An actress with the rare gift of showing us the soul of the outsider

From Downton Abbey to Harry Potter, the late star, who has died at 89, excelled at portraying eccentrics – and revealing their humanity

Surveying Maggie Smith’s richly busy, barely rivalled career – critically acclaimed and popularly adored – some triumphs leap out.
There was, of course, her Oscar-winning acting masterclass in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) – an immaculate, tragicomic account of school-mistress snootishness and deluded pedagogic over-reach (by neat symmetry, she cemented her global fame, more than 30 years on, with another formidable teacherly role: as Professor Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter).
Then there was her blissfully funny, pathos-steeped account of Alan Bennett’s odoriferous kerbside companion Miss Shepherd in The Lady in the Van (on stage and screen). And, cementing her international fame, her sublimely lofty, almost series-stealing Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. 
The common thread? A pronounced eccentricity – women distinctively detached, but also products of our society; particularities of class and anxieties related to status (however absurd in the case of the down-and-out Miss S) a key ingredient.
Yet to pick out highlights and detect recurrent features is to jump ahead of the fact that Maggie Smith was far more than the sum of her parts. Indeed, serving her characters while cleaving to her own intelligent, scrutinising personality lay at the heart of her greatness. 
Smith displayed an “attitude” to life; it’s there in her wonderfully off-hand and droll, even withering remarks in interviews (when she deigned to do them) right the way through. She looked at the world slightly askance, peered out at existence as if the inhabitants of this planet and her were not fully aligned – across her gaze could scud subtle clouds of bewilderment, bemusement and even alarm.
In short, she had a knack for imbuing her performances with observational rigour, allowing a dazzling duality whereby her heroines could be bystanders to action as much as participants in it. That alertness enabled her to shower us with gifts of comedy. Verbal and physical wit was her forte; she could dispense acid drops of satire in the most perfunctory remarks. Her Violet Crawley was, like her Lady Bracknell, a model of hauteur. At the same time, she could suggest the cost of that carapace, the self-defeating nature of social armour, evincing a British melancholy, a quiet lonely ache. She could bring the house down – and remind us what it’s like to fester in the attic.
Where the retention of a recognisable spirit might be counted a deficiency in many actors, such was the expressive apparatus that surrounded Smith’s vulnerability and sensitivity, by turns concealing and declaring it – inviting laughter, and tears – that it yielded an embarrassment of riches. The performances could be mis-labelled as more-of-the-same, but to comprehend the longevity of her career is to grasp that, from glowing youth to gnarled infirmity, she showed us much about the complexity of the human condition, habitually laid bare through the misfits, the odd-ones-out and the unattached.
In terms of stage successes, many of the tributes to her will surely allude to plays by Edward Albee – Three Tall Women (1994), A Delicate Balance (1997), The Lady from Dubuque (2007); in the former she garnered particular praise, and an Evening Standard award, for playing an elderly woman who, beset by enraging infirmity and senility, is surreally revealed in a freer, more empathetic light after a stroke. But for me the most archetypally brilliant Smith performance was in the middle-brow Peter Shaffer hit, Lettice and Lovage (1987). 
It was written as a West End vehicle for her, and, indeed, her anti-heroine Lettice Douffet used her guided tours of a Tudor stately home as a vehicle for cranky idiosyncrasy. It was a performance that was itself much ado about performance. 
In the opening scene – potentially irksome but, in her fluttering hands, theatrically inspired – we saw her repeatedly embroider historical trivia about a staircase, the better to engage visitors, until it became a great aria of asserted baloney. When she reprised that bit at Shaffer’s memorial celebration at the NT, Smith held the audience in raptures, delivering a tour de force, seemingly extemporising each pronouncement, every detail harnessed to the whole.
The play could have been too parochial, niche and cosy but it travelled, happily, to the States, avid for her star quality. The New York Times’s Frank Rich, known as the “butcher” of Broadway, laid down his carving knives and marvelled: “Her long arms are in windmill motion, as if she were directing traffic at a rush-hour intersection. Her voice, the only good argument yet advanced for the existence of sinus passages, tucks an extra syllable or two into words already as chewy as ‘escrutcheon’.” It was a conjuring trick – you couldn’t quite see how she did it, her technique and instinct magically allied.
There was something of the sleight of hand distraction tactic, too, about her Miss Shepherd in The Lady in the Van, a vagrant alighting outside the home of a famous playwright who conducted herself as if the star of a long-running, mildewed play. Bennett turned her life into art, but recognised that her life was artful – its chaotic kerfuffle orchestrated to keep questions about her at bay, not least from herself, haunted as she was by a thwarted musical career, her rancid immovable van a sorry sign of a life stopped in its tracks. 
Because Smith excels at willed extroversion and mannerism, she was magnificent in the role on stage, directed by Nicholas Hytner, but equally, because she can withhold so much, she was perfect on screen too. When she played at the piano, the worry-lines and years vanished; the composure remained but we saw behind the mask, and in the stirring spectacle of loss briefly salvaged she earned that incongruous air of grandeur.
Though my first experience of the theatre was bearing infant witness to her Peter Pan in 1973, I’d have loved to have seen her at other, more noble points of her career: the Restoration comedies, her Hedda Gabler, her sparring Private Lives opposite her then husband Robert Stephens. Amazingly, you can hear her early revue days with her pal Kenneth Williams (Share My Lettuce, 1957), and even watch a recording of her Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello (1960). Still, even late in the day, you saw what the fuss was about. I was lucky to review her big theatrical comeback, at the Bridge, in 2019.
In Christopher Hampton’s A German Life, a monologue delivered by one of Goebbels’s secretaries, Brunhilde Pomsel, here again was the frustrated, little-remarked-on life only this time not so harmless. This was a minor player whose incuriosity contributed to monstrosity. Sitting alone, Smith used her comic resources as surreptitious weapons, enlisting our sympathy, lulling us (“It turned out to be a crowd of men with B-O,” she observed, with an enjoyable sniff, of the Nazis as she first encountered them). If we went in thinking of it as long ago, she made it close to home. Instead of hiding herself in her character, she showed us again what most of us like to keep hidden, the devil lying in the fine detail of denial.
Nothing was admitted, and yet it felt like a plea for absolution. “I think there is an accepted way that a face should be, and I’m not like that,” Smith said once. By that she meant her looks, though many praised them. But, it’s true, her face had a rare legibility. In A German Life she let us peer into a writhing conscience. At her finest, she showed us the soul itself.
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