Maggie Smith: Oscar favourite is a glorious antidote to the self-absorption of so many in her profession

From Miss Jean Brodie to the Lady in the Van, Smith excels at playing women who want to get their own way

Maggie Smith at The Lady In The Van photocall (Getty)

It is instructive to watch Dame Maggie Smith in her Oscar-winning performance as the headstrong teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). First spotted on her bicycle, Miss Brodie is well turned out in a bluestocking way with a long, Isadora Duncan-style scarf draped around her neck. She has a wonderfully refined Morningside accent, too, telling her class: “Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders. All my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

Forty-six years later and Smith, now 80, is being tipped for another Oscar for her performance in The Lady in the Van. She plays Miss Mary Shepherd, the cantankerous and incontinent old lady who lives in her van in the driveway of Alan Bennett’s Camden house. On the face of it, the two women have nothing whatsoever in common. The fragrant and attractive Miss Brodie believes in “goodness, truth and beauty”, but what she shares with the smelly Miss Shepherd (and many other characters Smith has played over the years) is a headstrong and obstinate quality. Smith excels at playing women who want to get their own way.

Smith was made a dame back in 1990 and has long since assumed national treasure status – but there is nothing remotely cuddly about her. She has very sharp edges. She is also enigmatic and strangely reticent. She is reluctant to talk about her private life to interviewers or to agonise in public about the challenges of playing a particular role. “I watch all those actresses banging on about themselves and their traumas on television, and I’m always amazed at the way they can keep talking without getting overcome by the boredom and pointlessness of it all,” she told one journalist.

Maggie Smith in 1963 (Getty)

Not that such wariness should be considered as evidence that she takes a casual approach to her craft. Those who’ve worked with her on stage and screen testify to her painstaking approach – the forensic detail in which she studies the text of a play or movie and her drive always to improve a performance, even if it is the end of a run and she has played the part many times before.

In his biography of her, Michael Coveney writes that she “behaves at all times as if she has no power or status whatsoever”. That is surprising given the hauteur she projects so effortlessly when playing Lady Bracknell types in Gosford Park or Downton Abbey.

Her tendency toward self-effacement isn’t new. Back in the mid-1960s, when she was still in her twenties, she was throwing journalists off the scent by telling them: “I’m a pinhead who’s all eyes and teeth… I’m dull, uninteresting, shy, ordinary. No scalding sex life, no scandal, no punch-ups.”

For a while, Smith and her first husband, the actor Robert Stephens, were a celebrity couple of sorts – a slightly less showy version of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. But when their marriage broke up in the mid-1970s as her career overtook his and his hell-raising grew out of hand, she kept her counsel.

The producer Graham Broadbent, who worked with her on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2014), talks of the down-to-earth qualities that still persist today.

“She knows her own mind. A lot of people are very nervous around her and I think that probably frustrates her in a way because they don’t communicate very well with her,” Broadbent says. “We all found her – the crew as well – brilliant and kind. I mean that earnestly and wholeheartedly. The danger of this is it sounds a bit wanky, but I really mean it.”

Perhaps because of her reticence, Smith has never been typecast. She is a virtuoso comedian but one equally adept at playing very dark roles. She was very good in light comedy (for example, in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever or in revue), but also excelled in Shakespeare, Strindberg and Ibsen or in playing Virginia Woolf. She could tackle classical roles with aplomb but had also spent a lot of time in the late 1950s in revue with future Carry On legend Kenneth Williams – perhaps one reason why she is good at pulling funny faces and putting on voices.

Smith comes from a conventional enough middle-class background. She was born Margaret Natalie Smith on 28 December 1934 in Romford. Her father Nathaniel was a pathologist who worked at Oxford University. She started acting at Oxford High School for Girls and, in the early 1950s, attended Oxford Playhouse Drama School.

“Oh, you can’t let her, not with that face,” her grandmother is said to have remarked to her mother when the youthful Maggie first expressed a desire to go on stage. Smith was red-haired, wore braces as a kid and had a lot of freckles. In 1959, she joined the Old Vic Company. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, she was one of the mainstays at the National Theatre. Her roles included Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s Othello and Hedda Gabler in a production directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Sketch by Lauren Crow (Lauren Crow)

In the 1960s, she signed a seven-year contract with a film company but, the Daily Express reported, once received a message from the studio publicity department telling her: “Your fan mail total for the month of February is nil.” The fans might have ignored her early on but the critics (the men in particular) adored her. They warmed to her nervous energy, humour and vulnerability.

Read the old cuttings and you can’t help but be struck by their effusive reaction to almost everything she did. Smith was “bright, a chemical explosion, a star” according to one critic, “funny, pretty, ambitious and wound up like a spring” in the words of another, who liked her so much on stage that he asked her out for lunch.

Like Judi Dench, her fellow lady in lavender with whom she has appeared in several films, Smith has been enjoying an extraordinary Indian summer. Her popularity extends way beyond Britain. European distributors speak in awe of the box-office boost that she can give their films. Younger viewers who’ve never heard of Jean Brodie still recognise her instantly thanks to her performances as Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. Downton Abbey further cemented her appeal (although fans were dismayed recently to hear that she wouldn’t countenance appearing in a feature film spin-off from the series.)

The role in the The Lady in the Van can’t have been easy to play for an actress in her eighties. Smith is portraying an old woman hardened by homelessness, not a pampered aristocrat. Her preparation for the role (which she had already played on stage) was as meticulous as ever. The director Nicholas Hytner has talked of the way she strove not to be “too demonstrative on screen”. After all, this was film, not theatre.

Christine Langan, head of BBC Films (which backed The Lady in the Van), points to the moments in the film that are unspoken, “when she is not saying anything, when she is on her own”. It is here we see her true measure as an actress: what Langan calls her “quiet power”.

Smith can deliver punchlines and perform pantomime-style comedy with the best of them, but she is never satisfied with only a surface portrayal. Just as when she was playing Jean Brodie all those years ago, she still wants to get to the heart of her characters – even if they do happen to be old battleaxes like Miss Shepherd.

A life in brief

Born 28 December 1934, Iford, Essex.

Family Father a pathologist, formerly of Oxford University; mother a secretary.

Education Oxford High School, then studied acting at the Oxford Playhouse.

Career Oscar-winner in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and California Suite (1978). Four-time Bafta winner, and five-time Evening Standard Awards best actress. Appeared in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey.