December 16, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Celebrated British actress, Dame Maggie Smith, recovering from cancer treatment, turns 75
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, December 16, Graphic News:  To a whole generation of children, Maggie Smith will forever be Professor Minerva McGonagall, Head of Gryffindor House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, admired for her ability to transform herself into a cat and her enthusiastic support for the game of Quidditch. To the parents -- and grandparents -- of these same junior film fans, Dame Maggie, who counts fellow Dame, Judi Dench, among her closest friends, is equally fixed in the consciousness as the sorely-tested chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, in the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room With A View (1985), or the radical Edinburgh schoolmistress in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), for which Smith received her first Oscar. In a career that now spans more than half a century, her appeal is undiminished.
 
Yet, for the actress who started out at the Oxford Playhouse in the 1950s, played Desdemona to Olivier's Othello in the 60s and whose two sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, successfully followed in her footsteps, this last year has been one of the most challenging to date. She has described the effects of her treatment for breast cancer as "almost worse than the disease itself" and admits that, as well as leaving her physically frail, the process has robbed her of her confidence. She has, in recent months, expressed doubts about ever going on stage again, although she is determined to finish filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last of the seven phenomenally successful J. K. Rowling novels to transfer to the big screen.
 
Brought up in Oxford, where her father was a University pathologist, Margaret Natalie Smith left school at 16. Not for her the academic route, the prestigious drama school entree to the profession which many of her peers enjoyed; instead she learned about the theatre from immersing herself in it at the local Playhouse, acting in everything from farce to drama, and working her way up to assistant stage manager. Invited to join the fledgling National Theatre, set up with Olivier as artistic director in 1963, Smith is remembered with awe by actor Derek Jacobi, also beginning his career at that time. "Being onstage with someone like Maggie Smith, who thinks with the speed of lightning...is a lesson in itself," Jacobi recalls.
 
Smith herself acknowledges that she may be "quite good at playing spiky, elderly ladies" because they come naturally to her, being a person who, she confesses, does not tolerate fools. Many of her characters are class-obsessed -- Smith calls them her "gallery of Grotesques" -- such as the snobbish Constance, Countess of Trentham, in Gosford Park (2001), while other outstanding performances have depicted life at the opposite end of the social scale, as in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van, about a homeless woman who lived on the playwright's drive. "The boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is poised always", Bennett has said of her.
 
Smith was married to the late Robert Stephens -- the father of her sons -- for seven years, until their divorce in 1974. Her second marriage, to the playwright Beverley Cross, ended with his death 11 years ago. She freely admits to doting on her four young grandchildren, to whom she is known simply as "Granny Mog".
/ENDS