The Sunday Times Profile
Maggie Smith - Worrying her way to the pinnacle of high comedy
Maggie Smith, it seems, is forever in "something of a state". She is perpetually worried, said to have raised "self-doubt to an art-form", ill-at-ease, frequently at odds with herself, and rarely satisfied. She worries so much that she is said to worry even that people refer to her as a worrier.
Greatness is often compounded of tics, mannerisms and eccentricities, nowhere more so than in the art of comedy acting. In the case of Smith, anxiety is a potent fuel.
This week a new film starring Smith, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, opens in London. Based on Brian Moore's 1955 novel, set in Dublin, it concerns a plain, lonely spinster whose hopeful spirit leads her mistakenly to place her trust in an American ne'er-do-well, played by Bob Hoskins.
Few actresses can so vividly allude to the eddies of humour, passion, or vituperation which lie beneath the smooth surface of refinement or propriety. Smith is the mistress of suggestion.
This weekend's honours list contains at least one surprise: that Smith, 54 last Wednesday, has not been elevated to the ranks of theatrical dames. This, at least, is unlikely to cause her concern. Her indifference to ranks, status, the dubious blessings of "stardom", is monumental. She describes herself as a "pinhead, all eyes and teeth". Her career is similarly dispatched. "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one's still acting."
Smith was born, and grew up, in Oxford. Her father, Nathaniel, was a pathologist; she had twin elder brothers, both of whom became architects. She began acting at Oxford High School for Girls under the encouragement of a Miss Bartholomew, whom she was to describe as "my own Jean Brodie", alluding to her role as the Scottish schoolmistress for which she won her first Oscar in 1969.
After a spell at the Oxford Playhouse drama school, she drifted into university cabaret and revue in Edinburgh Festival fringe, and later in New York. She made her London West End debut in 1957 in the revue Share My Lettuce, opposite Kenneth Williams.
Williams's brand of febrile high comedy was to be an abiding influence; he became a close friend, and the first of a series of mentors. Another was Laurence Olivier, who in 1963 invited her to play Desdemona opposite his Othello. She refused at first, and was "jangling with nerves", yet it was an important milestone, alerting people to her possibilities as a serious actress.
In the 1970s frustration at being denied the great classical roles led her to Stratford, Ontario, at the invitation of Robin Phillips, her third great mentor. It was there that she first played Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.
"The trouble is that I'm really no good at managing my own career," she has confessed. "I can never think of a part I would be remotely able to play unless somebody else tells me just to go ahead and do it and stop worrying. I really don't see myself as Dame Maggie, bravely battling on into my theatrical eighties; on the other hand, acting is what I do for a living, and I would like somebody to tell me what I should be playing next."
A distsinguished theatrical record almost overshadows her films. The best actress Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was followed by another for best supporting actress, in California Suite, in 1977. There have been outdstanding performances in box-office successes such as A Private Function and A Room with a View.
And yet she has never seemed a "star", in the self-promoting, more meretricious, sense of the word, exuding that glamour which flatters to deceive. "All that fuss..." she says of the film industry, "the theatre is much more the real world." Without it, she adds, "there seems to be no shape to my life at all".
Williams once remarked that Smith "got laughs by using her eyes". Her skill lies in nuance, investing the most innocuous remark with myriad meanings.
Patrick Garland, the director and writer, recollects seeing her on stage in Noel Coward's Private Lives in 1973, playing opposite her husband, Robert Stephens. "Whose yacht is that?" Smith asks. "The Duke of Westminster's," Stephens responds. "It usually is..."
"Maggie's was the feed line," says Garland, "but she got the first laugh. It was the wonderful irritation she conveyed in her voice - as if she could have spanked it for sitting there in the Mediterranean."
In other respects, the play constituted an unhappy episode in her life. It was poorly received by the critics, and her discomfiture was increased by having to act opposite Stephens even as the marriage was falling apart. They divorced in 1975, and shortly afterwards she married Beverley Cross, the playwright, to whom she had been engaged during her Oxford days. Friends say it is a perfect partnership.
They live in a farmhouse near Petworth in Sussex with Smith's two grown-up sons by her first marriage. Cross is the balm for her perpetual anxiety, a protective shield from the more bruising vagaries of her professional life: he reads all her notices - which she refuses to do - and dispenses them carefully.
Acting, according to Smith, is something to be got on with, not necessarily discussed. The allusions to "the craft", the chemistry, divining the alchemy of talent, so beloved of others; are utterly absent. "She can't stand pretentiousness," says Margart Tyzack, who played opposite Smith for a year in Lettice and Lovage. "Maggie is as straight as a die."
A quality of somewhat dotty dismissiveness can verge on the disingenuous. Returning to the role of Mrs Millamant in Way of the World, at Chichester in 1984, she faced a barrage of questions. Why return to Chichester after 15 years? Why return to the British stage after three?`And why to the role, almost a decade after playing it in Canada?
"You see," Smith explained calmly, "I live very close to the theatre here. It really is extremely convenient."
She also had her age at the time, 50, removed from the programme on the grounds that it was nobody's business but her own. She had been brought to Chichester by Garland, the festival's artistic director. "Maggie is the consummate actress, and she applies the art of comedy to whatever she does," he says. "In a sense, she is very Mozartian. Her performance skates along dizzily and effortlessly, and then suddenly catches you by the heart; there is this blast of perception, aand great vistas are opened up."
The anxiety which prefaces every performance, the reassurance sought before and afterwards, are genuine enough. As is the thread of impatience and waspishness that friends also detect. She can be, one may hear it delicately put, temperamental.
"Funnily enough, the person she resembles is Rex Harrison," says one acquaintance. "They are both master comedians, and comedians are different from other people in a way that actors aren't. Rex is notoriously bad-tempered; he doesn't suffer fools. High comedy, as opposed to light comedy, imposes enormous pressure and tension. It gives people this highly-strung, thougoughbred quality."
Smith is a literate and interesting conversationalist, but not somebody who would dominate a dinner table.
Jack Clayton, the director of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, describes her as "the wittiest lady I've ever met. She is brilliant in her observations of other people, very mischievous".
But it is the remarkable combination of facility with unease, an inner fragility, which perhaps most characterises Smith.
Acting, she suggests, is a trial. "The more you do, the more difficult yoou realise it all is. When I started, I sailed through, learnt the words, stood in the right place and that was that. Now it's a much more complex thing. It's a contradiction that the more one has done something, the more difficult it gets but that's the way it is."