29/09/2024
Simon Callow's fascinating and wonderful tribute to Maggie Smith in The Times -
On the joy and agony of working with Maggie Smith
I was filming in Paris when the news of Maggie Smith’s death came through, and a number of actors, American and French, came up to console me. They knew nothing of any personal relationship I might have with her, they simply knew that the British acting profession had lost one of its absolute greats and that I, as a British actor, would be feeling bereft and diminished.
They knew that a huge figure who celebrated and embodied the power and possibility of acting had departed the scene.
She was a joy to act with. When we started working on A Room with a View, I think she rather took against me: too loud, too opinionated — guilty on both counts. But when we first had a scene together, everything changed. We clicked completely. One day I stumbled and uttered an expletive. She roared with laughter. “Oh,” she said. “So you are human.”
Seeing the film the other day, I was reminded of what a heartbreaking performance she gives. As in so very many of her performances, especially the most comic ones, she finds a moment in which to reveal the character’s inner life. In Room with a View, she tells Judi Dench’s Miss Lavish about an affair she never had. Tears spring instantly to the eyes. In an interview in the late 1960s, she said of herself: “Underneath, one’s just falling to pieces.”
Her scope was enormous. Now somewhat eclipsed by her late-career gargoyles in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, her stage work was astoundingly varied. From her early days in rep, to West End and Broadway success. Her heroic final performance — at the age of 85 — was in a one-person play by Christopher Hampton.
Her physical gifts were prodigious. Physically slender and lithe, with etched cheekbones and enormous eyes, she had from the beginning an exceptionally expressive and highly original voice. Starting out at the age of 16, shyly and deeply lacking in confidence, she rapidly became an absolute mistress of her craft.
She attributed a great deal of her success to the Carry On star Kenneth Williams, a ruthless comic technician, with whom she worked in plays and revues. From him she learnt, she said, “clarity and speed; incredible deftness within a line; speaking very clearly and knowing where you are; knowing the words and being able to play with them and make them do what you want them to do”.
Her appetite for furthering her craft was insatiable. While she was playing — supremely well — Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre, she attended every single matinee of Alastair Sim’s great comic performance in The Magistrate, constantly trying to fathom out what it was he was doing, how he created comedy out of the simplest means. Technique hypnotised her.
When I was directing her in Jean Cocteau’s play The Infernal Machine in the mid-Eighties, I would sometimes come across her sitting in an empty room chanting the old diction exercise “red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry”. Things were not going so well at the time.
No doubt she was regretting having been inveigled into appearing in this hallucinatory version of the Oedipus story by someone who had only ever directed one play before — a solo show in a basement in Chalk Farm.
But it wasn’t only that that the tongue-twister was assuaging. It was her own almost hallucinatory mental processes. Over one of the meals during which I wooed her, she told me, quite casually, that during one of her pregnancies she had been haunted by the fear that her child would have three heads.
It seemed to me that this was a clue to her acting: its extraordinary vividness was a product of her startlingly intense imagination. In Cocteau’s play she needed that imaginative engagement: she had to present four aspects of Jocasta. It needed an actor who could encompass visions.
The problems with the production were legion. The despair emanating from Maggie became infectious; the company lost all faith in the play and the production. She fell ill for a week. In her absence, the production rallied somewhat — so much so that the actor playing Oedipus, in his renewed enthusiasm, fell off the back of the set and broke his arm.
Informed of this on her sick bed, Maggie, whose wit never entirely deserted her, croaked: “Well, that’s one less wrist to be slapped.”
She came back in time to find the first three previews cancelled for technical reasons. The long-awaited dress rehearsal was abandoned when the paint and dry ice interacted badly and an actor nearly slid to his death. This was our one and only preview. I told the actors I would understand if they refused to go on. Maggie said: “We might as well do the f**king thing.”
Half an hour before the curtain was due to go up, I went to her dressing room. “Why should I carry the can for this pile of sh*t?” she inquired, staring at me through the dressing room mirror.
The curtain went up, Maggie played the first two acts with some brio. She felt she was saving the show. The audience responded warmly. She calmed down. The set worked; the light worked; all the special effects worked; the play worked. I raced round to her dressing room and said: “Pas mal.”
“Pas mal,” she said, looking me in the eyes for the first time for some weeks.
In the last two acts she had regained her trust in the show and performed with astonishing dreamlike intensity. The crowd roared. She and I exchanged a few brief words in the general elation at the end.
The following day, a Sunday, she left a message on my answer machine: “Simon, darling, this is Mags. I just want to apologise for playing the first two acts last night the way I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to avoid. I’ll be better next week, I promise.”
She was more than better: she was sublime, sublimely moving and supremely funny. A year or so afterwards, at a party at the Oliviers, she asked my forgiveness: “The dreadful things one says. Awful. It’s just fear. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I mean it.”
We nearly worked together again. Ismail Merchant, the producer of A Room with a View, wanted me to direct her in a film of Lettice and Lovage for which he had acquired the rights. Who, we wondered, should play Lotte Schoen? “Whoopee Goldberg,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. An inspired idea, but somehow the rights slipped away.
She was a ravenous reader, but rarely spoke about what she read. Once I found myself on a plane sitting across the aisle from her and her husband, Beverley [Cross]. She told me they’d brought with them the first volume of my rather hefty newly published biography of Orson Welles. “We’ve checked it in as excess baggage,” she said.
She was a very witty woman as well as an exceptionally well-read one. Her confidence to speak her opinions was never strong. Instead, she made jokes. Wonderful ones.
Making the film Tea with Mussolini for Franco Zeffirelli, there was some question of doctrine. Here they were in Rome, why not ask the Pope? But how does one get in touch with the Pope? “Fax vobiscum,” drawled Maggie.
A while ago I was trying to coax her into a memorial event for an old colleague. She hadn’t the heart for it, she said — what was I doing? “Another one-man show,” I said. “Quite right, darling. Very sensible. None of that kicking the other actors out of the way.”
The last time I saw her, a year ago, she had turned up unexpectedly at a party. She looked great, though the eyes that had troubled her for so many years seemed inflamed. I said she looked wonderful. A disbelieving grunt from her. “What are you up to?” I asked. “I live,” she said, “like an anchorite.”
I believe she would have been genuinely shocked by the outpouring of love and admiration that has greeted her death.
