The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 130

At the Stratford Festival this week Maggie Smith, best known as a comic actress, gave her first performance as Lady Macbeth, the most challenging female role in the theatre. According to Ronald Bryden, who as a critic for the London Observer reviewed her first performances in British theatre 20 years ago, she now takes her place among the great classical actresses of theatrical history The Magnificence of Maggie Smith place. To her friends' amazement, after three years with the British National Theatre she decided it was SCARCELY ANYONE HERE KNOWS the superstition about the play" said Maggie Smith. "They can't understand why time to leave and had to have her arm twisted to stav another three mitive, or waiting about in the sun-Bette Davis was climbing the walls for more to do!) There was also the knowledge that, after two weeks' rehearsal with her Macbeth, Douglas Rain, she must leave the production while she flew to Hollywood for the filming of Neil Simon's California Suite. The wrench from Egypt to Ontario to Hollywood, from staee-work But last summer Robin Phillinss.

don and New York of Sherlock Holmes and Tom Stop-pard's Travesties. "So you see, it was quite a good period for acting in Oxford," she says, as if the com Stratford's astute, artistic director, we call it Aimez-vous Glamis!" She laughed. As so often on stage, she'd turned a rather lame verbal joke into a many-colored character one. Her laugh apologized for the desperation of the ioke itself. That's the kinH of dangled before her the role every actress has regarded as Everest; and sne couldn resist it.

Lady Macbeth was an offer she couldn't refuse. Although most critics agree that she's one of the Erreat rnmir nrtresses wit you're driven back on, it implied, when you find yourself snowbound in Stratford. Ontario, rehearsing in to filming and back to the staee pany somehow sunnlies her rreHen. early March for a theatre season again, the jogging through icy streets, swimming at Stratford's YWCA while her children were 4000 of history, in the line of Garrick's Peg WofEneton. Madame Vestris nnH tials.

It seems not to cross her mind that her contemporaries might use her name in the same way. One of them was a young man who Came to the Universitv frnm the nn. that wont open until June. Next there was the desneration of know. miles away at a boarding school in Edith Evans, she's always thought of her comic career ing tne joke was meaningless to most people around here.

usual background of a couple of as an accident. It wasn't what she intended years in tne Norwegian merchant navy. His name was Beverley Cross. Over the next 20 years, while he made a reputation as a playwright when, at 16, she How many young actors in the Stratford argued her re luctant parents into letting her go to a small company would know that in ana iiDrettist, their paths were to cross and recross. In 1961 she played the lead in his comedy Strip the Scotland the name Glamis wuiow.

inree years ago, when her theatre school in post- war Ox nrst mamace to the artnr Rnhorf rhymes with ford. After two Stephens ended in divorce, she and Brahms, or have years as an as heard of the ross were quietly married. A large, bearded, restful man. he rlearlv sistant stage manager at the knows all her moods and adores her Franchise Sagan novel on whose title she was Dunning? Oxford Plav in all of them. Her last Stratford Dlav this season is Haumrth.

nipro house and play-ine women's he's written about the Brontes, al They'd also parts in univer ready optioned lor Broadway. Which Bronte sister will she nlav? "It -t- miss the jokes main Doint-the doesn't work quite that way? she English stage explains, smiling secretively at CrOSS. "It's about them and theli- work. I do all the women." sity productions she wentto the Edinburgh Festival with a college revue, where she was spotted by a Broadway pro-ducer and grabbed for something called New Faces of superstition is that Macbeth, the play she was rehearsing, is unlucky, so fraught with doom that its name must EING A NEW BROADWAY FACE I of 1956 led to nothing but returning to London as a new JL-face of 1957. This was in an MAGGIE SMITH AS HEDDA (above) in the 1970 British National Theatre production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directed by Ingmar Bergmaa "It was directed rather like a film," she says.

There were chalk marks all over the floor and we were constantly moving into close-up." Opening night in London was disrupted by American playwright Tennessee Williams, who laughed uproariously at all the wrong moments. One of Maggie Smith's first roles with the National Theatre was as Avonia Bunn in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelamy qf the Wells (top nght). Her film roles include Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and Augusta in Tmwls with my Aunt (below) other undergraduate-stvle revue. never be spoken within earshot Share My Lettuce, in which she snared the limelight with Kenneth of a theatre. She had to single-hand of rssr burrev.

was winiams, the outrageous-choirboy comedian of the Cnrrv On filmo her own doing Thev became fast friends, and she says she learned from him most of what she knows about comic timing. i ne revue ran lor more than a vear. establishing her as one of the fun ediy bear the burden oi four centuries' fear of Shakespeare's blood-boltered tragedy, in addition to her own panic at facing the most testing role of her career: Lady Macbeth. The laugh also implied that the rigors of rehearsal in sncw-banked Stratford had been amplified for her by the culture shock of flying there more or less direct from several broiling weeks filming Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile in Egypt. had air-conditioned rahina on One revue led to another, and revues to zany comedies, but she still resents the criticisms that compare her with Gertrude Lawrence, and she dislikes talk about the revue skills she brings to straight comedy.

Comedy is one of her skills, one that has served her well, but she trained herself to be an actress, and that's how she thinks of herself. Her first stage role was Viola in a 1952 Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Twelfth Night. Ronald Eyre, who played Sir Toby Belch, is now one of London's leading directors. Malvolio was John Wood, the phenomenal star in Lon- niest women on tne British stage, but rather than get typed she signed on in 1959 for secondary roles at the She had brought this panic on herself. She hadn't intended to return to Stratford for a third season.

She was content with the two years she'd spent there. She's never believed in staying too long in one uia vie, which at the time was regarded as passing through lean years If alter the tat ones ot Kichard Kiirtnn John Neville and Claire Bloom. In fact, it was nursine- manv nf the the Queen of the Nile, but most of the time we were shooting on another old riverboat, much more pri- British stage's leading talents of toaay-jonn wood, Judi Dench and WEEKEND MAGAZINE, JUNK 10, IMS -18-.