Maggie Smith once lamented that as she got older the roles seemed to get smaller, observing: “I now play all these nasty old women, really, on the whole.” Yet her old bats have a habit of stealing scenes, notably her magnificent dowager countess in the television series Downton Abbey, which is expected to pull in millions of viewers for tonight’s Christmas special.
Wickedly, caustically funny, Smith’s depiction of the materfamilias of an old English dynasty is the one that stands out among a distinguished cast. According to the stage director Sir Peter Hall: “Maggie could pack out a theatre even if she was reciting a telephone directory.” Sir Michael Caine, her co-star in the film California Suite — for which Smith won an Oscar — was not entirely joking when he warned Michael Palin that she would steal the movie The Missionary from him.
So pity the Downton Abbey players led by Hugh Bonneville, who portrays her son, the Earl of Grantham, and Elizabeth McGovern, who plays his American wife — not to mention a seasoned downstairs staff marshalled by Jim Carter’s butler and Phyllis Logan’s housekeeper.
But then Smith has been in a different league ever since she achieved international stardom as an unorthodox Scottish teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for which she won her first Academy award in 1970. Her range takes in extremes, from “acid queen” to the emotional depth of one-handers such as the BBC series Talking Heads — she played the character of Susan in A Bed Among the Lentils — written by her friend Alan Bennett.
Neat and bird-like as she approaches her 77th birthday on Wednesday, she remains as reticent as ever to give interviews: “What is required of actors today is beyond credence — it seems vital that you tell the world everything about your private life and remove every single garment you possess while you are about it.”
Besides, she finds it hard to talk about her work because she is unaware of what she does as an actress: “I know when there has been a good moment, but I couldn’t begin to tell you why. The only thing I do know is that acting definitely gets harder — more draining, at least. But then everything does in life. Life really is terribly hard.”
Still, she has banked her “pension” — appearing in the lucrative Harry Potter film series as Professor Minerva McGonagall, a character she described as “Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard’s hat”. She was relieved when the franchise finally ended: “Alan Rickman and I ran out of reaction shots. We couldn’t think what sort of faces we would pull.”
Some find her intimidating: she has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly and is said to have a volcanic temper. As a novice at the National Theatre she had the temerity to utter a legendary put-down to Laurence Olivier, who “terrified everyone”. The knighted thespian had been taking Smith to task for her accent — once described as “adenoidal, estuarine, slightly chortly”. One night she was preparing to play Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello, for which he had blacked up with greasepaint. Poking her head around his door, she called with perfect pronunciation: “How now, brown cow?”
Other interviewers have found her hilarious, with a gift for mimicry. To her mind, she is no tragedian and would always prefer a comic interpretation: “I tend to head for what’s amusing because a lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.” She believes comedy is not the antithesis of tragedy, but just a different way of looking at the same material.
This levity is hardly surprising, given that her great mate and early mentor was the late Kenneth Williams. Her first West End appearance was with the comedian in a 1957 revue written by Bamber Gascoigne and called Share My Lettuce. To their friends, they were “twin souls”. She recalled Williams’s advice one day at London’s Queen’s theatre: “Look, ducky, you’re being absolutely boring. You would never say a sentence like that.” Smith, who thought she “was clever because I’d learnt all the words”, resolved to “colour things as vividly as Kenneth does”.
Williams once recalled accompanying his chum to Fortnum & Mason to buy a bra: “The assistant said: ‘Yes we have that particular bra, ma’am — it’s seven guineas.’ Smith said: ‘Seven guineas! Cheaper to have your tits off!’”
A lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything These days she is Granny Smith, who dotes on the children of her two sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, from her tempestuous marriage to the actor Robert Stephens, who died in 1995.
The playwright Beverley Cross, the “lovely” second husband she married in 1975, died of heart disease in 1998. She lives in a well-concealed West Sussex farmhouse where “Bev” used to make potent cider, and in a west London townhouse she has kept for 45 years.
One of her best friends is the actress Judi Dench, with whom she shares the honour of being Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She admires Dench for all the things they don’t have in common: “Jude is the most incredibly level person. Generous, understanding. All the things I’d have to work very hard at, Jude is like all the time.”
They lost touch after meeting in 1958 and were reunited in the film A Room with a View (1985). In the 2004 film Ladies in Lavender, they played two spinsterish sisters — “old bags in grey wigs” — whose lives are transformed when they find a young man washed up on a beach.
Smith was an unhappy child. She was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, Essex. Her Newcastle-born father Nathaniel, a pathologist, and her dour Glaswegian mother Margaret had had twin sons — Ian and Alistair — six years earlier. Her father was a gentle man who may have instilled her enduring sense of anxiety: “Mustn’t ride a bike, you’d be bound to fall off. Couldn’t swim, you’d most certainly drown.” One day her mother confided to her that her father’s nervousness had begun when he accidentally injected himself with something intended for research animals. “After this he was never the same.”
When she was five the family was evacuated to Oxford. Overawed by her brothers’ superior intellects, she despaired: “I was rather hopeless, I suspect.” On leaving Oxford high school for girls at 16, she resolved to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but her mystified parents ruled that she must stay in Oxford to follow her dream. Her talent was quickly spotted at the Oxford Playhouse theatre and in 1956, aged 21, she went to Broadway to work in revue comedy.
Smith, a vivacious redhead, had earlier entranced Cross, a history undergraduate and aspiring playwright. It was on his advice that she accepted Olivier’s invitation to join the new National Theatre, where she fell for and married the charismatic Stephens. They were a star couple who produced box-office magic. She was unaware of his drinking for a while. But the cracks widened after they appeared in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which Stephens played a slimy, amorous art teacher. In 1970 Stephens tried to commit suicide while playing the lead in Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
“And after that it was just hopeless,” Smith recalled. “It got worse and then it went on getting worse and worse. In the end it was destroying everybody. And he was having so many affairs.” After six years she left. “Honestly, I don’t think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.”
In 1975 she married Cross, her former love. They took the boys to Ontario, Canada, where she worked for five years. Some described it as a “self-exile”, citing negative reviews. She agreed: “I was bloody awful; the critics were right. My life was a mess. Everything was impossible.” By contrast, her stage performances in Canada were acclaimed. Her Rosalind in As You Like It reduced the critic Bernard Levin to tears of joy.
For a while Smith and Cross lived in New York, where their neighbours included the actress Katharine Hepburn and the composer Stephen Sondheim. “She [Hepburn] came round with a basket of eggs and some marmalade one day and I nearly fainted.”
She never stopped loving Stephens, though: “I don’t see how you can, really. I have two wonderful sons and he is the reason for that.” Towards the end of his life they were friends again.
A few years ago she received treatment for breast cancer, which made her feel horribly sick: “I was staggering around Waitrose and felt ghastly. I was holding on to railings, thinking, ‘I can’t do this’.” She was in mid-treatment when she filmed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: “I was hairless. I had no problem getting the wig on. I was like a boiled egg.” After doctors gave her the all-clear she was fairly philosophical: “Shit happens.”
Smith once played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and has no desire to repeat the experience. She blames the indelible performance of Dame Edith Evans: “That f****** handbag is stuck in everyone’s head.”
According to colleagues, Smith’s quest for perfection is such that she does not take breaks during rehearsal, but is seen pacing up and down, repeating her lines as if exploring them for their meaning. “I don’t think I’ve been good enough,” she concluded. In that opinion she is in a minority of one.
