Maggie Smith found a clarity on stage that in some ways surpassed her work on screen Maggie Smith

MAggie Smith was an actress of legendary wit and style who seemed to have the ability to deliver a one-line hit even offstage. There’s a lovely moment in Roger Michell’s TV film Nothing Like a Dame in which the assembled quartet (including Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) are asked to talk about the difficulty of living with a title. Joan Plowright says it’s worse for her because her marriage to Laurence Olivier gives her not only the reputation of a lady, but also that of a lady. With exquisite timing and the perfect verb, Maggie looks at her old friend and says, “Joan, darling, you just have to deal with it.”

Smith’s achievements on stage and screen are well documented, but I was fortunate to witness a lesser-known side of her work: her seasons at the Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, from 1976 to 1980. She once told me that she was there Due to her private life she has to work in Canada. I wondered if it was also because of her Private Lives, which, although a huge success in the West End in 1972, led to accusations that she became a prisoner of her strange mannerisms. Whatever the motivation, her work in Stratford, Canada, was characterized by a directness and sincerity that amounted to a reinvention of herself.

Unfortunately I missed her inaugural season playing Cleopatra and Millamant in The Way of the World, but I was there in 1977 and was blown away by what I saw. Her roles included Titania and Hippolyta in Robin Phillips’ beautiful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I have rarely seen her better played. Her Hippolyta had the sadness of a defeated queen and her Titania was not a fluttering fairy but a figure plagued by remorse. She resisted Oberon’s claims to the changeling child in her possession, remembering that his mother was a selector of her order, but that “as she was the mortal of that boy, she died… and for her sake I will not part with him.” separate”. With these lines, Maggie Smith hit straight to the heart.

I saw her again in 1978 as the sparkling Rosalind in As You Like It and as the black-haired Lady Macbeth with limitless ambition and limited imagination. As she discussed Duncan’s murder, she exclaimed, “A little water cleanses us of this act – how easy it is then,” relying with deadly short-sightedness on the word “simple.” It’s fair to say that it went beyond a slow production with two breaks. When I arrived at her house to interview her the morning after the first night, her husband, Beverley Cross, suggested I pick up the phone. “For what reason?” she asked darkly. “No one will probably ring the bell.”

But in 1980 she had another triumphant Stratford season. As Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing opposite Brian Bedford as Benedick, she hinted at a wounded heart behind a façade of mockery. She also had great success as Virginia Woolf in a one-woman play by Edna O’Brien. What struck her was the character’s mix of passion and insecurity; She skipped in delight as she and Leonard became the center of literary London, but also suggested Virginia’s gradual retreat into suicidal loneliness through the tightening of her body and the narrowing of her gestures.

I will remember many of Maggie Smith’s other performances, from her comically angular Myra in Coward’s Hay Fever to her radiantly confident Jean Brodie in the film adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel to her Lady Bracknell-like widow in Downton Abbey. But I will always remember that moving to Ontario allowed her to regain the clarity, honesty and emotional openness that were at the core of her best work.