Dame Maggie Smith’s 10 best roles

From sparring wit in Much Ado About Nothing to extraordinary courage in A German Life, the late Maggie Smith let her work speak for her

“There’s no reason why one should put into words what you do,” Maggie Smith complained. The adenoidal voice sounded as baffled as you would expect. Dame Maggie, who has died aged 89, was one of those very great actors who didn’t enjoy the business of talking about acting.
That much came across when I was sent to interview her in a sitting room at Highclere Castle as the first series of Downton Abbey was being filmed. When she wanted to, she could deliver a quip with perfectly weighted timing, but I found a woman who had none of the conversational ease of her contemporaries Judi Dench or Eileen Atkins, and preferred to let the work speak for her.
Her career is so vast and myriad that any selection of her great performances on stage and screen will generate disagreement. She began lightly in revue and comedy. Then came weightier work in the National Theatre before film stardom beckoned.
It was only after the break-up of her marriage to Robert Stephens in the 1970s that she moved to Toronto for five years and gave herself permission to play Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. “I wouldn’t even have dared play them here,” she said. “I don’t think anybody would have accepted it.”
As she grew older the roles grew ever grander. “I think it’s just sort of antiquity,” she drawled. “I really feel if there’s an old bat to play then it’ll be me.” I remember a hint of a confiding smile as she downplayed her status as one of the greatest of the age. When we parted she had melted enough to give her interrogator a warm and perhaps relieved hug.
At the recently formed National Theatre, Smith’s instinctive gift for comedy made her a more natural fit for Beatrice than she had been for Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s heavily blacked-up Othello. Franco Zeffirelli directed her and Robert Stephens, whom she married two years later. Her sparring wit in the role was captured in a BBC version though the tape was thought lost until rediscovered in 2010. “I wonder you would still be talking, Signor Benedick, nobody marks you,” her Beatrice said upon meeting her future husband in a withering style that would become a familiar trademark.
Smith’s first Oscar. The crème de la crème of Smith’s performances on screen was one of her earliest. Muriel Spark’s masterpiece told of an elegant young Edinburgh schoolmistress who is a fan of Mussolini and drips polite poison into the heads of her female pupils. Memorable for her fiery red hair but even more for her clipped Morningside vowels (which she later repurposed for her stint in Hogwarts as Professor McGonagall). Her dreamboat lover was played by Stephens. Spark’s fiction would give her another fine role about fear of death in Memento Mori (1992).
Smith was born to deliver the barbed witticisms of Coward, but this wasn’t initially a happy production. With her co-star Stephens she rowed in character onstage, and in real life off it until light comic John Standing came in as the production went on to Broadway. “You’ve got to have a certain rapport with somebody,” he told me, “and Maggie and I did get on amazingly well.” Not that everyone liked it. “Have you seen the ghastly performance Maggie Smith is giving in Private Lives?” Kathleen Tynan asked John Gielgud. “Er,” he replied awkwardly, “I directed it.”
Like much of Smith’s screen work, Neil Simon’s script started out on stage. Smith plays Diana Barrie, a neurotic Oscar-nominated star in a loving lavender marriage to Michael Caine. “It’s bizarre,” says Diana Barrie on the flight to LA. “Eight years with the National Theatre, two Pinters, nine Shakespeares, three Shaws and I finally get nominated for a nauseating little comedy.” Hollywood couldn’t resist the way Smith humanised Simon’s sentimental satire, and gave her another statuette for real.
“At the stroke of 50 I was all set to turn into a wonderful woman.” Smith had been going for more than a quarter of a century before television audiences caught a glimpse of her feel for tragedy. In Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue she played a vicar’s alcoholic wife who is in both senses faithless, having a young Indian shopkeeper as a lover. Doing without all her default vocal trickery, Smith gave a revelatory portrait of midlife pain and sorrow. 
More than any of her contemporaries, Smith was comfortable inhabiting the American imagination. Now 60, she aged up to 90 to embody a version of Edward Albee’s autocratic mother in Three Tall Women, sharing long-winded, rambling memories of lost youth. It earned her a fifth Evening Standard Award, and revived Albee’s career. “We trust each other,” he once told me. “She trusts my text and I trust her intelligence. That’s the way to do it.” 
Alan Bennett’s front drive in north London played host for 15 years to a Miss Shepherd, a homeless woman who lived in a yellow minivan. His diary of this long awkward stand-off between a man too polite to assert himself and a woman too stubborn to go became a play that was just made for Smith, who masterfully conveyed the querulous grandeur masking a pitiable vulnerability in a woman who had fallen on very hard times. She reprised the role in Nicholas Hytner’s 2015 film.
In Robert Altman’s country house drama, Smith’s Countess of Trentham is a filigree portrait of galloping, caustic snobbery. “Bought marmalade,” she sniffs at the breakfast table. “I call that very feeble.” The cast was stuffed with stars but it’s Smith’s strapped aristocrat that lingers longest in the memory, partly because it was this performance in a script co-written by Julian Fellowes that segued into a certain Dowager Countess.
“At my age, one must ration one’s excitement.” Julian Fellowes’s comforting upstairs/downstairs melodrama was wonderfully leavened by Dame Maggie’s glorious turn as Lady Grantham cocking an eyebrow, flaring both nostrils, firing off weapons-grade quips and generally refusing to accept the entire concept of the modern day. “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle-class.” If any of them belong in a dictionary of quotations, it’s because of the way Smith deathlessly delivered them. No one ever said it, but really she was channelling the ghost of her 1950s vaudeville sparring partner Kenneth Williams.
Smith chose to conclude 65 years as a theatre actress with a bravura turn of extraordinary courage. In a solo play by Christopher Hampton at the Bridge Theatre, she took to the stage alone to play Brunhilde Pomsel, a woman who had been the private secretary of Josef Goebbels. The manner in which she faltered in her delivery captured a sense of a woman’s struggle in later life to accept the enormity of Nazi crimes. What a way to finish.
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