Hitting the Top
Maggie Smith, the star of the National Theatre, has climbed a high range in a few years. Overleaf she talks to Stanley Reynolds about how she got there.
The kookie lynx coat in which she had been lounging about in a gondola in Venice was casually cast on a couch and Miss Smith was in a neat twin-set and straight-arrow pearls, on the set in Rome. The set was the interior for "Anyone for Venice?", a tarted-up modern "Volpone" produced by Joseph Mankiewicz. Maggie Smith, who has been Sir Laurence's Desdemona and Strindberg's Miss Julie and Ibsen's Hilde Wangel and the critics' darling, was playing the faithful girl again, and she said it was to be her last film.
"Doing films," she said later, in double breasted black rabbit in a café around the corner from the Spanish Steps, "and staying in the theatre is having your cake and eating it." And Maggie Smith is too canny to attempt that.
The handiest analogy to Miss Smith's career is that of a shrewd and lucky horse-player, who has hedged her bets. This has taken her from the Oxford Playhouse up through the Edinburgh fringe, to Broadway revue, to comedy parts in the West End, to the Old Vic, and the National Theatre playing opposite Sir Laurence Olivier. Now it has brought her to the Cinecitta studios inRome playing opposite Rex Harrison. Nevertheless, Miss Smith is a dedicated actress and uncompromising about it. "Criminally uncompromising," said an American film man on the set, when he learnt she was going to give up films.
And she is deceptive. At first glance she looks like the kind of girl she plays in the film - the trusty secretary in "The V.I.P.s", the faithful colleen of "Young Cassidy", merely the voice of morality in "Anyone for Venice?" But inside the Deborah Kerr/Doris Day girl next door is some sort of inner compass that points her in her own direction.
She has no politics. She has no hobbies. She started going to cookery classes but she was too tired to learn. In London, she lives alone in a flat in Kensington which she leaves for the National Theatre at 9.30 a.m. and returns to at about 11 or 12 midnight. She is not engaged to anyone, and has no plans for marriage.
Maggie Smith cannot remember a time when she did not want to be an actress. She does not even seem to get pleasure out of reaching the top. "I don't think I am at the top," she said. "I don't see how it could possibly be. There is so far to go."
She thinks about being an actress, and she says it has always been like that. She was born 30 years ago in Ilford, Essex. Her family moved during the war to Oxford, where her father is a pathologist at the university. Her mother is from Glasgow and her father is from Newcastle-on-Tyne, and Maggie Smith has the foxy features of the redheaded Celts with a lot of charm and twinkle but with eyes that can suddenly take 10 years off your life.
She says her family was astonished when she went into the theatre. "I went to the Oxford Playhouse school for two years - it was only open for three. The school was attached to the Oxford Rep., and we used to walk on.
"I left the school when I was 18," said Miss Smith, "and joined the Oxford Rep as a student actor. I made thousands of cups of tea and swept up. I wasn't unhappy - this is like psycho-analysis - but I was frustrated because I didn't get the parts."
She left the rep company to go into revue at the Watergate and she joined Equity. She was one in a queue of Margaret Smiths, so she changed it to Maggie.
At the Watergate Leonard Sillman, the American producer, asked to see her: "So I went around to the Savoy and it was filled with people - all auditioning. I was asked to sing, which is something I can't do. But then I looked over and saw a friend of mine, Stanley Myers, at the piano. I had been in revue with him, and he knew I could sing a song called 'Blind Date' so we whipped into 'Blind Date'. If I had been asked to sing a popular song I would have dropped down dead.
"But I hung around for ages and ages in London. Evidently Sillman didn't have the revue ready. And I didn't have any work." She waited around Londond looking for work for almost a year.
Eventually Sillman's show materialized, and "New Faces of 1956" ran for seven months in New York. "From Oxford to Broadway was a big jump," she said. "And it was at that time that I decided to get the hell out of revue and become an actress."
Back in England she appeared in a play for Granada television called "Boy Meets Girl", and then in "Share My Lettuce", which ran for nine months in 1957. She was auditioned by the Old Vic, and appeared as Lady Plyant on Congreve's "The Double Dealer". In the following years she played quite a few more parts, from Celia in "As You Like It" at the Old Vic to Mistress Ford in "The Merry Wives". Then in 1962 she really caught the imagination of theatregoers with virtuoso performances in "They Private Ear" and "The Public Eye".
"Then," she said, "Sir Laurence took me out to dinner. To 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."
At the National Theatre this year she will play in "Othello" on February 11, and "Miss Julie" is due to open in London in March. Some people are anticipating Miss Smith will reveal yet another dimension in "Miss Julie". She doesn't share this view. "I don't see myself in any particular way. 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. I like doing comedy. And going from 'Othello' to 'Hay Fever' was marvellous."
She is very uick and decisive when speaking about the theatre. Even after rising at 6 a.m. and spending a day of take an retake on a Roman film set, or going without lunch, she was an incisive and tough-minded opponent in argument. What did she think of the remark attributed to Anthony Quinn that before he went into the theatre he thought all actors must be brilliant, only to find them the opposite? "That," she snapped, "is a fairly sweeping statement, and rather rude. A lot of actors are shy; going on stage is a perfect place to hide if you are shy. Some actors are not intelligent, of course, but you don't work with them again. If you are unintelligent you don't stay."
And her own future? "I don't think I've done as much as I should have done for the National. I really should stay with the theatre. I haven't worked hard enough. Time is so limited."