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Grande Dame

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It's been that way for years; she may plead innocence, but she remains the Lucky Luciano of scene-stealers. Hold a private Maggie Smith Film Festival and you'll wonder whether writers--even William Shakespeare--always had her in mind when they stuffed certain lines with ammonium nitrate. In the 1995 version of Richard III, she howls at Ian McKellen, stretching the epithet "You toad!" into about 11 syllables. During a scarlet harangue in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for which she won the 1969 Best Actress Oscar, she stuns Celia Johnson with verbal spitballs like "fetid frustration" and "slllime." "When you write a normal screenplay and the lines come out of Maggie Smith's mouth, processed through her brain, the lines themselves are just underscored," says Altman. Barely a film goes by in which her character doesn't lacerate somebody with language.

"Yes, it's true," she says, sighing. "I'm always playing this sort of formidable woman, I suppose. It is funny, how you get sort of stuck with that. It's a bit boring."

Boring, no. Intimidating, yes--especially when you're sharing tea and lemon with her, and the room is hot. In person, though, there is something remarkably vulnerable about Maggie Smith. In 1988 she came down with Graves' disease, the hyperthyroid condition that causes a person's eyes to ache, swell, and protrude. "It was horrible, because this is the most important part of your face, as an actor," she says, her hands hovering in front of her blue orbs. "If ever my eyes feel sore, I panic dreadfully."

There are other things that make her shudder. She recalls a TV interview to promote 1987's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne--in which she played a Dublin spinster grappling with booze, poverty, and romantic delusions--and the memory seems to salt an old wound. "Oh, God, I remember doing an awful thing with, is he called Tremble?" From one of the morning shows.

Bryant Gumbel? "Yeah," she says. Her hands go to her temples again; she shuts her eyes. "I was in a studio here, and he was talking to me from New York, and he said...oh, it was just, I get all hot thinking about it again...he said something like, 'Who do you think wants to watch this depressing film?' It was so awful, I can't say. It was terrible." If she sees Gumbel's face now, she switches off the TV. "Because he makes my nerves so bad," she says. "It all comes back to me. The horror. The horror and the humiliation."

She's often described as reclusive; she doesn't take issue with that. "I probably am," she says. "But that's all right. I mean, the opposite is what? Whirling around and going to all these things?" It's telling that the first time she went to the Oscars, in 1978, she didn't go as Maggie Smith; she went as Diana Barrie, the Oscar-losing diva in California Suite, so that director Herbert Ross could shoot real red-carpet scenes for the movie. She did go again the year after--and won Best Supporting Actress for California Suite--but she can recall only a blur. "I was there for a good evening, but it didn't happen. Well, it did. But I mean, I didn't get to sit there very long," she says. "You're kind of whirled away into total hysteria."

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