By Richard Ouzounian
Theatre Critic
LONDON—The Right Honourable Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, glided through the chicly restored lobby of the Savoy Hotel, sat down at a corner table in the Thames Foyer and turned aside an offer of the room’s legendary high tea, requesting instead an icy glass of white wine.
Heads turned; they always do. Because this is Dame Maggie Smith, currently riding a tsunami of popularity due to the success of the PBS superseries Downton Abbey.
She also trails unassumingly behind her a train made up of 60 years in show business that has won her seven BAFTA awards, two Oscars, two Golden Globes, two Emmys, two SAG awards, an Olivier Award and a Tony.
She’s touching down briefly in Toronto over the next few days to launch her latest film at TIFF (Quartet, Dustin Hoffman’s directing debut) but, most importantly, on Monday night she will be honoured as the 2012 recipient of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Legacy Award during a fundraising evening at the Four Seasons Hotel.
The 77-year-old woman who’s survived everything from quidditch (thanks to her role as Professor Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter) to chemotherapy (a harrowing battle with cancer) has a wonderful serenity about her except, on this particular afternoon in London, when she worries about the scope of the upcoming Stratford gala.
“Is it very, very, very sort of grand?” she queries.
“I mean, is there time for me not to go if I find it all too intimidating?”
Assured that it’s not too big, that she can’t back out and that everyone there will be celebrating the four glorious years in the 1970s when she sprinkled her particular brand of stardust on Stratford, she gulps some wine and reconciles herself to going.
“But it’s terrifying,” she says in a little-girl whisper. “Why? Because it was such a vivid and clear time in my head and probably the most important years of my whole career.”
That’s no idle boast. Back in 1975, Robin Phillips, the newly appointed artistic director of Stratford, swept Smith away from the Royal Alexandra Theatre, where she was appearing in Private Lives, for a weekend of snow, solitude and creative suggestion on the shores of Lake Huron.
“It was wonderful,” she recalls. “I’d never seen such snow. I’d never known such peace. I didn’t want to leave.”
At that point, Smith was a highly regarded comedienne onstage and screen, but some critics felt she was starting to fall into certain patterns of sameness. She thought so too.
Phillips offered the antidote: classical repertory at Stratford. With comic roles you’d expect her to play, like Millimant in The Way of theWorld, balanced by parts she never thought she’d do in her lifetime, like Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.
“I thought it was absurd, ridiculous and I told Robin so. But of course, I had said the same thing when Larry (Olivier) asked me to play Desdemona to his Othello. In both cases, I came around.”
And everyone was glad she did. The work was stunning, the world’s critics lined up to pay their respects and the Church Restaurant was packed every night with the likes of Lauren Bacall and Rudolf Nureyev.
“I’m glad all that happened for the festival’s sake, but for me it was the work, always the work, that came first,” insists Smith.
And by those standards, many Stratford-watchers feel 1977 was the finest of the quartet of years Smith spent there (1976, ’77, ’79 and ’80).
Her Virgin Queen Hippolyta paired superbly with her gossamer Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but that only set the stage for her radiant Rosalind in As You Like It, a production still remembered with awe by anyone who saw it.
“I’m not one for souvenirs, but I have on my mantelpiece in the country a little mug and in it are two of the canvas oak leaves from that beautiful tree that hung over the stage,” admits Smith.
One of the lessons of As You Like It is that death is a part of life, but Smith rages against that when recalling her co-star from the show, Domini Blythe, who died of cancer in 2010.
“She was too young to die, too young!” says Smith. Too often, when discussing colleagues from the past, she has to ask, “Are they still with us?”
Thinking of Blythe brings to mind Smith’s own battle with breast cancer, which began in 2007.
“Some people say you have to fight cancer. But it was fighting me. The cure was worse than the disease, and it left me totally exhausted and depressed. I just hid myself away in my daughter-in-law’s flat.
“I couldn’t face anyone or anything. But you get though it, you finally get through it. But you don’t know how bad it is until you actually live through it yourself.”
At that precise moment, the waitress offers Smith another glass of wine, which she cheerfully accepts, saying, “I see no reason why not.”
And then she starts the wheels of comic invention turning again.
“There are advantages to cancer, you know. My chemo cheered up the makeup department on Harry Potter because the wig went on a great deal easier without a single hair on my head.”
