Maggie Smith a Portrait | part 1

she has a kind of mercurial quality that is absolutely unique it's to do with her absolutely extraordinary mind mind is not a quality that many people associate with actors but the truth of matters it's all about thinking I don't think there is another actor on earth who can make you see what she's talking about maybe Smith comes from a very ordinary background she was born in Ilford in Essex when war broke out in 1939 her father was posted to Oxford she had a very encouraging teacher at absurd high school for girls and she found her way into the theater and of course in Oxford she fell in with the Playhouse crowd and the students and that's where she started working in Review with people like Ned Sharon and the professional actors at the Playhouse you in fact made your your name really as a review artist didn't you yes Tony yeah did you enjoy doing review well it's a mixture really I didn't really want to do it it was just one of those things that happened yes I was at Oxford I lived in Oxford and I went to a drama school that started there and I did so many things you know round universities their unit you know if you were going ever enough and I suppose quick enough you could almost do a weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different business a different time right hmm what what Maggie Smith fell into was this culture of review in the theatre which is sort of disappeared now short black out sketches written by writers like Peter Cook who went on to do Beyond the Fringe at that time there was a radical Bamber Gascoigne who who wrote a review will share my lettuce and there were lots of performers who were who are masters of this art one today would still be Sheila Hancock who is still a very flourishing actress like Meggie herself and many of our playwrights wrote them I mean Harold Pinter first wrote review sketches and short radio plays and so a lot of our playwriting and our Model T that comes out of that tradition just before she did private lives on Western stage in the early seventies she shot these two films for the BBC one was The Merchant of Venice one was the millionairess by George Bernard Shaw what find out here her Porsches counterfeit it's a it's a rather comforting old-fashioned production but for some wonderful actors in it and Charles gray as Antonio I seem to remember and there's a very good supporting cast right the way through it's a sort of classic television production by Cedric Messina and of course she's whiplash fast as Portia and she rattled so it's a great pace and she's very ferocious in the in the courtroom scene you were painted with the difference that Holmes is present question what I am informed through Lee of the course which is the merchant here in which the jewel Antonio and old both stand for is your name Sherlock is my name of a strange nature is the suit you follow yet in such rule the venetian code cannot impugn you as you do proceed millionairess had been a big success for Peter Sellers Sofia Wren but it strayed quite wildly from the play and it's a it's a beautiful play and as Nancy banged Smith the garden television critic self knew what was wrong with having Maggie Smith singing Shore for 90 minutes she played if epithelium a very rich woman who but who had had a condition for husband had to turn 150 pounds I think into several hundred thousand pounds it's a fairly enjoyable a performance she looks ravishing in it beautifully costumed as she always is and beautifully cruft and she's very funny you deny that you assaulted of course I denied anything more monstrous I have never heard what happened was he insulted my father grossly it was most unperfect at a moment when I had every reason to expect the utmost tenderness from him this is not at all what we were led to expect I thought we were going to see the Arno the signora distinctly wrote South rooms with a few and close together instead of which is giving his North rooms without reveal and a long way apart I first met Maggie Smith when I when I acted with her in a room with a view that was really the first time I ever met her and of course our first meeting was blighted by my admiration for her I blurted out various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew she doesn't like that sort of thing very much to party mr. Beebe what is happening to your neighbours Oh alas they're they're there they're moving out old UNS too Emerson's rheumatism has come on hundred George's thinks it's too far that mr. Hamilton's taking refuge from the movers inside might I impose on your kindness and wait here for mrs. Honeychurch my only enzyme I think Maggie was very wary of me at first on a room with a view I think she just thought I was a very loud noisy bull in a china shop kind of a person and I don't think she warmed to me at all until we started to act together and then she found that she enjoyed that and suddenly it all melted away and I think we got on very well then there's always a problem with with great actors and it doesn't matter who they are there's always a problem about manner mannerisms really a lot of people thought Olivier was a very mannered actor a lot of people today think Ian McKellen is a very mannered actor and to a certain extent they are they are who they are and their mannerisms as people and as actors come with them one of the things about Maggie Smith is she has this sort of self generated motor of gesture expression she doesn't work on it it just sort of happens naturally it's really why she doesn't like talking very much about acting she never wanted to talk about acting acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did it would disappear and then she told me what story about Laurence Olivier out of which he doesn't come to well which is that they were doing the recruit officer together and he'd said to her after been over some months the Ronnie's at their package so billet what you do that like that laughs you get it so marvelous how do you do it how do you do it what is it that you do how do you do it how do you you are not something about this and eventually she told him and she said and of course I could never do it again ever which is exactly what he wanted but but but but you know um and so I I respect that perfectly well why not I mean she does something utterly extraordinary but I don't think she necessarily understands it which makes it a little alarming for her she has a pretty good idea of what she's trying to do but why it works how it works mysterious areas well it's it didn't strike me as very difficult the awful thing is I don't know quite how to explain it is but things get more and more difficult as you go on but when you start in the theater and I suppose really when you start with anything you have a kind of extraordinary conceit it doesn't really enter your mind that it is going to be as difficult as it is it's the more you do the more you realize that about my profession anyway that it isn't extremely difficult in the late 80s she did she played her first American heroine really it was her first American heroine mrs. Venable in suddenly last summer by Tennessee Williams it was directed by Richard Eyre famously this role was played by Katharine Hepburn another I mean if there's two iconic actresses in whose trail Maggie Smith operates it would you'd have to say Edith Evans and Katharine Hepburn I guess I've seen everything that maggie has done for the last 40 years she's just simply a great actress it was Natasha Richardson's idea she was then married to producer Robert Fox and Robert approached me and asked me if I would direct it I was running the National Theater and I had a brief period probably two months holiday had accumulated we shot the film in the same on the same soundstage completely coincidentally as the mankiewicz film which had been shot the one with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift which had been shot 20-30 years before which they shot I remember because we were infuriated to discover that it was the same stage and they'd shot over a period of about 12 weeks and we had 11 days Maggie wasn't terribly well so a lot of the time she was quite tired and it was it was very very grueling we rehearsed and think for two weeks or three weeks because and I rehearse with thee with Andrew Dan who was the the director of photography and and in the latter stage is also with the grips and the lighting a technician or the gaffer and the seulement because of having to shoot such a lot every day so we had to plan the whole thing but choreograph the whole shoot in the studio oh we were famous couple people didn't speak Sebastian and his mother this is pen avoid her son with a Sebastian and viola viola and Sebastian are staying at the Lido there are the Ritz in Paris Sebastian and violet violet miss Bastian have taken a house with a season of periods something I would hope had hoped for she gave a probably more eloquently than than I'd anticipated which was that in the middle of this absolutely monstrous woman whose behavior was unforgivably vicious and mean you see a kind of vulnerability you see a sort of sadness you see a kind of heartache for you know the absence of love in her life and somehow she there are two or three moments where she absolutely takes your breath away and is astonishingly and unexpectedly moving name it that if you like I don't care they're just two things to remember she's a destroyer my son with the Creator I had my honesty as shocked you pick up your little black bag and run away out of this garden without the subsidy in it nobody's heard our conversation but you and I don't shoot miss Venable up what what is it miss mob she is I would think probably intellectually that thus that the smartest actress I've ever worked with you just you have to get up very very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith she's very very well-read she's highly articulate and she is she can be completely enchanting and she can equally be and sometimes quite unexpectedly be quite savage there's a lot of talk about the word difficult when it comes to magazine is she's difficult because she is certainly temperamental and she is the sort of virtuozzo artist I mean

Channel: theresa-cullen

Views: 631,656

Keywords: maggie, smith, hollywood actor, director

Id: Fz0F6lDwj-s

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2011