Latest Site Notices

ruperts_babe · #1 (**permalink**) 04-18-2004, 11:48 AM

[img]http://www.snitchseeker.com/images/news/mcgonagall_grades_80.jpg' align='middle'> Maggie Smith heads to NZ -

Summary:
Maggie Smitch is heading to NZ for her theatre performances

Article:

Thanks to Wizardnews

Quote:

The grand dame of British theatre, Maggie Smith, is heading to Wellington for a season that was acclaimed in Sydney last month as one of the greatest performances the city has seen. Joyce Morgan meets the formidable stage and screen actress.

Dame Maggie Smith has to go shopping. She didn't pack many clothes and what she brought is all wrong.

"Wherever you go, you are not wearing what the people wear . . . I never get it right. Like I haven't got the uniform," Smith says.

It's a curious comment, suggesting someone who feels she simply doesn't fit no matter how much the world tells her that she's in a class of her own. Smith rests her head on her angular wrist and admits she's feeling deranged. A head cold and jetlag haven't helped.

The dark interior life of a provincial vicar's wife is occupying her as she makes her much-awaited New Zealand debut in Alan Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils, one of his Talking Heads monologues. (The show opens at Wellington's St James Theatre on May 19.) She played the role to great acclaim initially on TV in 1989 and on stage in 1996. In Australia last month her performance was described in national papers as simply "magnificent". "Performing an intimate monologue in a big venue, she exceeds all expectation - and the expectation has been running high for weeks," wrote John McCallum in The Australian. "This is one of the greatest performances seen in Sydney for a long time."

As Susan, she is a woman let down by life and God. Her secret fondness for altar wine and a young Indian grocer with good legs and teeth relieves the tedium of days among sanctimonious parish matrons where flower arranging ranks as a competitive sport.

"One sees them so often in England, those women," she says. "You know them automatically."

They may be a peculiarly British breed, but will Smith have to make any changes to Bennett's idiomatic script for an audience unfamiliar with such peculiarly British terms as off-licences rather than bottle shops?

"Bottleshops . . ." she says. She lingers over the word as if trying it on for size and asks for a piece of paper. I tear a sheet from my notebook.

"What else?" she asks. She writes down a few more Antipodean sayings.

Smith is known for her attention to detail. She pores over every word of her script, according to her biographer Michael Coveney. He has described how she "works on the line, on the word, and she does so with brutal, scientific precision and persistence".

Not that Smith, 69, will be drawn. She is a reluctant interviewee, ill at ease discussing herself or her work. She once summarised her life: "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one's still acting".

In a white knitted top and navy stretch pants, with a discreet diamond necklace and earrings, she is a more reserved presence than the formidable, flamboyant and arch characters she has portrayed over four decades, such as in the title role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, and Harry Potter's Professor of Transfiguration Minerva McGonagall.

She is shorter than her dominating stage and screen presence suggests. The woman I saw tower on the London stage in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women a decade ago is of average height, certainly nowhere near the giant I am expecting.

Smith never considered being anything other than an actress, despite disapproval from her Oxford school and her grandmother, who told her she could not go into acting "with a face like that".

"She thought I looked so dreadful," says Smith. "And she's quite right. The awful thing is I now look like her."

She similarly downplays her presence in the Harry Potter films that have made her a popular figure with a generation of young filmgoers.

"I don't have much to do . . . I appear from time to time and tell the students to go to their dormitories," she says.

The film schedule meant she had to pull out of what had been planned as her Australian debut in 2002 in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van for the Sydney Festival, a role she had played to acclaim in London. She played Miss Shepherd, based on the eccentric who lived in a van parked beside Bennett's London house for 15 years from where she issued a stream of pamphlets, odours and the occasional flying turd.

"I used her (walking) stick," Smith says. She still has it.

"It has flecks of yellow paint on it from where she had painted the van yellow. She must have been left-handed because it is worn down on the left-hand side."

Clearly Smith has scrutinised the stick with the detail she applies to examining scripts. Smith did not know Miss Shepherd, but people who did commented on how well she had captured her. Again she plays down her own role. "It's a lot to Alan's credit that he had written so accurately," she says.

Bennett has said of her that "the boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is always poised". "That's nice," she says. "Because that's what I think a lot of it is about."

Then as swiftly and commandingly as she might order a Hogwarts pupil to the dormitory, she changes the subject. To the weather, that great British standby. "How long does it stay like this? It's magic."

Although Smith's performances regularly leave the critics spellbound, she wonders what roles there are for mature women. Playwright Peter Shaffer wrote the role of flamboyant tour guide Lettice Douffett in Lettice and Lovage, for which she won a Tony Award.

"The fellows go on to do King Lear and we're left stranded . . . you suddenly end up playing the grotesques, that's the boring thing. Suddenly you're Mrs Malaprop and Lady Wishfort."

Aside from her Harry Potter "pension scheme" as she calls it, she is not sure what lies ahead. She might be the grand dame of British theatre, yet she shares the fears of all actors.

"After they finish a job, they think that's the last they'll ever do. It's a universal fear for an actor. It's one of those professions. Hit and miss . . . But something might turn up," she says.