Plenty of reasons to be anxious about meeting Maggie Smith, starting with reputation itself. There are only two theatrical dames of this vintage and stature, and the other is Smith’s close friend and fellow survivor, Judi Dench. Over the years, the public has crudely allocated characters to them, so that Smith is seen as prickly, Dench as serene. It’s a tempting game to play with pairings, from Gladstone and Disraeli to Lennon and McCartney, and it often gets played by people who should know better.
In fact, Maggie Smith has two reputations of her own. The first is for having been an exceptionally fine actress this past half-century, and the second, more daunting, is for being a pretty sharp mistress of repartee. Here are two examples of her work in this latter field. On a 1993 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, when asked if she would take it to Broadway: "Broadway? I wouldn’t take it to Woking." To the playwright Ronald Harwood, whose limp Interpreters she was appearing in, when he told her he was off home as he was struggling with a new play: "Aren’t we all!"
Because these lines come from the very voice that you have heard delivering the wit of Wilde or Shaw, they carry a withering charge. And what a voice it is, rich as wine, certainly, but capable of turning to vinegar even as she speaks. How strange to hear it now in the basement of a discreet hotel in the Fulham Road bit of Chelsea, not far from her place in town. Strange because she rarely does this sort of thing. In a hospital nearby, George Best is hanging on to life by a bootlace. She shakes her head and tries to imagine how awful it must be to give up the art that justifies your existence when you are still in your twenties. Ronnie Barker, a devoted friend whom she met through her twin brothers who were at school with him, died the other week. She casts an eye around the subterranean room and says shiveringly: "It’s all sealed up, isn’t it? How really throat-cuttingly grim. Just like Separate Tables" – a reference to the Terence Rattigan play groaning with small hotel despair.
Via Best and his troubles, the talk shifts to her first husband Robert Stephens, the "Next Olivier" of the Sixties. He was brilliant, charismatic (think of him as Teddy Lloyd with her as Jean Brodie in the 1969 film), unbalanced, alcoholic, self-destructive, had a liver and kidney transplant, and died ten years ago to the month. She says she loved him "enormously and continuously", never stopped admiring him or his talent. "It was absolutely huge, I was heartbroken by it, oh, there were so many emotions around it." It was said that Olivier, perhaps chastened by his own turbulent marriage to Vivien Leigh, had tried to dissuade Stephens from marrying Smith. Was this true? "Well, that’s what Robert said," she replies. "I really don’t know. Larry may well have said that, and maybe he was right. He probably was right, I guess. I really don’t know. He didn’t say it to me. I’ll ask Joan, I’m seeing her tomorrow." This is the actress Joan Plowright, Olivier’s widow and Dame Maggie’s other close friend in the profession.
What emerges over the course of the next hour is an extraordinary story of two great loves – the first of them, for Stephens, so unruly that she had to leave the country and live abroad to give the second, for the playwright Beverley Cross, room to flourish. He too is gone, having died four years after Stephens and two years before Dame Judi’s actor husband Michael Williams.
"It hasn’t been a breeze, I have to say. All those platitudes that it gets better with time – it doesn’t, actually. What happens is there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just get on with it. Of course, it’s something to do with age, too, with the losses coming thick and fast. I don’t know whether you get fatalistic about it. If it happens when you are younger it must be so peculiar. I don’t know what you call it. Loss is the only word, and it’s horrible."
She comes back and back to the subject of these two men, occasionally berating herself – and me – for visiting this old territory, but at the same time intrigued by the view from this increasing distance. She was after all bound to both of them by her two sons, fathered by Stephens and brought up by Cross, and by the roles the men played in a career that she says has now ground to a halt. Is she serious? Do I really have to tell Times readers that she has retired?
"Obviously, one wants to have new challenges, to be stimulated," she replies. "But then sometimes one does think, well, perhaps there is an end. Yes, I have sort of ground to a halt. You do read about people this age steaming ahead and writing books, and so on, and I think, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I feel a great stop."
"This age" is 70. She will be 71 next month, as will Judi Dench. No great age these days, surely. Look at Muriel Spark – Jean Brodie’s creator and a great admirer of Maggie Smith – 87 and still scribbling away. I say I remember interviewing Yehudi Menuhin nearly 20 years ago, when he had just turned 70, and him saying, without a trace of amusement: "You know, my mother, she is very worried about my future." Dame Maggie roars with laughter at this, throwing her head back and crinkling up her eyes. This is not the body language of an actress contemplating eternal rest. And yet: "My agent sends me these scripts with extremely old ladies dying in bed, and I’m thinking, do I have to rehearse it!"
All this is delivered with a mix of intensity and mild campness, the two modes undercutting each other just as they do in some of her best work for the stage and the screen. It is what she does when she is being Alan Bennett’s Lady in the Van, or the oldest of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, or indeed Jean Brodie or the title part of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, or countless classical heroines – going for the small, telling chip of embarrassment and self- deprecation bleeping away inside a show of outward grandeur. In her work, this is responsible for the famous sense of danger that she brings to even the most unlikely roles. Some of the same unpredictability is there in her private manner, but, contrary to rumour, it doesn’t seem to be waiting for the chance of a put-down.
On the contrary, she keeps glancing down reflectively and then looking up again as if to ask whether she’s doing all right. So it’s possible that she now finds herself in the same place as did the Olivier whom she first knew: "I think everyone was scared of him. Scared in as much as they revered him so much. I’m sure he was just as scared as us, although it never crossed our minds that this could be so. Everyone felt so inadequate around him."
Because of the weight of fame on him? "Absolutely. As you get older, you realise how terrifying it must have been for him, both physically and emotionally." As to her own fame, she laughs it off and says that Judi is much more famous than she is. Just as Dench does with her. "No, honestly. If we are walking down the street together, it’s Jude whom everyone looks at."
Yet Maggie Smith has achieved massive international recognition for her Professor McGonagall in three Harry Potter movies in the past four years. "Well, yes, for a younger audience. Not that I do a vast amount in those films. Of course, it can absolutely stun children if they suddenly connect you. I suppose I’d be noticed a bit more if I walked round in that hat all the time. Sometimes, I’m in a restaurant and I can see them thinking, ‘Hmmm, I know who that is,’ and when they work it out they go completely to pieces." Then what happens? "Then you sign all sorts of things for them and say, ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t turn into a cat.’"
