“She found life incredibly funny and unbearably painful”: Nicholas Hytner remembers Maggie Smith | Maggie Smith

MAggie Smith didn’t seem to care about being loved in her performances, but she was as adored as an actress can be. The two things were connected; Anyone who watched her knew that behind her ruthless wit and her ability to shed light on the most terrible depths of human existence in an instant there was an unwavering honesty.

She found life incredibly fun and unbearably painful. Her company was intoxicating – she was even smarter and funnier than her legions of fans had imagined. But since the death of her husband Beverley in 1998, she has often been lonely, and the fun was a way of laughing at the inevitable misery that attracts people to great actors. It bears witness to the tragedy of life and at the same time offers a way out of it.

She was several steps ahead of everyone else and many times smarter. She was never as good as she wanted to be, and when she was, she created her own obstacles. Her last appearance on stage at the Bridge Theater was at the age of 85 as the 102-year-old Brunhilde Pomsel in Christopher Hampton’s “A German Life” – a monologue in which one of Goebbels’ secretaries lied about her life for 100 minutes.

Her character laughed gleefully about her youth, showered the Nazis with withering contempt, and complained about the injustice done to her; Left unsaid was the creeping certainty that this woman knew she had done evil. Maggie herself was determined to remind her audience – and reassure herself – that she had acted alongside Olivier, played Hedda Gabler for Ingmar Bergman, and made films with John Ford, George Cukor and Joe Mankiewicz. She learned the whole thing in advance. To be honest, it was a triumph from the first moment.

She was in the rehearsal room for a day, she had a director she trusted (Jonathan Kent), and it must have felt too easy. She became ill and was hospitalized for almost two weeks. Maybe she was really sick; maybe she convinced herself she was. But she barely gave herself time to rehearse. When she came back she had made it almost impossible to move on and she was happy. Her performance was as radically naturalistic as anything I’ve ever seen, although her timing was still as precise as if she had been playing Wilde.

In recent years we often went to the ballet together. Sometimes she walked alone and stood in the director’s corner. She admired the young dancers for their talent, their grace and (perhaps most of all) their uncompromising and self-sacrificing devotion to their art. She must have seen herself in them, and it was always possible to see the young Maggie in her, the enchanting revue artist who, through her unparalleled talents and passionate devotion to her craft, became a great, great actress – greater than she would have ever believed Sei.