Maggie - Moody & Magnificent (Telegraph Magazin)
Maggie Smith is the country's greatest stage actress, yet behind every acclaimed performance there lies a chasm of self-doubt that drives her in search of perfection.
Mick Brown profiles a woman who comes most to life on stage.
When Dame Maggie Smith accepted the role of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest last year it was widely anticipated as one of the great theatrical events of the decade. How, the critics wondered, would our foremost stage actress - hailed as the successor to Dame Edith Evans - rise to the role that Dame Edith had made her own? What indelible mark would Dame Maggie leave on the part? Would it, in short, be a performance to remember? It was.
While Smith's performance was praised by most critics, others suggested that as the run progressed, so her performance began to owe less to Dame Edith than to an early mentor of Smith herlself, the comedian Kenneth Williams. In a display of unrelenting high-campery, Smith was accused of mercilessly upstaging her fellow performers, milking the audience for applause and effectively turnig the play into a one-woman show.
There were suggestions that Smith was unhappy with director Nicholas Hytner's artistic vision of the play and with the expressionist set. A rich body of rumour accumulated as the production went on. Hytner was said to have developed a withering impersonation of Smith and her 'suburban vowels' with which to amuse friends at dinner parties. Smith - no mean mimic herself when the occasion demands it - was heard to say that far from taking the production to Broadway she wouldn't even take it as far as Woking. One cast member is said to have spoken of 'the worst time I've ever had in the theatre'. "It is true that nobody was very happy," the show's producer Robert Fox acknowledges drily. Needless to say, The Importance of Being Earnest was an enormous hit.
In her 60th year it is said that Dame Maggie Smith has become 'demanding', that a certain imperiousness of manner is making itself felt. Next week she opens in a new play in the West End, Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. This, too, has had its problems. The original director, Karel Reisz, withdrew two weeks into rehearsal, to be replaced by Anthony Page, apparently because he felt he could not do justice to the complexities of the play. But nevertheless, our greatest stage actress in a new play by one of America's greatest playwrights is another prospect to be relished.
Thirty years ago, Maggie Smith gave an interview in which she summarised her views: "I'm never shy on stage. Always shy off it. You see, the theatre is a different world. A much better world. It's a world whose timetable is more precise than anything else on earth. It's strict. It's secure... Outside, marriages crash... life goes wrong... the thermometer freezes. Inside, the walls are padded against the world." Her career has been shaped by the conflict between how at ease she feels on stage, and how apparently ill-at-ease she feels off it.
Talent, as her friend, the theatre director Sir Peter Hall observes, "can be a terrible curse. The public tend to think that talented people just press a button marked 'talent' and go on and enjoy success and fame and money. But that's almost never the case. You not only have to be blessed with talent but also with a talent for handling the talent.
"I would put Maggie in the list of the 50 most difficult people I have ever worked with," adds Hall, with a chuckle. "And they are all great actors, actresses and singers..."
He has known Smith for 30 years. They first worked together in the early Fifties, when he was director of the Oxford Playhouse, and she was plain Margaret Smith, fresh out of school with four O-levels, and working as an assistant stage-manager. He recounts a memory of Smith on stage at the Oxford Playhouse in an Edwardian musical, singing The Boy I Love Is Up The Gallery. "I was accompanying her on the piano wearing a false moustache. I remember it vividly, because the effect on the audience was absolute, I knew she was a star. She was a star before she sang the song, but that's when I saw it." Smith is by general consensus, our finest stage actress.
Some may argue for Dame Judi Dench, others for Vanessa Redgrave. But for range and versatility it must be Smith. "One of the problems she's always had in Britain," says Peter Hall, "is that because she's such a consummate comedienne, and because people always hate versatility n this country, the fact that she's a terribly true, serious actress had to rather forgotten."
In her 40 years in the theatre, Smith has been awared every accolade. Her stage work is so praised, it is easy to forget that she has been equally, if not more, successful in films. She won the best actress Oscar in 1969 for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; a best supporting actress Oscar for California Suite in 1977. There have been outstanding performances in such films as A Room with a View and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
Yet Maggie Smith remains the most unknowable of all actresses. Her very face seems a stage. In no two photographs does she look the same, as if there is some inner quality that forever eludes the photographer, but which can be tranformed into wathever a part requires. She can appear radiantly beautiful if the part demands it; as she can appear haughty, playful or dour.
Of her work, Maggie Smith says almost nothing. Her statement that 'one went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one's still acting' is among her most eloquent pronouncements on the subject. There is none of the endless illumination about 'the craft' that obsesses so many actors; it is as if Smith regards her talent as an evanscent gift that may wither in the heat of analysis. At her very heart there seems to be a deep and abiding anxiety - about her work, possibly about life itself. It has been said that she raises self-doubt to an art form'.
"She worries about her own standards, and her ability to deliver," says Peter Hall. "She nags herself into perfection." Rober Fox adds: "She worries about working, and she worries about not working. But if you're that good you do worry. She is an utter perfectionist."
From the earliest point in her career, Smith demonstrated an unease at having to explain herself, an apprent fear of being thought uninteresting. "I wish I could just go into Harrods and order a personality," she once said. "It would make life so much easier."
"She believes that she only properly exists in the spotlight," the critic, Michael Coveney writes in his biography of her, A Bright Particular Star. "What she thinks of the world - ghastly and depressing as a whole - she believes is of no interest to anyone else."
Coveney has been unstinting in his admiration of Smith's work for much of her career, yet she declined to be formally interviewed for his book, accpeting it with a sigh of resignation rather than of whoop of joy, and calling him 'the premature obituarist'. "Quite simply, I don't think she thinks she's interesting," Coveney says. "She commands ferocious loyalty, and she's much loved, because she's so fragile. People think she'll snap; she's just so tense, so ill almost, with the strain of acting."
Her most redoubtable champion, her buffer against the world - is her husband of 19 years, the writer Beverley Cross. "A very nice, calm man," says a friend. Cross is a talented scriptwriter and librettist, who shields his wife from the more bruising vagaries of her professional life. He reads all her notices - which she refuses to do - and filters them carefully.
It is a romantic story. Cross was in the audience when Smith made her first public appearance on the lawns of Mansfield College, Oxford, at the age of 17, playing Viola in Twelfth Night. He was immediatley smitten by an apparition 'very tall, very thin, very young, with all this red hair'. They became engaged, but the relationship foundered in the early Sixties when Smith fell in love with the actor Robert Stephens, with whom she was playing at Laurence Olivier's National Theatre.
Ironically, it was Cross who had persuaded Smith to join the National, after she had initially refused in a fit of panic. The affair between Smith and Stephens blossomed into marriage and Cross himself has been married twice. But he was there when Smith and Stephens divorced in 1974. Cross and Smith married the following year, Cross in effect becoming father to her two sons by Stephens, Toby and Chris. (Smith and Stephens remain on good terms. Their sons have followed them into acting. Smith recently telephoned Stephens with the news that 'Toby has got Coriolanus - but it's all right, it's not infectious'.)
Smith now lives in West Sussex, in a converted farmhouse, which is described as 'everything beautifully arranged, uncluttered and charming'. The bookshelves are lined with Virago first editions and theatrical biographies; her numerous theatrical awards used as bookends. Reading and walking in the surrounding countryside are said to be her greatest pleasures.
Nobody describes Maggie Smith as a social animal. After performances, she goes hoome. Relaxing with friends, her mimicry of her fellow professionals can be hilariously precise and caustic - a process Smith herself has described as 'laying people out to filth'. Those who know her say you would be glad not to be laid out. "She can impale somebody with a phrase."
Michael Coveney believes that, with one or two notalbe exceptioins, even Smith's friends 'are in some way frightened of her'. The writer and director Ned Sherrin agrees that Smith 'frightens a lot of people, because of her fierce intelligence and her determination to get things right. But she can be very funny. She giggles a lot.'
Peter Hall talks of Smith's "extraordinary sense of personal identity. She knows she's very good, and she is. The image of Maggie as a difficult lady who is munching up directors and young actors and standing in the spotlight being a monster is completely wrong. I don't think she's remotely difficult unless she's among idiots. She's very hard on herself, and I don't think she sees any reason why she shouldn't be hard on other people too."
Michael Coveney believes that Smith is "a temperamentally unhappy person. I think it's probably hard for her to be happy, because she's so hard on herself." She is not particularly robust. Over the last few years she has shown considerable fortitude in struggling against a variety of ailments.
Her role in Albee's Three Tall Women promises to be not only physically, but more particularly, emotionally taxing. The play is an unremittingly bleak view of the human condition in which Smith stars as a 92-year-old woman looking back on her life. It is based on Albee's adoptive mother, who terrorised him as a child, whose house he left when he was 19, without looking back. It is a monumental role.
It was Peter Hall who first introduced Smith to the play, and he believes the role will be 'a great meal' for her. But then she has hardly taken a role that hasn't been. Speaking of some years ago, she alluded to the directionless quality her career had taken. "I can never think of a part I would be remotely able to play unless somebody tells me just to go ahead and do it and stop worrying," she said. "I can't see myself as Dame Maggie, bravely battling on in into my theatrical 80s. On the other hand, acting is what I do for a living, and I would like somebody to tell me what I should do next."