Last Sunday, Dame Maggie Smith was named Best Actress at the Evening Standard British Film Awards for The Lady in the Van. The Evening Standard caught up with Dame Smith to talk about Sunday’s awards and her wide-ranging career.
On her latest win, Smith remained modest as ever, highlighting the brilliance of the actresses she was up against:
“Quite honestly, the things one was up against, it doesn’t seem fair,” she says. “Brooklyn [starring Saoirse Ronan], and 45 Years in which Charlotte [Rampling] was so terrific, and Sicario [with Emily Blunt], although I didn’t really get that…”
She puts on a Uriah Heep voice: “I just feel ever so ‘umble. It does seem awfully unfair and I can’t help feeling it’s because I am so old.”
The interview developed more on recent interviews about Smith’s early career conducted by LA Times (read here) and CBS News (here). Smith tells more about her portrayal of The Lady in the Van‘s Mary Shepherd in Nicholas Hytner’s West End production in 1999, alongside writer Alan Bennett:
“I was fascinated by the mystery of her,” says Smith. “And of Alan, the way he coped with it and put up with her. I don’t know who was the oddest. You just wonder where her head was. You think ‘confused’ but she was very clear in what she thought, trying to form these political parties and writing letters to [Seventies TV personality] Eamonn Andrews and all that.
“As I have got older I wonder how the hell she did it. Honest to God, the filming finished me off and that was sort of deluxe. The van was… cleansed from time to time.” She couldn’t have been the Good Samaritan Bennett was, she says.
A film was immediately mooted in 1999 — “the material is actually more filmic” — but for some reason was only made 15 years later. “Whether it was just that Alan decided he wanted to do it, or Nick nagged him, I don’t know,” says Smith. “It certainly wasn’t me! I didn’t go on about it at all. But I was very pleased to sort of finish her off in a way.”
The loss of Alan Rickman is also mentioned in the interview, along with the recent passing of Frank Finlay – another member of the first National Theatre company in 1962. Smith starred as Desdemona alongside Finlay (who portrayed Iago) in Laurence Oliver’s Othello:
“One night dear Frank came off stage and he flew to the prompt corner and started tearing at his eyes, like Oedipus,” she recalls. “I got very worried, and went over, and said ‘Are you all right?’. He had terribly bad sight, Frank, and was wearing contact lenses, which he never normally wore, and he said: ‘I’ve just seen Sir Laurence for the first time! And I never want to do it again.’”
She gives a husky laugh, then says: “You get a bit wobbly, you know, when you get to a certain age. It [mortality] seems to be too near.”
For the first time in her career, Maggie Smith has found herself a lot less busy, and whilst The Evening Standard picks up on the fact that she hasn’t much relished the fame brought on by her roles in Potter and Downton, Smith still finds the quietness ‘weird':
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Romford but moved to Oxford aged four, her father a pathologist and her mother a secretary who thought young Maggie would never work on stage “with a face like that”. Actually, Smith says, she benefited from not being a “juve”, or ingénue, and has worked constantly, though latterly she’s been stuck playing “’orrible old women”. This is the first time in her career that she hasn’t had a job to go to, “and it’s weird, because suddenly there is no shape to anything”.
On the prospect of taking up future work, Smith says ‘big TV shows’ are out of the option, but on a role in film, she retains her sense of humour and answers:
“I can’t think what the part would be, can you?” she says. “It’ll be another old bag won’t it, hurr-hurr-hurr.”
Smith tends to keep her personal life away from the press, but her spoke briefly about her marriages:
Smith was married to the fiery but rackety actor Robert Stephens for seven years and they had two sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, both actors “and both out in South Africa at the moment, can you believe, doing this thing called Black Sails, being piratical”.
After her divorce from Stephens in 1974 she married playwright Beverley Cross in 1975. He died in 1998; Robert Stephens had died in 1995. Smith says it doesn’t get any easier being on her own, especially when fans intrude. But she doesn’t think she’ll enjoy an autumnal romance like the one her friend Judi Dench is having: “No, I don’t think I would get that lucky. I don’t think I would find anybody who would come anywhere near Bev.”
Given how rare interviews with Dame Maggie are, we’re very lucky to have had so many recently! Read the rest of the interview here, and make sure you catch her latest award-winning performance in The Lady in the Van.
Yesterday, LA Times published an interview with Dame Maggie Smith about the earliest roles in her acting career, and found that her experience of typecasting was very different to what they would have expected!
Instead of appearing in a “Shakespearean tragedy, a George Bernard Shaw satire or a sophisticated Noel Coward comedy”, typical of early British actors, Maggie Smith actually appeared first in New Faces of 1956 – a musical comedy revue.
Dame Maggie spoke about how she ended up in musical theatre, and the difficulties of moving to New York at 21:
“In Oxford, I used to do university revues,” Smith explained in her unmistakable voice over the phone from her house in London earlier this week. “Sometimes we would do we things at the Edinburgh Festival — we were the first things on the fringe, in fact — and then we took it to London in a little, tiny theater. I suppose the [‘New Faces’] producer Leonard Sillman saw me. That’s how it happened.”
“I spent my entire time crying. We were paid so little. I didn’t know anyone then. I had been booked in a hotel I couldn’t afford! It was $60 a week.”
Sixty years on from this role, Maggie Smith has been our beloved Professor McGonagall, adored by masses in Downton Abbey, and recently appeared in The Lady In the Van – for which she has been nominated for the Best Actress BAFTA award. She now has Oscars, Emmys and a Tony to her name, however, she recalled that it took a long time to escape repetitive typecasting:
It took her forever “to get people to believe I could do something other than revues. I was sort of pigeonholed for a very long time.”
In the 1960s, Smith joined London’s Royal National Theatre and appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in Othello, both on stage and in the 1965 film, for which she won an Oscar. She told LA Times:
“It was scary,” she said. “Shakespeare and I were a long way apart because I had been doing things like ‘New Faces’ and revues. I would have been terrified anyway just leaping into Shakespeare, but that was going in at a pretty dizzying level. I should have maybe started off in a kind of quieter way. But I was so thrilled to go to the National.”
LA Times noted that Smith’s absence at the Golden Globe nominations was due to her recent hip replacement surgery, from which she is still recovering:
“I feel so much better,” she said, “but you can’t sit that long in the airplane.”
The Lady in the Van is something of a memoir of the relationship between the elderly woman Mary Shepherd (Maggie Smith) and playwright-actor Alan Bennett, the former of whom lived on the driveway of the latter in an old van for fifteen years. It started out as Bennett’s autobiographical stage play as an Ode to the last Mary Shepherd (who died in 1989) in 1999 on London’s West End, in which Smith appeared, and was then turned into a radio show – in which Dame Maggie also played Mary.
However, Dame Maggie doesn’t think it will be as successful outside of Britain:
“I don’t think ‘Lady in the Van’ will travel,” she said. “One of the reviews said, ‘I don’t think it will travel outside north London.’ I think there is a bit of truth in that.”
On working with Maggie Smith, Nicholas Hytner – who directed the film The Lady in The Van and collaborated with her on various other projects, said that at first he was intimidated by her ‘extraordinary history’:
“It is a wealth of experience, extraordinary energy, imagination and experience,” he noted. “You worry in advance that you are not going to be able to measure up. But actually, what she doesn’t want at all is a voice in the rehearsal room that is unable to speak up when they need to speak up. She is harder on herself than she is on anybody else. She really needs to feel that somebody is keeping an eye out for her and on her.”
Smith said she told Hytner to “please slap me” if her performance was veering off-course. “Nick was terrific,” she said. “I want to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible. She’s mad enough.”
On having never watched Downton Abbey, Smith says:
“Why do I want to see it?” Smith said matter of factly. “I’m doing it. I know the story of it. I do have the boxed set, but you know that would take me to the end of my life to watch.”
Well said, we think – and as LA Times notes, ‘not unlike something Lady Crawley herself might say’. Read the full interview here, and make sure to catch The Lady in the Van in cinemas!
Dame Maggie Smith, our dear Professor Minerva McGonagall, is celebrating her birthday on December 28. In honor of both her birthday and her amazing career, CBS News Sunday Morning broadcast an exclusive question and answer session today.
The short interview highlights the major events in Dame Maggie Smith’s life, from her first appearance on Broadway in 1956 to her current project, The Lady in the Van. In the new film, Dame Maggie portrays Miss Shepherd, a vagabond woman who spent the last fifteen years of her life in a van parked on playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway.
The interview also includes quite a few juicy tidbits about Downton Abbey, and CBS News credits the Harry Potter films with introducing this wonderful actress to a new generation.
At the end of the interview, Correspondent Mo Rocca shows Dame Maggie a clip from her appearance on the Carol Burnett Show in 1975. Dame Maggie takes a moment to reflect on the experience and the outfits designed by Bob Mackie. “Those were the days,” she says.
“Correction, these are still the days of Dame Maggie Smith,” answers Mo Rocca. We here at Leaky agree.
So, although she doesn’t want to be reminded, please join us in wishing a happy birthday to Dame Maggie Smith!
To watch the interview, visit CBS News, here.
On this day when we in the fandom are celebrating Professor McGonagall's birthday, it is only fitting that we hear from the woman who brings this character so memorably to life on the screen: Dame Maggie Smith. The Times has released a brand new interview with this acclaimed actress, where she discusses her career, her role as the Head of Gryffindor in the Harry Potter films series (she noted s...
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