Maggie Smith

By Jasper Rees

1964 HAY FEVER MYRA
Daughter of an Essex pathologist, brought up in Oxford, a student at no major drama school, Maggie Smith took her place as a great comic actor 50 years ago and is still the best reason for having a television set. Olivier picked her for his first National Theatre company and miscast her twice, before Noël Coward handed her Myra, his creation who “uses sex like a shrimping-net”. Equipped with a pearl-encrusted bustle, which she scooped into position with a cigarette-holder like a fairy’s wand, she presented a delicious cartoon that exposed the desperation of a tease in a tight corner. In 1972 she returned to Coward as Amanda in “Private Lives”, electrifying the text with sparks of comic insight. Gazing at the Côte d’Azur, she remarked, “Look at the lights of that yacht reflected in the water,” before adding, in the voice of Becky Sharp, “I wonder who owns it.”

1969 THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE TITLE ROLE
Her first Oscar. The crème de la crème of Smith’s screen turns came to her via Muriel Spark’s novel about an elegant young Edinburgh schoolmistress in the 1930s who, as a romantic devotee of Fascism, exerts undue influence on her female charges. Smith’s flaming crop semaphored a fiery disposition, barely contained by those clipped Morningside vowels (later reprised for Professor Minerva McGonagall, of Hogwarts). Her dreamboat lover was played by her then husband, Robert Stephens. Spark’s fiction was to give Smith another fine role about fear of death in “Memento Mori “(1992).