It's hard to think of another actor who can do more with syllables than Maggie Smith. For her, language was a multipurpose accessory.
His characters crashed into consonants, as if landing a plane in the middle of a blown engine, or lengthened vowels in defiance of various laws of physics. Silence was a deadly weapon in his hands. Your pauses could engulf the surrounding conversation. More powerful than any joke was the space he left to anticipate not only what he might say but as She could tell.
Trained as a repertory theater actress in an English system rooted in Shakespeare, Dame Maggie, who died on Friday in London aged 89, was groomed for versatility. His astonishing variety, confirmed by a theater and film career that crossed generations, genres and cultural levels, had a common denominator: a reverence for the written word. His gifts (and they were rightly legendary) turned dialogue on the page into verbal music.
If comedy was more typical of her than tragedy, it was because she understood that life did not observe any separation between the two. Pain and loss do not cancel out the absolute absurdity of human behavior. He enjoyed the indomitable nature of our quirks and whims, their ability to survive even a dire catastrophe. Each of us will eventually be erased, but our unique textures are unrepeatable. She honored those traces even as she ironically highlighted their indefensible triviality.
I saw Smith only once on the New York stage, the last time he was on Broadway, in Peter Shaffer's “Lettice and Lovage” in 1990. I was still a student at the time and can still feel the air of excitement around to production. . The public flocked to the Ethel Barrymore Theater to see a comic virtuoso in full struggle. Watching Smith lob verbal grenades with co-star Margaret Tyzack was like watching Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova trade forehands at Wimbledon.
The play, about a fantastical tour guide of a boring, stately English country house who comes into conflict with an objectively demanding official of the historic property, was almost irrelevant. What endures is the harsh tone of the game, the growing exasperation, the tango of opposite temperaments finding fleeting common ground. Shaffer provided enough to unleash the formidable arsenals of two wily veterans.
Maggie Smith, seen in the rehearsal of “Night and Day” in 1979, has died at age 89.
(Ray Howard/Associated Press)
Smith won an Oscar for her starring role in 1969's “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” about a larger-than-life teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school who wants to free her students' minds with romantic ideas that turn out to be dangerous if not fascist. Based on the indelible novel by Muriel Spark, the film was a perfect vehicle to express Smith's histrionic charm and seductive magic.
She was at her best on screen when she could carry the stage with her. Her first Oscar nomination was for playing Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier's Othello and her subsequent nominations were all for characters whose theatricality was a way of existence. She won a second Oscar for her magnificent supporting role in Herbert Ross's 1978 film “California Suite,” playing an egomaniacal British actress who has come to Los Angeles with her husband to attend the Academy Awards as her marriage falls apart. . Smith prepares a full course with Neil Simon's wild parody.
International fame fell upon Smith through his work on “Downton Abbey” and the “Harry Potter” films, fame that he treated like a suspicious visitor. Playing an acid-tongued widow or a witchcraft teacher came naturally to her, but what excited her about acting was its transformative freedom. An actor contains multitudes and Smith knew there were legions within her.
It was fun to play aristocrats with autocratic ways, but common-level characters could be just as imposing. She excelled on stage and screen in Alan Bennett's “The Lady in the Van,” playing a cantankerous squatter with an imperious sense of entitlement. Another of Bennett's works, “Bed Among the Lentils”, part of his “Talking Heads” series of monologues filmed for BBC Television, gave Smith the opportunity to play the wife of a reclusive vicar with a drinking problem every increasingly noticeable and longings that are not so easy to contain.
Balancing pathos and idiosyncratic humor in depictions of women pushed to the limits of their resources – something she achieved to perfection in the 1987 film “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” – has always been her forte. He recognized that there is nothing more dramatic than human contradiction, the clash and jingling of self-image and public perception.
Consider the haughtiness of his unforgettable widow in “Gosford Park” compared to the character's dire financial difficulties. Satire hurts best when it immerses itself in embarrassing realities.
Smith had that quality that Geraldine Page had of bringing the street to the screen or stage, as if someone who lives an everyday life had slipped through the back door of the casting. The fact that these were two of the most technically accomplished actors of the modern era is a testament to their genius. Smith, a product of the classical British tradition, had Shakespeare's lightning eloquence to guide her. His timing was incomparable, but what made it so was the truth he revealed in the interval that occurs before thought and feeling are finally released into words.
