She could hold a line, a moment or a look, seemingly forever. Maggie Smith’s command of time – whether holding a theatre audience spellbound or holding screen audiences rapt – was matchless.
She was a mistress of calculated exaggeration for dramatic or comic effect, yet nothing she did was at the expense of truth. Even at her piercingly funniest, she let you see the emotion that underpinned and caused the laughter.
Who else could, or indeed would, have starred in a specially conceived double bill – as she did at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at Chichester Festival Theatre in 1965 – that began with Strindberg’s savage tale of lust and class Miss Julie only to return as comedy temptress Clea, a role written expressly for her by Peter Shaffer in his masterpiece farce Black Comedy?
Her late career catapulted her to a previously unknown level of fame via two vast, worldwide successes. Pursed of lip and forceful but fair, she entranced the world’s children as Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise. And she made mountains out of the molehills that the scripts for Downton Abbey which she confessed to Graham Norton she hadn’t watched. “I’ve got the box set…”
Both of those roles were a testament to the breadth and depth of her long screen career and even the Oscars, not always the most reliable judges of acting, got it right with her.
She is blissfully funny as actress Diana bitching with her lavender husband Michael Caine in a hotel preparing to attend the Oscars in Neil Simon’s 1978 California Suite – the character lost, Smith won.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, she won her first Oscar as the fascistic title character in the 1969 film of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Fiercely charismatic, she ate up the script which, amazingly, had been offered to Julie Andrews.
But her real dedication was to the stage. And, most particularly, bringing a unique combination of spin and honesty to high comedy. Her whiplash comic timing is still visible in a short clip on YouTube of her vampish Myra, teasing and toying with her host in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, a performance so arch it’s almost a viaduct. And she was famously stylish, quarrelling and cavorting her way through his Private Lives in the West End and again on Broadway.
But for all the laughter she evoked, some of her most piercing work was in tragedy, notably her devastating performance as a woman whose closest companion is gradually revealed to be the bottle in Jack Clayton’s 1987 film of Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
The lightness of her touch married to the depth of emotion is shown nowhere better than in A Bed Among The Lentils, Alan Bennett’s monologue of love and disappointment that he wrote for her as part of his BBC series Talking Heads. Magnificent on screen – it’s currently on BBC iPlayer – it was yet more extraordinary on stage where her addition of audience laughter and her ability to silence it, was utterly astonishing.
When it came to comic disdain, there was no-one to touch her. Playing a withering Lady Bracknell in a rare misfire in a West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest, she was asked if she would take it to Broadway, to which she is alleged to have replied, “I wouldn’t take it as far as Woking.”
She also always had the measure of her gift. Struck down with flu during the run of Black Comedy, she kept in daily touch with her understudy, Carolyn Jones, who called her every night to tell her how it was going in her absence.
“I got two laughs tonight, “ Jones proudly told her. The following night it was three. Upon being told that Jones had got six, she snapped, “I’m coming back.”
