Dame Maggie Smith’s Interview With LA Times

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!