Dame Maggie Smith — a matchless talent in the West End and on screen

The celebrated West End actress, who was best known for screen roles in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, has passed away at the age of 89.

“Watch yourself, Tallulah!”: the place was Broadway’s ANTA Theatre (now the August Wilson) late in 1979 and the woman speaking the line was the inimitable Dame Maggie Smith, in the third of only four appearances she made on Broadway over the years. She was playing Ruth Carson in the American premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, and the theatre-mad college student in me remembers that voice pinging across the auditorium as only hers could.

I had by that point seen Smith on screen, of course, not least in the two films (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite) for which she won her Oscars. But to experience her live was something else. Like her longtime friend and colleague Judi Dench, Smith was a screen name whose real passion was for the stage, and to have been able to share that passion first-hand will forever be a privilege.

Night and Day sparked in me a lifelong devotion to her work on stage, which continued through to my attendance at her last-ever London performance: the final night of her Bridge Theatre run, in 2017, playing the real-life character of Brunhilde Pomsel — Joseph Goebbels’s secretary — in Christopher Hampton’s scorching solo play, A German Life.

A packed house included her son Toby Stephens, the actor, keeping an affectionately watchful eye. But the sustained ovation at her curtain call came with a sense of finality – few of us thought she would ever do a play again, as indeed she didn’t – and Smith shut down any fuss, mouthing the words “thank you” and then slipping away quietly into the night. The celebratory fizz in the foyer went unconsumed, at least by the very person that had brought us there.

At the time, the director of A German Life, Jonathan Kent, remarked to me that Smith’s interest in taking on so challenging a play so late in her career (she was then 84) was largely due to a desire not merely to be remembered at the time of her death for the twin phenomena of Harry Potter, in which she played Professor Minerva McGonagall, and Downton Abbey, as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

No such luck. Obituaries in recent days have led with those exact titles, as is fair enough – global recognition, however ambivalent Smith felt about hers (and she did), isn’t easily arrived at. But I’m surely not alone in associating her first and foremost with the vast swathe of her theatrical affections – whether for new plays by Peter Shaffer, Ronald Harwood, and Alan Bennett or for the established canon of Edward Albee. Could one turn back time, I’d love to have seen her Desdemona opposite Olivier’s Othello, or the Amanda she played in Private Lives to her then-husband Robert Stephens’s Elyot. By the time the latter production reached Broadway in 1975, she and Stephens had called it quits, and John Standing was her co-star.

But my four decades in London nonetheless brought Smith into view with revivifying frequency, her performance in A German Life an extraordinary climax to a career that (with the possible exception of Dench) remains without peer.

Few knew better than she how to time a laugh – her delivery, as Myra in Noël Coward’s legendary 1963 revival of Hay Fever, of the line “this haddock is disgusting” has become the stuff of legend, even if Smith famously couldn’t figure out what people found so funny. And as the extravagant Lettice Douffet in the Peter Shaffer play, Lettice and Lovage, she transformed excess into something so elegantly distilled that the role seems pretty much unplayable by anyone else. I’ve seen others try but the Dame’s singular presence – Shaffer wrote the play for her – hovers over the text throughout.

Less often celebrated was Smith’s hairpin ability to shift moods: the anger, for instance, that she brought to the seemingly ebullient Lettice when, faced with the sack, she demands of her employer how someone her age will possibly find a job.

Camp came to her easily — the pinched nasality that won her worldwide favour in Downton Abbey and that she brought to her West End appearance as Lady Bracknell. I remember at that 1993 opening night her tapping Bob Crowley’s set during the bows as if in mock-reproach at her designer’s bold aesthetic. Such technique was made, too, for Restoration comedy and verbally dextrous plays like The Way of the World, the Congreve comedy in which I first saw her on the London stage in 1984.

But Smith could drop mannerism and affectation in an instant, too. As the alcoholic wife of a Yorkshire vicar in Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils, seen both on TV and stage, she communicated a sad-eyed psychic wasteland. And pain informed her turn as the naturally witty nonagenarian in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, in which she triumphed across two separate West End runs. Her effortless beauty – and own considerable height – were ideally suited to Albee’s world of pained privilege, even if Smith herself was an Essex girl, born in Ilford. At the opposite end of the social spectrum was the begrimed Miss S in Bennett's The Lady in the Van, a bravura stage turn repeated on screen.

My own, most lasting takeaways are of her retreating from view in A German Life, as the set slowly receded just as Pomsel herself seemed to understand the enormity of the atrocities in which she had been complicit. And of her breathtaking West End turn in 2007 in Albee’s tricky The Lady from Dubuque, in which she arrived at the end of the first act only to carry the rest of the play before her.

Non-realistic, as Albee’s plays often are, this one cast Smith as an exquisitely spoken woman, unnamed, who seems very likely to be an emissary of death. Towards the end of the play, the others in the play turned on this newfound presence in their midst, demanding to know her identity. “I am the Lady from Dubuque,” she told them, “I thought you knew.”

She then turned to the audience, adding softly and with an air of infinite mystery that I shan’t forget, “I thought they knew.” When it comes to her greatness, we did – and we do.

Dame Maggie Smith: 28 December 1934 - 27 September 2024

Photo credit: Dame Maggie Smith in A German Life at the Bridge Theatre. (Photo courtesy of production). Inset: Smith in Downton Abbey, alongside Shirley MacLaine.