Nicholas Hytner: ‘Maggie Smith was probably the wittiest actress who ever lived’

The director remembers the late Maggie Smith’s formidable ability to convey multiple aspects of the human condition, often in the same role

In 1993, Nicholas Hytner directed Maggie Smith for the first time. It was for a West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest in which, of course, she played Lady Bracknell. I wondered if Hytner found her as intimidating as the Wildean aristocrat.
“Oh yes, she could be very intimidating,” he recalls, “and you could get nothing past her. She was always three steps ahead of you, but that is what made her so exhilarating to work with.”
Hytner’s most famous collaboration with the actress, who died at the age of 89 today, was The Lady in the Van. This 1999 masterpiece (staged in the West End) by Alan Bennett detailed the playwright’s oddly touching relationship with Miss Shepherd (played by Smith), an elderly woman who parked her dilapidated van in his Camden driveway and promptly decided to stay. “Of course she was hilarious,” says Hytner who directed the subsequent film version, too. “She was probably the wittiest actress who ever lived, but she had limitless emotional range. She could take you from acerbic wit to the furthest reaches of the human heart – funny one moment and then suddenly the loneliest creature whoever existed.
“The reason that performance touched so many people was that it was an extreme version of something universal to the human condition – to an extreme degree Miss Shepherd lived with the knowledge that her life could have been different and better. Maggie could take you there without doing anything – her eyes would fill with fear and loneliness, and then in a split second she would be cutting her down to size.”
Hytner recalls first seeing Smith when he was in his teens – in Olivier’s famous (and now controversial) production of Othello in which she played Desdemona, and alongside her then-husband Robert Stephens in Private Lives. The thing that mesmerised him, he tells me, was her extraordinary range.
When he launched the Bridge Theatre at London’s Bankside, Smith soon followed, taking on a daunting monologue – at the age of 84 – called A German Life, directed by Jonathan Kent. Here, she played one of Goebbels’s secretaries, incurious to the mounting atrocities. 
“Someone described that performance to me as experimentally naturalistic,” says Hytner. “She appeared not to be acting. It was a massive jolt for those who went to see the Maggie who could make you laugh. But with the flick of a single word, she showed you how she gradually became acquainted with evil and was determined to lie to herself. It was the most remarkable thing to watch.”
Hytner also pinpoints something in that performance that was peculiar to Smith’s acting. “Not for a second did she appeal to the audience to love her, and the audience were so confident that they weren’t being asked to love her, that they loved her anyway.”
“Maggie never sugar-coated her unsentimental view of human nature, so audiences trusted her because they knew they weren’t being messed about.”
Hytner got to know Smith well, and tells me they often attended classical concerts and the ballet together. “She always responded brilliantly to the dancers, the toughness of their world,” he says.
I ask Hytner why Dame Maggie Smith matters, and he pauses for a moment. “The performing arts matter, and the greatest performing artists, the ones so in command of what they are doing, are so naturally skilled and so honest that they make life bearable, and understandable.
“Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry. Of course, we never saw them. But Maggie is definitely in that line.”
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