Meet the royal filmstar with the insecurity complex (TV Times Magazine, 20-26 March 1982)
She sits, serene and sedate, before the cut-glass and the silver cutlery, at a table in London's Cafe Royal, nibbling at paté and - of all things for such a slim lady - slimming toast. She is dressed in a devastatingly severe masculine pin-stripe suit that accentuates her vulnerable feminity.
But, slimming toast? Surely the sleek Maggie Smith doesn't have to worry about her weight?
"Always," she says. "I even go off to a health farm now and again to keep my weight down."
She becomes slightly dramatic. "I love those places. I could live my life in one of them. You simply have to slow down when you are there. I love the feeling of relaxation. And it is always best when you don't have to think of any work. You relax and slow yourself down until you slip into a kind of euphoria."
She talks, in private anyway, with an ever-so-light drawl. But then you realise she is really relaxing for a change, her voice a slowed down gramophone record. At least, right now, she doesn't have to give her all as if she were on stage or on camera.
For Maggie, now starring in her second Agatha Christie murder mystery, Evil under the Sun, taking life easy is probably her only major self-indulgence. It seems to her that her entire life has consisted of work. "All I really want is to loaf around at home and watch the telly," she says. Hardly the public image of a powerfully-attractive lady whose on-screen passion and abundance of acting skills gives her the right to be called a superstar.
Yet, despite her success, Maggie Smith is renowned for her insecurity, a trait which, it has been said, she turned into style.
"Of course I feel insecure," she says. "Every single thing I do is different and every single thing is another challenge."
She begins, but doesn't finish, wringing her hands in traditional anguish. "I'm never quite sure I can do it again. It never gets any easier. There's more and more nerves with it all.
"When I started it seemed that everything was all lovely and plain sailing. It never crossed my mind that you couldn't do something or that it was difficult. You just said your lines and, as they say, didn't bump into the furniture. The more you live, the more you realise just how complicated life is."
She screws up her brow and tuts. "Earlier, it seemed perfectly straightforward."
'Earlier' began nearly 30 years ago, when, as a startling young redhead, she was in the pioneering 'fringe' Oxford Theatre Group, working with such budding stalwarts of film and television as Patrick Dromgoole, Colin Shaw and Ned Sherrin.
She claims she was not mightily courted by the young men. "No, not at all," she says. "I was always so deeply involved with what I was doing in the theatre."
Her love life has revolved around two men. Her boyfriend and fiancé was writer Beveley Cross, but in 1967 she married and later had two sons by actor Robert Stephens.
They divorced in 1975 - and two months later Maggie married Cross. She said at the time 'I should have done it this way from the start.'
After her divorce from Stephens and her marriage to Cross, Maggie's career went off on another tangent.
The story, at the time, was that she 'ran away' from the British theatre scene to Ontario, Canada, to a theatre company working under the direction of Robin Phillips.
"That could be part of the reason, but there were so many," she says. "It seemed time to find a complete change of direction."
In Canada she received such critical acclaim - including praise from visiting British critics - that it became obvious there was still a lot to come from this dynamic actress, who learns her lines by writing them out, like a punished schoolgirl.
Her film career, running between stage seasons, brought her devastating success: six Oscar nominations and two outright wins, her 1979 best supporting actress award for California Suite, in which she starred with Michael Caine, followed up her best actress Oscar, 10 years earlier, for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
After such a dedicated acting life, can she ever contemplate retirement`"Well, one day I might go off to somewhere warm. I'm not sure. It may happen that I'll be forced to retire."
Isn't that remark a symptom of her insecuity? She laughs, which she does beautifully when she lets go. "That's not insecure. That's sensible."