“Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty,” said Aristotle, in an observation that will resonate with anyone who spent time with Maggie Smith.
At the turn of the century, I wrote a play, The Breath of Life, in which Maggie appeared opposite Judi Dench. One night at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Hillary Clinton came with Madeleine Albright. They were both seated on time, but Bill Clinton and Chelsea, delayed by traffic, joined them in the middle of first act. Next day, I was eager to find out what the Clintons had been like. Judi had received them in her dressing room and been swept away by their charm. When I went to ask Maggie what she thought of them, she said she had refused to meet them. “Do you think I’m going to shake hands with anyone who’s late for your play?”
Maggie’s exact phrasing has stayed with me, because it was the use of the word “your” that pierced my heart. It is one thing to reject the opportunity to meet the most famous people in the world, but to do so from unforced loyalty to a playwright tells you everything you need to know about Maggie’s character. I had long noticed that a section of the public wanted to confine Maggie to a repertoire of camp and bitchiness. They wanted to do what they had done to Bette Davis: turn a dramatic actor into a vamp. In the 1970s, Maggie had felt she had to flee Britain to go and play Rosalind, Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth in Canada, because she believed no one in Britain understood exactly what kind of actor she wanted to be. There were always admirers who wanted Maggie not just to be friends with Kenneth Williams, but to be Kenneth Williams.
Of course, nobody would deny she was a great comedian. I was a holiday usher at the Old Vic in the 1960s, so I tore tickets while she played the travesty role of Silvia in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. I watched in awe, over and over. It remains one of the freshest and most accomplished comic performances I ever saw. But comedy was also a curse for her, because dedicated playgoers scanned her so closely. Her own passion for focus was answered by a parallel, and occasionally frightening, intensity from the stalls. The air was always charged when Maggie appeared. A spotlight of scrutiny seemed to follow her around. Once, in The Breath of Life, at an inappropriate moment, she accidentally cocked her wrist in a mannerism that gave off a stylised signal of high comedy. At once, the audience were on it, roaring with laughter. Afterwards, she was abject. “I don’t know how it happened. It won’t happen again.”
I’m not sure any of us were able to follow Maggie to the depths of her seriousness. She adored her friend the pianist Murray Perahia, wishing actors to bring the same intensity to their work that soloist musicians did. She was shockingly hard on herself, without always realising that her devastating moods infected everyone. If she was depressed, so were we all. She couldn’t help it. The central paradox of her character was that someone who had such perfect control over her art on stage had so little control over her temperament off. No wonder that we all lived in terror of being the object of one of her legendary jokes. When the playwright Ronald Harwood visited her dressing room shortly after she had opened in his play Interpreters, she asked him what he was doing. Harwood said he was struggling with a new play. Seamlessly she replied: “Aren’t we all?”
Nobody can recapture the greatness of her Hedda Gabler, under Ingmar Bergman’s direction, nor of her Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem. Today, it is only on film that you can see her, flirtatious in The Pumpkin Eater or majestic in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Watch Jack Clayton’s stylish film of Memento Mori or, best of all, his adaptation of Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Maggie’s performance represents the quintessence of her art: vulnerability, loneliness and alcoholic hope mixed together, with expressions of each passing across her face like clouds. Who else, besides Magnani and Moreau, could be so changeable, so swift?
One weekend, a few years ago, I ventured out to present Maggie with one of her countless awards, on this occasion for film. As she arrived on stage she whispered in my ear: “Why are you wasting a perfectly good Sunday evening giving an award to me?” Hard to explain why from anyone else such a question would have seemed affected. But from Maggie, it was heartfelt, funny and genuine.
