A Forceful Character

“I’m always in costume and period things, wandering around in wigs, Merchant Ivory department,” Dame Maggie Smith says dryly. “If they want one of those snobbish English nasty people or whatever, I get into that bracket. It’s all right.”

To be sure, Smith is not to be confused with these snobbish English nasty people, but she does have a certain British reserve and a crisp, though not clipped, delivery. She doesn’t waste words, and the ones that do come out occasionally glimmer, as if all of those years declaiming Shakespeare, Shaw et al. onstage have rubbed off (she attributes these glimmerings to her devotion to the London Times crossword puzzle).

“It does look very black, stygian,” she says referring to the coffee she has been served, using a literary word that means “unremittingly dark and frightening, as hell is imagined to be.” That’s strong coffee. She asks for cream.

Smith’s verbal facility is on display in her newest film, Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” in which she plays Constance, Countess of Trentham, a tea-swilling, bridge-playing, drawing-room despot--a quintessentially Maggie Smith character. Constance’s put-downs in the film--of a visiting Hollywood producer, of a British actor celebrity, of pretty much anyone in her path--are the most memorable lines in the film.

Even before its nationwide release--it opens Wednesday in Los Angeles--the film is receiving critics awards for its director and a Golden Globe nomination last week for supporting actress for Smith, with talk of a likely Oscar nomination. “Gosford Park” follows the weekend activities of a group of English gentry (plus a couple of American guests) at a country manse during the 1930s and the parallel world of their maids, butlers, cooks and footmen. It’s “Upstairs, Downstairs” Altman-style, which means that conversations overlap, plot takes a back seat to character--a murder is committed, but who cares?--and there’s a huge, starry, talented cast: Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emily Watson.

Towering over them all, somehow, is Smith, although her character is no more important in the scheme of things than anyone else’s. Yet Altman’s restless camera dwells on her. How could it not?

“I think that’s very likely because she’s older than the others, and the countess would be deferred to in many ways,” says Smith, who is 66 and could easily be speaking about herself. Still rail-thin, she wears a simple pantsuit--no Merchant Ivory get-up--for a recent interview at a New York hotel. Her speaking voice retains that nervous, humming-bird quality familiar to generations of audiences.

Smith adds: “I think she [Constance] would automatically be the matriarchal creature around the place, rather more forceful than the other characters. Albeit she was reliant on Gambon’s character [he’s the owner of the Gosford Park estate] for money and things, but he was a sort of jumped-up nouveau riche person.

“She wasn’t interested in that. But I think that’s why she seemed dominant, because I think an elderly person usually is. Particularly if she’s an old bat like that one.”

Altman’s instructions to Smith about Constance were brief.

“The only thing I told Maggie when I started is that the truth doesn’t mean anything to her,” Altman says. “She’s very self-serving. There were certain things in the script, but a lot of it was improvisational. Again, I didn’t have a discussion with her about it. It just occurred. She fills up the room.”

Smith says she was delighted with Altman’s shooting style, which required that the actors act even if they were supposed to be in the background, because with everyone miked and three or four cameras roaming around, they never knew where they were in the shot. “It keeps you alive,” she says of this technique, “because it can get very, very boring on a set.”

This seems to pretty much sum up Smith’s attitude toward acting on film. She doesn’t come out and say she prefers theater to movies, but the stage is where she has spent the bulk of her career and where she has achieved the most success (despite two Oscars, as best actress for her eccentric teacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in 1969, and best supporting actress for her Oscar-losing actress in “California Suite,” in 1978).

Smith got her start on the English stage in the late 1950s and appeared in a sprinkling of films before settling in at the National Theatre, acting opposite--and holding her own against--such luminaries as Laurence Olivier. This was a period, the 1960s, when London was swinging, and the films that came out featured fresh mini-skirted ingenues such as Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave. Smith was not among them.

“I think it’s just a question of people not knowing quite what to do with you,” she says. “Ages and ages ago, I was under contract to a film company, and the guy who ran it said, ‘We don’t know what to put you in because we don’t know what you can do.’ And I said, ‘I’m in the theater, can you not come and see what I’m doing?’ And he said, ‘No, I can’t go to the theater because I get claustrophobia.’

“So I didn’t really do anything,” she continues. “I never got to the end of the contract because I was always working in the theater, so in the end it was paid off when I did ‘The V.I.P.s.’ [1963]. It’s not unusual. It’s quite recently that Judi Dench has been in films. It’s always amazed me that she [hadn’t been] in film.”

Smith says it’s easier to be typecast in film than in the theater, where the same person can play, say, the beleaguered Desdemona, as she did opposite Oliver in a 1965 production of “Othello” that was filmed (a movie she doesn’t particularly like), then turn around and portray Chekhov’s imperious Irina in “The Seagull” in repertory theater in Canada in the late ‘70s. Rather than follow this sensible course, it seems as if filmmakers picked up Smith’s eccentric, mannered style, which includes much waving of the hands and a fluting voice, and crudely took that style for her substance.

Thus the Maggie Smith character was born, the class-conscious snob appearing for the past 20 years in such period films as Merchant Ivory’s “A Room With a View,” “Washington Square” and “Tea With Mussolini.” And now, of course, “Gosford Park.”

“We wanted that,” Altman says unapologetically. “Most people do. Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, come on. You are who you are.”

However, this character is by no means the only one Smith has portrayed on film, only the one she’s most closely associated with and made her own. Notably, she was a bargain basement Lady Macbeth in “A Private Function,” a woebegone spinster in “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” a tight-lipped Mother Superior in the two “Sister Act” films, the grandmother in Spielberg’s “Hook,” and now, of course, Professor McGonagall, a head-mistressy wizard in “Harry Potter and Sorcerer’s Stone” (she’s a scold with a heart of gold).

Despite all the acclaim--in addition to the Oscars, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1990--Smith has remained relatively anonymous. People are always confusing her with somebody else. She says she autographs anything that’s thrust in front of her, no matter what is asked.

“I used to write ‘Glenda Jackson,’” she says. “It saves time, if that’s who they think you are.”

Clearly this is not someone who craves publicity. It has been said that her second husband, playwright Beverley Cross, who pursued her for years and even wrote an entrance line about her in one of his early plays--”She is about 25 and very beautiful. As elegant and sophisticated as a top international model. A great sense of fun. A marvelous girl”--used to run interference for her with the press and public (he died in 1998). He helped raise her two sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, both actors, whom she had by her first husband, actor Robert Stephens.

Smith rather reluctantly concludes that she might be more recognizable now that “Harry Potter” bestrides the globe. In fact, she’s shooting the second one right now, and she was measured by lasers so that she could be fashioned into a toy, a process she found “creepy,” as if her soul were being stolen. Somehow, however, despite all the technology, some things don’t change. Every role, even a Maggie Smith role, is something to be approached with trepidation.

“You’re only as good as the thing you did before,” Smith says after nearly 50 years in the business, as if received wisdom could possibly apply to her. “That’s what everybody says.”