Two Of Maggie Smith’s Best Performances Came In Underseen Classics

Like most people without easy access to the West End and Broadway, I did not get the full measure of Dame Maggie Smith’s genius as a performer. This is true of many great actors who found their way to film and television from the boards, and it is why I am often reluctant to enter arguments over or make lists ranking the greatest actors of all time. Theatrical performance requires a flexing of radically different muscles; you must fill the space, or recede from it, or mingle harmoniously within it without the emotive aid of close-ups and cutting. And you must play each role every night for weeks upon weeks (upon weeks should the show become a hit) while remaining in moments that cannot be manufactured – because an astute audience (and they’d better be good and goddamn astute given what they’re paying to see a show in either of the aforementioned locales) knows when you’re faking it. You may pretend, but you cannot lie.

So I wince when I see lists of “greatest living actors” that routinely elide Cherry Jones, whose Tony Award-winning performances in the 1995 Broadway revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s “The Heiress” and the 2005 original Broadway run of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” are the stuff of theatrical legend. I was fortunate enough to see Jones in a 2000 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” and “life-altering” is not an overstatement. Show most people a photo of Jones, and, through no fault of their own, they’ll likely identify her as the president on Fox’s “24.”

And I cringe just a little when I exclaim that Maggie Smith was one of the greatest actors of her generation because I’m going on two magnificent lead performances in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “Travels with My Aunt,” a slew of supporting turns in movies over the last 60-plus years and what little I watched of her on “Downton Abbey” (I tapped out early on because I think Julian Fellowes is a lousy writer who traffics in the shallowest kind of anglophilia). If I’m being honest with myself, I’m factoring in a lot of work I’ve never seen to place her in the same league as Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson.

Certainly, Smith, who just passed away at the age of 89, was one of the best to ever do it. But she was so prolific and so open to playing aged matrons in films that often weren’t deserving of her presence that it can feel daunting trying to separate out the wheat. You’ll likely be reading a good deal about her most frequently lauded work, so what I’d like to do is single out a couple of underseen performances where Smith either finds grace notes that aren’t there in the writing, or locates with volcanic unsubtly a read on a well-known character we’ve never seen before.

This isn’t simply Smith at her best, but the actor at her most brilliantly resourceful. They’re portrayals where she brings you into the moment with her, and reminds you what a bright, shining mind and a boundless imagination can do with seemingly stale characters. It’s here and in the hastily re-staged-for-television renditions of West End productions from the 1960s and ’70s (some of which are streamable, if only via beat-up, nth-generation videotape transfers via YouTube), that we get that vibrant measure of Smith only a small number of theatergoers got to see live.

In Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel, 10-year-old Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly), who’s recently lost her parents in an earthquake, is sent to live with her guardian/uncle Lord Archibald Craven. The spoiled, emotionally remote child may not care a whit about a loving reception (as she confesses to us in the opening voiceover, “I didn’t know how to cry”), and she’s not wild about being palmed off on Mrs. Medlock, the severe housekeeper who is every bit Mary’s equal in the coldness department. She wants to keep the child imprisoned in her own room located within Craven’s sprawling mansion. She is never to leave without Medlock’s supervision, and if she wants to take up the matter with Craven, she’s out of luck: he’s never around.

The entire estate is haunted by the tragic death of Craven’s young wife Lilias, and the sickly condition of their only child Colin (Heydon Prowse). Medlock complains of being busy, but it often feels like her only job is to keep two kids well fed and thoroughly miserable. Why is she so deeply unpleasant?

To nail the sense of spiritual and physical liberation the children feel by sneaking out of the mansion and re-growing Lilias’ long-withered garden, Holland and “Edward Scissorhands” writer Caroline Thompson make Medlock out to be a hissable old maid. Smith could’ve responded with stock kid-lit villainy, but she lets us sense the sadness coursing through Medlock’s frigid veins. This was once a thriving estate filled with love (as symbolized by the garden), and the grief has hit her the hardest because she’s the one left to tend to a master-less house. Everyone in this story has been abandoned in one way or another. When Smith realizes the magnitude of her imprisoning misdeeds, her breakdown isn’t satisfying. She suffers, too — and now, with the garden flowering again, she suffers most of all.

Shakespeare’s greatest monster has never been more frightening than in this Richard Loncraine-directed rendition set in a 1930s England that looks not at all suspiciously like 1930s Germany. As Richard of Gloucester, the youngest brother of the newly crowned Edward York, Ian McKellen is a hunchbacked vision of sneering, unabashed fascism. He is vile in self-satisfied ways that, sadly, are not at all unimaginable for a whole new generation that missed out on World War II. And he will stop at nothing to seize the throne out from under Edward; he drugs his brother’s wife and kills the man’s children to ensure that the line of succession can lead only to him.

This piques the ire of the Duchess of York (Smith), Richard and Edward’s mother. What little motherly affection she might’ve still harbored for the former curdles into black-hearted hatred when he has the young princes murdered. It’s here that Smith harnesses some of Shakespeare’s most eloquently composed invective with a fury I’ve never seen summoned by any of the numerous greats who’ve played this part.

Richard tries to parry his mother’s insults with insouciance, and in many productions of “Richard III” you don’t buy that this reptile is at all shaken by the Duchess’ opprobrium. This is not the case here. “You came on Earth to make the Earth my hell” gashes Richard, and she finishes him off with the closer of all closers: “Shame serves your life and will your death attend.” This isn’t just family bickering. This is a woman who realizes she’s mothered Satan incarnate, and in Smith’s rant we hear all the notes: rage, disbelief, madness, vengeance, and heartbreak. It’s a symphony in four movements in a little over one minute. God, what Maggie Smith could do, and god dammit that so much of the best of it was shared with so few! The theater, folks. There is no substitute.