None of those Restoration productions was ever committed to film, but Stuart Burge's unadorned 1965 movie of the famous "Othello" in which John Dexter directed her and Laurence Olivier during her first season provides a glimpse of what it must have been like to watch Smith at the National Theatre. She's the only Desdemona I've ever seen who could possibly hold the stage opposite Olivier's Othello. She finds the hushed power in Desdemona's sweetness and eroticism and lifts the role out of the supporting category of other Shakespearean tragic heroines like Ophelia and Cordelia. Here is the English theater critic Kenneth Tynan's assessment of her Desdemona's response when Othello publicly slaps her across the face: "Her reaction ... is not the usual collapse into sobs; it is one of deep shame and embarrassment, for Othello's sake as well as her own ... After the blow, she holds herself rigidly upright and expressionless, fighting back her tears. 'I have not deserved this' is not an appeal for sympathy, but a protest quietly and firmly lodged."

Most of the movies she acted in during the '60s gave little indication of the sort of range she was displaying in London's West End. She had a memorable two-scene role in "The Pumpkin Eater" as Philpott, who tempts a married writer (Peter Finch) into bed while befriending his fragile wife (Anne Bancroft). Sitting on top of a compact fridge, her legs half-folded underneath her, biting her nails and touching her neck sensuously and talking in a cuddly, insinuating Cockney twang, she must be as quirky a seductress as anyone in the history of movies. But though she's pretty good in films like "The V.I.P.s," "Young Cassidy" and "The Honey Pot," the intelligence she brings to bear on these colorless inginue roles seems wasted. Moviegoers seeing her again as Muriel Spark's nonconformist Edinburgh schoolmistress in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" would have registered her name and not recalled where they knew it from.

Coming at the end of the decade, "Jean Brodie" made Smith as famous as she deserved to be. Looking luminous in slightly absurd, too-colorful ensembles, with glamorously marcelled blond hair and scarves thrown recklessly over her shoulder, Isadora Duncan style, Smith brings all her classical training to bear on Jay Presson Allen's clever dialogue and turns in a miracle of a performance -- both hilariously mannered and somehow heroic. The movie goes out of its way to humiliate Brodie in its final half-hour, bringing all her dreams and schemes crashing to the ground; it moves awkwardly from high comedy to melodrama -- rarely a smart direction. But Smith is so vivifying and so funny that the callousness of this woman's manipulations doesn't outweigh the value of the show she puts on for her lucky pupils, day after day, and finally we don't believe in her as a villain, whatever the script may tell us. I doubt audiences ever did. I saw the movie several times when it came out (I was a college student) and remember falling in love with Brodie; returning to it after three decades, I was astonished to find that you're supposed to walk away thinking she's bad news and -- to quote the student who brings her down -- that "children shouldn't be exposed" to her.

Smith left the famously political National Theatre in 1971 after several disappointments and embarked on a series of projects -- leading roles in movies ("Travels With My Aunt," "Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing"), British TV dramas ("The Merchant of Venice," Shaw's "The Millionairess") and a highly successful tour of Coward's "Private Lives," directed by John Gielgud, in which she costarred with her husband, Robert Stephens, who had also been her leading man in "Miss Jean Brodie." But the marriage fell apart during the long run of the show, and Stephens left the cast. Canadian critic Martin Knelman is not alone in his assessment that what remained of Smith's performance was "a nightclub comic's Maggie Smith impression -- all tics and nervous affectations."

Knelman, who chronicles the history of the Canadian Stratford Shakespeare Festival in his book "A Stratford Tempest," sees the beginning of Smith's collaboration with the festival's brilliant young artistic director, Robin Phillips, as the salvation of her career. She performed at Stratford in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1980, often under Phillips' direction and often opposite Brian Bedford. By this time she was remarried, to playwright Beverley Cross, who was an old, pre-Stephens flame. (He helped to raise her two sons by Stephens, Chris and Toby, both of whom became actors.) I was in my 20s then, teaching high school in Montreal, and I used to make the seven-hour drive to Stratford in a state of joyfully prolonged delirium once or twice a summer to see those productions, conscious that I was watching a pair of theatrical legends and a company in a golden age. I saw her Rosalind and Lady Macbeth and Beatrice, her Queen Elizabeth in "Richard III," "The Sea Gull" and "The Guardsman," Edna O'Brien's "Virginia" and a completely reconceived "Private Lives" -- all magical, unforgettable.

She was imperious as Irina Arkadina in "The Sea Gull," treating her sensitive son with superficial concern and dismissing him with chilly impatience. She survived a fumbling "Macbeth" by providing a portrait of the Scots lady as psychically frail from the outset. These were daring choices. Her Virginia Woolf, in an exquisite production of a major, neglected play, had a knife's-point lucidity. Knelman's report that "the audience was caught in a kind of spell" certainly confirms my own experience. Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, praised her performance as "an act of intuition and of acting alchemy. She has merged her own vivid personality with that of her charismatic subject." Her Amanda in "Private Lives," all tinkling ice cubes and devastating one-liners on the surface, got at the heartbreak beneath, at what Alan Strachan called "the underlying sadness of these glib and over-articulate people who twist their lives into distorted shapes because they cannot help themselves." There was the moment in "Much Ado About Nothing" when her Beatrice and Bedford's Benedick discovered for themselves what their friends had known all along -- that they were in love. I remember it because it was the first time in my life I'd ever seen two actors on a stage look at each other with true erotic amazement.

Recent Stories