Even before she was famous, I knew Maggie Smith was a treasure | Canada Voices

There was haddock and then there were the Dolomites. Let me explain.

In 1964, in the second season of Britain’s National Theatre, Maggie Smith in the role of Myra Arundel, the jaundiced sophisticate of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, came down to a disconsolate third-act breakfast, sampled the buffet, and pronounced “this haddock’s disgusting.” The mixture of shock and venom she injected into that adjective may not actually have stopped the show, but they glorified it, giving it a niche in history and a defining place in the actress’ biography.

Six years later, still at the National, she was Hedda Gabler, perched on a sofa next to her admirer Eilert Lovborg, sharing mementoes of her recent disastrous Italian honeymoon. Now, what were those hills called? The Dolomites, prompted George Tesman, her besotted husband, hovering at the side. “These are the Dolomites, Mr. Lovborg” she repeated, not missing a beat, and somehow managing to convey in that purposefully overstressed word both a mild condescension towards him and a withering contempt for the unfortunate George. I doubt if any other Hedda has got such a laugh on that word. (To be fair, it’s unlikely that any other Hedda has tried.) The Hay Fever line was a slow burn; the Hedda one was an instant flash. Each was magnificently right for its context: “Maggie Smith,” I was able to write about her years later, “means timing of unholy perfection.” And the world’s most expressive pair of hands.

The timing wasn’t purely comic. Her Hedda, in a production by Ingmar Bergman, was a haunting, brooding study of self-destroying loneliness, hot ice and wondrous strange snow, the only Hedda I have ever felt sorry for.

It was her last performance for a company that she helped characterize; the National, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, was able in those far-off days to be a company as it was operating at just one theatre, the Old Vic, while waiting for the construction of its triple-staged fortress on the South Bank. Now Maggie Smith had first come to notice as a performer in revue: New Faces of 1956 on Broadway, Share My Lettuce in London. These made her an almost-star. We may, I think, hear a mature echo of the revue-era Maggie Smith in the film of Oh What Lovely War, enticingly sinister as she sings “I’ll make a man of any man of you.”

To some people’s surprise she soon turned up at the Old Vic, in its pre-National days, in a company full of young talent including her contemporary and instant friend Judi Dench. (They had hierarchical billing in those days, and Smith ranked a few notches above Dench.) She played a wickedly deflationary Celia in As You Like It and, deploying an unexpected sobriety, a demurely determined Scottish wife in J. M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows.

Having proved her classical chops, she had a succession of West End gigs: a surprising ingenue in Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal, an engaging double bill by Peter Shaffer, and – the real clincher – Mary, Mary, an American import by Jean Kerr, the wisecracking wife of the wisecracking American critic Walter Kerr. The last declared her an absolute star. And from there to the National Theatre.

Olivier recruited her for his first season; he cast her, unexpectedly but rewardingly, as Desdemona to his Othello. But what really made the National Theatre glorious in those early years were its explorations in (mostly) high comedy; even at the time it felt like a Golden Age, and Smith was at the heart of it. Her years at the National were bookended by two triumphs in Restoration rediscoveries: The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem, both by George Farquhar, both directed by William Gaskill. In the first she was very funny, in the second both funny and enchanting; she had acquired surpassing grace. Her leading man in both these plays was Robert Stephens, whom she married. It was, by most accounts, a stormy relationship, but it gave the company an extra hold on the public’s imagination. They divorced, but continued to speak well of one another. Stephens said that the only fault he could find with Margaret’s acting (he always called her Margaret) was that she was sometimes too quick to be humanly believable.

I wish I had seen her Cleopatra. She played it at Stratford, Ont., in 1976, the first thing she ever did there. This was Robin Phillips’s second season as Stratford’s director and he invited her when, despite now being a big name in both theatre and movies, her career seemed becalmed. It was reinvigorated by the four seasons she played at Phillips’ Stratford as a full company member, not just a visiting star.

Her Cleopatra must have drawn on all her reserves of wit and nerves (like her Hedda), as indeed, in the same testing season, did her Millamant, the archetypal Restoration comedy heroine, in The Way of the World. Her Rosalind, the archetypal Shakespearean comedy heroine, in As You Like It, was generally reckoned perfection. I can bear witness to her Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, a role she had played semi-successfully at the National and now did triumphantly, opposite her regular Festival high-comedy partner Brian Bedford. Then there was her Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream done up as Elizabeth I, and her other Queen Elizabeth to Bedford’s superb Richard III (my favourite Phillips production), and her barbed flirtations with Bedford in The Guardsman and Private Lives (I didn’t see the latter but know that it was impeccable), and her valedictory appearance as Virginia Woolf in Virginia, a life-and-works compilation in which she was uncannily convincing, physically and psychologically, even if some (meaning me) thought it “an interminable evening of cultural blackmail.”

She aged most gracefully. It was preordained that she would be a perfect Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (again, I didn’t see it, but I take it on trust) and I presume that she imported much of that performance into her turn on Downton Abbey: I loathed the show – I thought it a fawning attempt to appeal to a starry-eyed American conception of the English aristocracy – but I would occasionally switch on in hopes of hearing Maggie Smith deliver the odd epigram. And deliver she invariably did. I always relished, too, the touch of urchin that could surface in her work. My favourite of her screen performances was as Alan Bennett’s Lady in the Van. And of course, I relished seeing Dame Maggie and Dame Judi, along with Dames Joan (Plowright) and Eileen (Atkins), exchanging reminiscences over refreshments in Nothing Like a Dame – or, as I prefer to think of it, Dames at Tea.

And I’ve just remembered. The first time I ever saw Maggie Smith, a long time prehaddock, was in a TV production of that same Hay Fever. She was playing another of the beleaguered house-guests, the teenage flapper Jackie Coryton who, on being informed that “no one who really loved horses could enjoy a bull-fight,” replies earnestly and, in this performance, with a touch of nasal congestion “nor anyone who loved bulls, either.” She made it the funniest line in the play. She was far from famous but I knew then that Maggie Smith was to be treasured.