Beverley Cross could have been her first husband. Three years older than she, they first met on the steps of the Ashmolean in Oxford. She was 18 at the time and playing Viola in Twelfth Night at the Playhouse. Her father, a pathologist, had brought the family here from Essex when Maggie was four. Cross wanted to marry her, but there was a problem: he already had a wife. She agreed to wait, but while she was doing so another problem appeared – Robert Stephens. And then another: he also had a wife. Their attraction was unstoppable and catastrophic; Olivier was right. They married in the same year he and Vivien Leigh divorced. Look at Jean Brodie and you can sense the chemistry between the players, the dangerous matching of thoroughbreds, the headlong gallop, the inevitable prang. For an example of method-acting, in which the off-screen passions of the two are fed directly into the performance, this ranks alongside Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
It was not long after this that Stephens’ life began to unravel with alcohol. Had she known that there was this particular accident waiting to happen? "Of course I knew," she says matter-of-factly. In the next few years, his condition declined alarmingly. He became impossible to live with, not just for her but for anyone. His friends from that time spoke of a sort of vagrancy, with him sleeping on a succession of couches and generally losing the plot. Somehow, before he died 25 years later, he managed to retrieve enough from the wreckage to assemble two late, towering displays of his greatness – first as a Falstaff all too credibly waterlogged by the dissolute years, and then as a Lear broken by loss and madness.
After she married Bev in 1975, they went to Canada for several years. She played a string of starring roles at Stratford, Ontario. If it looks as though this marriage was a matter of falling back on to a safe option, that would be misleading. "Oh, no, no, no, it was a huge love affair. As it had been with Robert." It sounds as if there was a degree of heroism on Cross’s part, and she nods her head at the suggestion. During those years, there was no contact with Stephens, and she never spoke of him in front of her second husband.
Cross was a creative individual in his own right, author of a number of West End plays, including Half a Sixpence, but his career inevitably became overshadowed by hers. He had children of his own, but became a wholly committed father to the two Stephens boys, Christopher and Toby, both of whom are now actors. "Bev was sometimes distressed by the amount of publicity Robert would get," says Smith. "You know, he was just so good, and so protective of those boys. Heroic, yes. When these things come to an end, quite a bit of you dies at the same time. In a way, a whole life is gone. I don’t know....
"But that’s where it’s at, you just have to face the facts. When Bev died I was working [On Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini]. Joan and Jude were in the film with me. Obviously, it is good to be busy, but all that does is postpone what you feel. You put it off. I face it when I am not working."
There was a rapprochement with Stephens a few years before he died. In 1993, when he was playing Lear, his son Toby was playing Coriolanus, also with the RSC. It was Cross who rang Smith to say that Toby had landed the role. "He [Cross] was in a state of great excitement. When he said, ‘Toby’s got Coriolanus’, I couldn’t quite hear him, and I thought, oh dear, it’s some sort of disease." She says one of the strangest things was going to see Toby in Stratford, in the very dressing room his father had occupied at the same age.
Her own acting has at times divided the critics. When, in 1993, she played Lady Bracknell, a part that had been lying in wait for her like a rather grand bunker, she gave a performance that was "a classic of glittering bravura" if you agreed with The Observer, or else "a bundle of fussiness" if you saw it The Guardian’s way. Expand these two schools of thought and she becomes on the one hand a player of such virtuosity as to have upstaged Olivier’s Othello with her Desdemona, and on the other an inflated character actress with a lazy dependence on her repertoire of eccentric mannerisms.
Perhaps this is the lot of someone who looks, in her art as in her life, as though she might at any moment lance a potentially tragic moment with a piece of pointed mischief. If Dench is seen as a more substantial stage presence, there can be no denying Smith’s greatness as a film actress. Perhaps her finest performance, strangely unremembered, was in the title role of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in 1987. In this adaptation of the 1955 Brian Moore novel, she played an ageing spinster mounting a last, desperate campaign for love. The part was coveted by various Hollywood legends, including Katharine Hepburn, Deborah Kerr and Jane Fonda, and Smith must count herself unlucky not to have won an Oscar for it. (She did get a Bafta.)
The film was set in the bleak transience of a Dublin boarding house, in which her face did all the lugubrious but still comical things that it was doing a moment ago when she cast her eyes around the hotel tables. She also did a magnificent job in My House in Umbria (2003) as Emily Delahunty, the tipsy novelist around whom a disparate group of people assemble in the wake of a terrorist bombing. Here she was, once again operating in the territory that Alan Bennett long ago identified as her habitat, "between laughter and tears".
With her in that film was Ronnie Barker, who half a century earlier had said she would never make it as an actress. His opinion was significant because at the time he voiced it he was working with her at the Oxford Playhouse. She had just left Oxford High School for Girls and been taken on as an assistant stage manager. What did Barker base his opinion on? "Well, I suppose because I was just being the Chinese Boy and the Malaysian Woman. He didn’t think I’d ever get anywhere with it [acting]. I knew he would. Absolutely. He was already an absolutely brilliant actor. He was a juvenile lead, and what he did in Golden Boy was astonishing."
I ask about her new film, Keeping Mum, but I don’t get far – she hasn’t seen it yet, and she asks me to tell her about it. Well, it’s towards the Ealing end of her comic range, and it co-stars Rowan Atkinson (distrait vicar), Kristin Scott Thomas (frustrated wife) and Patrick Swayze (golf hunk). Smith is the sweet old housekeeper Grace, who…
"Oh yes," the actress intervenes. "I bump people off, don’t I?" She certainly does.
We talk about Edward Albee, the American playwright whose Three Tall Women and A Delicate Balance gave her two of her richest stage roles. Here is another one who, like Olivier (and herself as well), was made formidable to the point of ferocity by his great attainments, whereas the reality was that he too was "a bit of a pussycat, really".
And so to the future, the once faraway country of which we knew nothing. "I don’t know what to do," she says. "I don’t want to be on my own in the States. There aren’t the plays." She makes the same point that Judi Dench was making in these pages last week; about it being hard for actresses that there is no Mrs Lear. "I’m lucky to have got McGonagall. I suppose there’s Mrs Malaprop and things like that. Joan says you develop into grotesques, which is what these parts are. It’s not a moan, it’s a fact."
Then she talks a little more about Robert, but stops, saying, "We’ve dredged up so much, haven’t we?" Then about Joan and Judi.
"I don’t really know the others." At the mention of Dench’s name, she begins to smile, just as Dench smiled at the mention of hers. It’s almost as if they are hearing a joke that, even though familiar, never fails to make them laugh. When the trio worked together on Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini, after filming they sat up on the terrace of their hotel and talked. It’s a memorable image, these celebrated Englishwomen, great members of a generation heading towards the far side of maturity, sitting in the dusk and laughing until they cry.
Keeping Mum opens on Friday
