An Oscar for a Doorstep - Informal interview from Radio Times April 1972 by Irma Kurtz
Maggie Smith uses her Oscar as a stop for the living room door
She is one of the world's finest actresses - yet Maggie Smith is rarely recognized in the street. Why? Irma Kurtz, who talked to Maggie Smith at her home, supplies the answer.
Dedication is not a glamorous quality, its better part is hard work and there is nothing flamboyant about hard work.
There is no doubt that Maggie Smith is a dedicated actress, a hard-working career woman; and it is partly becaue of her dedication that, although she has done a lot more than many actresses, she is rarely recognized on the street, and never hounded down the King's Road by hordes of autograph hunters.
If you try to picture her face right now, chances are you will see instead Olivier's haunting Desdemona, Oscar-winning Miss Jean Brodie, an arctic Hedda Gabler and soon, wise Portia in the BBC1 production of The Merchant of Venice; chances are ou won't see the quick-witted redhead who spins these roles around herself with a deft talent.
It is her professional chameleon-like quality, which has even fooled the critics, and has led to her being discovered, rediscovered and re-rediscovered after each of her major achievements. 'No,' she said in her humorous, slightly laconic drawl, 'I'm never recognized in the street. I'm a sort of nothing, I think. I don't make any impression at all really.'
Sitting alone in the corner of one of the BBC's cavernous rehearsal rooms which are filled with bits of schoolroom furniture, chilly, grey in the North Acton light, Miss Maggie Smith was clearly nothing of the sort.
She had arrived early and she was working; studying lines with her head bent between long, nervous fingers, she looked diminutive but certainly not fragile. It is not difficult to imagine other actressess quaking when they came up against her at auditions. And it is certainly no harder to believe that some of the theatre's most accomplished directors have found their Miss Maggie Smith to be a lot more than clay waiting for a mould.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Miss Smith is not stage-struck; she loves her work and there is nothing giddy about her understanding of it.
'It's sad so many people go into this profession without knowing how hard it is,' She continued. 'I suppose I did to some extent myself. Glamour, they think, and greasepaint and all that rubbish. They have no vision of the those cold mornings, of working even when you don't feel up to par, when in some other job you might ask for the day off.'
She stopped to light a cigarette; ruefully, she admitted that she smokes quite a lot in fits and starts.
Like all compulsive workers Miss Smith likes her mind and her hands busy at something all the time.
'Even location work isn't so glamorous as it sounds. Oh, how I remember freezing mornings in Spain! Curiously, one gets more and more nervous. One starts out arrogant about acting but its' after you've been working very hard for a time that your nerves get worse.'
Maggie Smith was born in Ilford. From time to time, the stars must dance over there for it happens that Lynn Fontanne was born close by, at Woodford- though considerably earlier. The Smith family moved to Oxford where her father became a pathologist at the University and little Margaret went to school. Theatre is so much a constant ingredient of her bloodstream that Miss Smith cannot quite remember her first role, but she does remember being considered, in her own lightly mocking words, 'too cretinous' to take part in school plays.
'I just don't know when I didn't want to be an actress. I don't come from a theatrical family, but I think that makes it easier. My first ever, ever, ever part? Was it the porter in Macbeth? Let me see. Or Puck or Portia? I know that I learned the art of upstaging rapidly when I was cast as the page in Twelfth Night.'
With her parents' baffled approval, Miss Smith entered the Oxford Playhouse School and then in due course joined Oxford Rep at 18 to become the classic young hopeful, backstage tea brewer and broom handler. She finally leapt from Oxford to Broadway in the new Faces '56 Review, and from then on her career probably hit more critical high spots thann most artists ever see.
She has an array of awards which she treats with sweet irreverence, and one famous critic spent an entire column rhapsodizing about her delivery of just two words, albeit the most difficult Shakespeare ever wrote for a woman, the stunning 'Kill Claudio' from Much Ado About Nothing.
Miss Smith has kept her wit sharp on comedy, tragedy, film work, theatre and television; she even sang the poignant recruiting song in Richard Attenborough's film of Oh, What a Lovely War. Oddly enough, it is the variety of her successess the steadiness of her talent and her own intelligence which has kept her from becoming a 'superstar' instantly recognized in Harrods and besieged at airports.
'I'm very fortunate to work in film and theatre too. It's always refreshing to change mediums. I read the critics and I do care. When I know they are right, I try to adjust. Long-run plays, I admit, drive me mad. Time is so limited for an actress to play the parts she wants to play within a certain age. I need every moment I can get. Having children is important, too. It keeps one from getting stale."
Maggie Smith at home (all the best actresses have real ones) is Mrs. Robert Stephens. Her husband is also her colleague at the National Theatre; although cynics may say that professional unions are hazardous, Mrs. Stephens sees the advantages and would not have her marriage any other way.
'Does anybody ever really close the office door? Wouldn't I bore the hell out of, say, a dentist? I'll bet dentists talk about teeth all the time.'
When Mr. Stephens is working on a film and Mrs. Stephens is rehearsing a play, they may just meet on the stairs of their Chelsea home, but being actors, although sucessful ones, thare are so glad to be working that they would find it churlish to complain. Even rising at dawn, not her favourite time of the day by any means, provokes only a littel redheaded banter from Miss Smith.
'I feel physically ill getting up at sunrise. It's a kind of morning sickness. But there isn't an awful lot of work around,' says one of the most steadily-cast, versatile actresses in England, 'and one is lucky to be working at all.'
When she is curled comfortably in one of her own real old-fashioned upholstered chairs, surrounded by the books and objects of a home that seems to have 'grown' and not to have been 'decorated,' Miss Smith gives freer rein to her natural gaiety than she does when she is at the scene of her work. It really is a genuine Oscar acting as a stop to her living-room door so she can hear what her two lively boys are getting up to downstairs.
'The younger one, Toby,' says Miss Smith, casting a glance of open love at the photograph of a mischievous redhead on the mantel, 'I admit he shows every sign of becoming an actor. He's generally sort of loopy. If he or his brother Christopher wanted to act, I wouldn't encourage or discourage them.'
Because her work schedule is so demanding Miss Smith paradoxically spends a good deal of time at home. Every moment she can snatch from rehearsals and performances, she enjoys the company of 'children and nannies.' She and her husband lead a comfortable, moderate social life, the kind based more on staying in than going out.
'I don't like going out to the theatre,' she said. 'I get claustrophobic; and besides,' she said about to make one of her straight-faced jokes, 'I'm not at all stage-struck.'
As her colleagues know well, Miss Smith is a conscientious and punctual rehearser who, although she is good at it, does not enjoy the stop-and-go, erratic schedule of filming so much as the straight-throught-to-the-end schedule of theatre and much television work.
'I like to work in big, solid chunks. I don't like standing around, and breaking for lunch, and breaking for tea. When I work in small bursts, the way you must on a film, I dissipate too much energy and lose too much time.'
Cheerfully, she admits to having no hobbies at all, and although she quite likes cooking, she is not too proud to tell you that her husband is better at it. Even her wardrobe and her style are practical and streamlined; a busy woman's tastes for easy, informal clothes, a redhead's taste for beige, brown and sedate autumnal colours.
Upon meeting her and being delighted by her interest, her intelligence, her smile, it is hard to remember that Miss Smith is one of those bold, wild, slightly scandalous things called an actress. It becomes obvious after talking to Maggie Smith, the dedicated worker, that life upon the wicked stage ain't nothing like a girl supposes, but something much more demanding and much more enduring.