Maggie Smith, the veteran star of stage and screen, has said she would not have succeeded in the entertainment industry had she been starting her career today. Speaking at a joint conversation with Judi Dench at the Tricycle theatre in London, Smith said: “I think they are so brave, the young actresses of today. They seem to have to strip off every second. I can’t imagine how they cope with it today, I really don’t. They are required to do the most extraordinary things.”
Smith made her professional debut at 17, playing Viola in Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse. Now 82, she continued: “If I was asked to start now, I just don’t think I could, seriously. It’s difficult to imagine myself at that age because girls are starting even younger than I was [when I started]. I think it’s very, very, very hard now.”
Smith and Dench worked together most recently in the two Best Marigold Hotel movies, as well as in acclaimed Merchant Ivory drama A Room With a View (1985) and in Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender (2004). They also shared the stage in 2002 for David Hare’s The Breath of Life.
Smith said that her formidable on-set reputation is largely borne out of persistent nerves. “The awful thing is, I’m very aware when I’m being difficult, but I’m usually so scared. And that’s shaming, at the age one is.
“Because every time I start anything, I think, ‘This time I’m going to be like Jude [Dench], and it will all be lovely, it will be merry and bright, the Quaker will come out in me.’ But it never works. Jude has a wonderful calm, it’s very enviable. I think it would be hairy if she let fly, but I’ve never seen that.”
A six-time Oscar nominee, Smith was given a Bafta fellowship in 1996 and won considerable acclaim for her screen reprise of her Olivier-awarding winning turn in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van in 2014. Thursday’s event in London was hosted by Jim Carter, her Downton Abbey co-star, with whom she seems increasingly likely to star with in a film spin-off.
Smith said that having acquired notoriety as an actor who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, she would now only “frighten” co-workers were she nicer. “It’s gone too far now to take back,” she said. “If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work – it would frighten people more if I were nice. They’d be paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to.
“But perhaps I should try it … ‘Hello! What fun! We’re going to be here all day! And then filming all night too! Goodie! And it’s so lovely and cold!’”
Dench, who is also 82, will next be seen playing Queen Victoria for the second time, in Stephen Frears’s Oscar-tipped drama about the monarch’s friendship with Abdul Karim, a young Indian attendant.
