mother was a votaress of her order but that “she, being mortal of that boy did die … And for her sake I will not part with him”. With those lines, Maggie Smith drove straight to the heart.
I saw her again in 1978 as a scintillating Rosalind in As You Like It and as a raven-haired Lady Macbeth of boundless ambition and limited imagination. Speaking of Duncan’s murder, she cried: “A little water clears us of this deed – how easy is it then,” leaning on the word “easy” with fatal myopia. It is fair to say that she transcended a slow-moving production with two intervals. When I turned up at her house the morning after the first night to interview her, her husband, Beverley Cross, suggested he take the phone off the hook. “What for?” she doomily inquired. “No one’s likely to ring.”
But she had another triumphant Stratford season in 1980. As Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, opposite Brian Bedford as Benedick, she suggested a bruised heart under a facade of raillery. She also enjoyed great success playing Virginia Woolf in a one-woman play by Edna O’Brien. What she caught was the character’s mix of passion and insecurity; she skipped with delight as she and Leonard became the centre of literary London but also, through a tightening of her body and narrowing of her gestures, indicated Virginia’s gradual withdrawal into a suicidal solitude.
I shall remember many other Maggie Smith performances, from her comically angular Myra in Coward’s Hay Fever to her radiantly poised Jean Brodie in the film of the Muriel Spark novel, and her Lady Bracknell-like dowager in Downton Abbey. But I shall always remember that it was through her move to Ontario that she recaptured the clarity, sincerity and emotional openness that lay at the heart of her best work.