Effortless skill, mixed salads and a certain impatience with life: Michael Palin remembers Maggie Smith
To work with Maggie Smith, as I did in The Missionary and A Private Function, was to be in the presence of pure acting gold. Maggie was so skilful and intuitive. She could portray the maximum of emotion with the minimum of effort. Nothing was ever wasted with Maggie.
The slightest glance could contain so much information, the smallest gesture be loaded with such significance that you had to be absolutely on your toes to stay with her. The two films we made together were comedies, and Maggie’s impeccable comic timing was an absolute joy to watch and a privilege to be part of.
Her wit was sharp and always icily well-targeted. I remember having a meal with her and Alan Bennett at a rather smart Yorkshire restaurant during the filming of A Private Function, when I discovered a piece of glass in my mixed salad. No great fuss was made. To the manager, Maggie simply described it as “a very mixed salad”.
Maggie made it look so easy and yet I always felt that there was something else there. Something held back. An impatience with life. To be blessed with such an instinctive, effortless understanding of what acting was all about made her dismissive of anything she saw as dull and uninspired. She didn’t suffer fools.
She always maintained that the part of the process she liked most was the rehearsal. The working out of how to make the whole thing the best it could be. Once you’d got that right, then the rest of it was easy and, as she intimated, rather less fun.
I rate our work together as some of the happiest times of my life. I shall mourn her passing most sadly, but remember her most gladly.
