by Victor Olliver
The self-serving anecdotes, pulling of faces and touching of knees expected by chat show hosts (or "television vivacities", as Gore Vidal calls them) and their audiences of sing-a-long coach parties is one reason why Maggie Smith avoids prime time television interviews.
"It comes to the point where you're a stand-up comic, because I don't think anybody can handle it unless they're screechingly funny. You know," she snaps her fingers, "one-liners and being camp with Terry Wogan.
"I can't do that. I'd die of embarrassment so I don't go near it. I hate all those kind of things." Dressed for a pre-show workout in a black leotard embroidered with a silver star, Maggie Smith looked as if she were about to join Steed in yet another revival of The Avengers. A poor performance (her opinion) earlier that week as Nadia in Ronald Harwood's Interpreters at Queen's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, was blamed on the debilitating effects of antibiotics prescribed for a heavy cold.
Next month a lavish film version of E.M. Forster's comedy of manners, A Room With A View, co-starring Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett, receives its Cambridge première.
"One doesn't always fall in love with whom one intends - and when one does, there's no certainty that anybody else will approve," is one blurb writer's soapy exposition to the media of E.M. Forster's comedy of manners.
During filiming on location in Italy, she says it was "either raining and impossible to shoot or 105 degrees with people fainting".
Smith found Charlotte Bartlett "a very irritating woman. I think she was based on an aunt of Forster's whom he didn't like." Chaperone to Lucy (Helena Bonham-Carter), "Charlotte is one of those people who is always driving others mad by saying: 'I don't want to be any trouble'. They're forever trying to keep themselves out of the way and thereby permanently in the way by rushing about. Still, she feels deep remorse in the end - at least that's what happens in the film - and saves the day".
Maggie Smith has been described as difficult because of her refusal to give her interviews on set, confining them to the post-shooting period. "That probably goes back to Brodie, the only film to date in which I was involved in every frame and therefore your concentration has to be fairly bright. Quite frankly, Judi Dench and I sat around in Florence so long for A Room With A View we would have talked to anybody about anything. I mean if you're doing something very difficult you can't take time out to go to the caravan and talk about your divorce - which is all they want to know about. It seems to me fatuous."
Maggie Smith has won Oscars for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite. In 1981 she returned to Britain after four years in Canada because "the boys (her two sons) were kind of muddled as to whether they should be playing ice hockey or cricket". She played parts at the Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario, which she feels she would not have been offered in Britain.
In 1975 she was divorced from Robert Stephens and, the same year, married script writer Beverley Cross, a sweetheart of younger days. They have a country retreat in West Sussex which she visits "on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings... but the problem of where to live only occurred now with Interpreters. I am looking for a flat in London, a permanent base."
Interpreters marks the return of the well made comedy and well turned phrase. Nadia doesn't fancy three days of sexual athletics with Viktor (Edward Fox) - "as if it were an oil change" - only to be rejected again. Comprising the usual staples of humour, sex and foreigners, Interpreters affords an opportunity for Russian to be spoken on an English stage. Not all of it was written with detente in mind.
Maggie Smith's comic style of "wry astringency" (Michael Billington's phrase) is allowed full reign in the role of nearly jaded innocence. "I was fascinated by the idea of Interpreters which I had never seen before. I mean, there are not many parts for women, as you may have observed, in this day and age."
"What I like about Interpreters is that I'm not in the shadow of other people, as, say in the classics, which have been performed by many others before you".
Were there more opportunities for middle aged actressees in film? "I think it's getting easier. I presume Joan Collins has hacked her way into a new world for us all. You're not totally written off when you get older as happened before. I think what she does marvellous. It's sort of high camp... wonderful."
She once said that comedy acting - for which she is most renowned despite lauded performances of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and Desdemona - required an ability to see the world in a slight distorted light, "always being aware of the absurd orther side to any serious or tragic event."
"By that I mean, in tragedy there are many areas that could be comic. If you're plaiyng a serious part and you have a comic slant in your head, you can see what is funny and so you tread carefully to avoid that area. If I were just a straight actress I think it would be very odd because I wouldn't know where those dangerous areas were."
Did an absurdist's vision extend to reality? "Would that it did! One would have a much easier life. Life just always seems to be rather hard."
Did she do much for a role? "Sure, if there's a lot to do. Films are different because you have a different text from the original on the whole. Plays, yes... I could still be playing Virginia Woolf. The possibilities are limitless except she made me desperately glum; trudging every night inot the ooze, stones in your gut. Woolf was mad so I had to go mad and that was unnerving."
Did she draw on personal experience for characterisation? "Experiences are filed away but you don't have a button that you can press and say I'll think of my mother dying and that will make me feel sad. Everything that happens in life is of use to you as an actress - I suppose that sounds very Chekovian.
"I don't think anybody has a special knowledge of acting. I don't. I don't think it's a thing you can analyzse. Instinct is the truest way - the way I do. There's no handbook on acting, no DIY."
"I suppose one should appear on TV more often. TV creates a name much more quickly and that gets people into a theatre.
"Acting. It's a dumb thing to do but it's fascinating."