Maggie Smith was an actor of legendary wit and style who, even off stage, seemed to have the capacity to deliver a one-line zinger. There’s a lovely moment in Roger Michell’s TV film Nothing Like a Dame in which the assembled quartet (including Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) are asked to talk about the difficulty of living with a title. Joan Plowright says it’s worse for her because she not only has the handle of a Dame but that of a Lady through her marriage to Laurence Olivier. With exquisite timing and hitting the perfect verb, Maggie looks at her old friend and says: “Joan, darling, you’ll just have to grapple with it.”
Smith’s achievements on stage and screen are well documented, but I was lucky to witness a less well-known side of her work: her seasons at the Festival theatre in Stratford, Ontario, from 1976 to 1980. She once told me that she went to work in Canada because of her private life. I wondered if it was also because of her Private Lives which, although a great West End success in 1972, led to accusations that she was becoming the prisoner of her comic mannerisms. Whatever the motivation, her work in the Canadian Stratford had a directness and sincerity that amounted to a reinvention of self.
