Maggie Smith seemed in her performances to care nothing about being loved, but she was as widely adored as an actor can be. The two things were connected; everyone who watched her knew that there was an unswerving honesty behind her ruthless wit and her ability, in the blink of an eye, to shine a light on the most terrifying abysses of the human condition.
She found life hysterically funny and unbearably painful. Her company was exhilarating – she was even sharper and wittier than her legions of fans imagined her to be. But since the death of her husband, Beverley, in 1998, she was often lonely, and the fun was a way of laughing in the face of the unavoidable misery that draws people to great acting. It bears witness to the tragic business of being alive, at the same time as it offers an escape from it.
She was several steps ahead of everyone else, and several times smarter. She was never as good as she wanted to be, and when she was, she would invent obstacles for herself. Her last performance on stage, at the Bridge theatre, when she was 85, was as the 102-year-old Brunhilde Pomsel in Christopher Hampton’s A German Life – a monologue in which one of Goebbels’ secretaries lied about her life for 100 minutes.
Her character laughed gaily about her youth, poured withering contempt on the Nazis, complained about the injustices done to her; unsaid was the creeping certainty that this woman knew that she had done evil. Maggie herself was determined to remind her audience – and to reassure herself – that she had played opposite Olivier, played Hedda Gabler for Ingmar Bergman, made films with John Ford, George Cukor, Joe Mankiewicz. She learned the whole thing in advance. It was – to be honest – a triumph from the moment it was announced.
She arrived in the rehearsal room for a day, she had a director she trusted (Jonathan Kent), and it must have felt too easy. So she fell ill and took herself off to hospital for nearly two weeks. Maybe she was properly ill; maybe she persuaded herself she was. But she left herself next to no time to rehearse. By the time she came back, she’d made it nearly impossible for herself to go on, and she was happy. Her performance was as radically naturalistic as anything I’ve ever seen, though her timing was still as precise as if she’d been playing Wilde.
In the last few years, we went often to the ballet together. She sometimes went on her own, and stood in the stage manager’s corner. She worshipped the young dancers for their talent, their grace and (maybe most of all) for their uncompromising and self-sacrificing devotion to their art. She must have seen herself in them, and it was always possible to see the young Maggie in her, the bewitching revue artist who through her unparalleled gifts and fierce devotion to her craft became a great, great actor – greater than she ever believed herself to be.
