Those years with Phillips seemed to put paid to her early-'70s habit -- most evident in "Travels With My Aunt" -- of caricaturing herself. She hasn't done it since, not even in stinkers like "The Missionary" or this year's "The Last September," in which the precision of her take on the unassailable snobbishness of British aristocrats is the only thing that makes the picture worth seeing. She can sketch wonderful caricatures -- check out the New York divorcie chic and the repressed grimace of social disdain in her cameo in "The First Wives Club" and the way she attacks the role of the smeary-lipped blackmailer in the TV dramatization of Muriel Spark's "Memento Mori" -- but they're the kind that show off her talents rather than eating away at them.

Sometimes she brings a little more to the table than she has been allowed room for: There's a plaintive note in her last scene in "A Room With a View" -- an inkling of Charlotte Bartlett's lonely spinster's life -- that catches you unawares, and she keeps trying to mix tones, comedy and pathos in the underwritten role of the housekeeper in "The Secret Garden." It's not her fault that the experiment fails; it succeeds so well in "David Copperfield," where she has a part deserving of her talents, that every time she and Ian McNiece (as Aunt Betsey's kite-flying companion, Mr. Dick) pop up in a scene, you may find yourself laughing and crying. When a Smith performance fails to take wing, it's generally because of the limitations of the material -- she can't overcome the meanness of her role's conception in "Tea With Mussolini" or in Agniezska Holland's clumsily reworked "Washington Square," and as ingenious as her work is in "California Suite," the masochism in this Simon script makes you wince.

Smith is notoriously shy; she has given few interviews. (A People magazine interviewer once quipped, "Smith swats at questions like bothersome gnats.") And she dislikes talking about acting, so there's little on record to assist us in determining how she gets her effects except the occasional perceptive comment by a colleague. Playwright Alan Bennett, for example, once observed, "The boundary between laughter and tears is ... where Maggie is poised always." In a great performance like the one she gave for Jack Clayton in 1987 in "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne," or the ones she gave on TV in Bennett's monologue "Bed Among the Lentils" (also 1987) and in Richard Eyre's superlative mounting of the Tennessee Williams one-act "Suddenly Last Summer" (1993), there's so much going on that it's hard to know where to start to analyze. The first two are linked: portrayals of alcoholics for whom drink -- and, for Susan the vicar's wife in "Bed Among the Lentils," an unlikely romance with an Indian grocer -- provides the only bulwark against total sensory deprivation. But that's their only common ground. Susan is hyperconscious and piercingly ironic, like most of Bennett's heroes. Judith Hearne (invented by novelist Brian Moore) is an Irish spinster who has always looked to the Roman Catholic Church for the comfort she's denied in her life, first as a dutiful daughter caring for a cruel, unloving aunt and then as a wilting maiden struggling to make a living off a waning list of piano students. Her emotional commitment to Judith's collapse as she finds her final romantic hopes dashed, her neighbors mean-spirited and her church unyielding can only be called extreme. She does the kind of acting that first puts you in the character's shoes and then begins to strip away layers of her skin.

In "Suddenly Last Summer, playing the dilapidated matriarch who fights tooth and nail to protect the myth of her dead poet son's purity from his truth-shouting cousin (Natasha Richardson), the companion of his final days, Smith lays her Southern accent on a crushed voice. You think you're listening to a ghost, a desiccated figure smothered in gardenias, and the odor of poison oozes out from behind her white face, waved hair and cool silk. Smith has never looked so diminutive, so the amazing death's-head power of her Mrs. Venable is all that more remarkable. This is undoubtedly the least known of her great (nontheatrical) performances, and it's not like anything else she has ever attempted.

Both "Bed Among the Lentils" and "Judith Hearne," on the other hand, belong to a genre that she has made her own. She specializes in illuminating a kind of besieged gentility -- in "Judith Hearne" it's lace-curtain Irish, in "Lentils" it's Church of England (and Susan abhors it and rebels against it). It's the source of the humor in both "Memento Mori" and the uproarious 1985 comedy "A Private Function" (written by Bennett), set in the brutal rationing days after the war, where Smith plays a provincial Lady Macbeth who beats up on her befuddled chiropodist husband (Michael Palin) until he agrees to secure an unlicensed pig. (Smith's Joyce isn't hungry so much as status hungry; she wants to eat like a somebody.)

The central joke in Bennett's latest play, "The Lady in the Van," which Smith's enormously entertaining performance has made a West End hit, is the tension between her character's circumstances -- she's homeless -- and her grandiloquence. And you can find elements of this scraping for hauteur in "The Secret Garden," "Washington Square" and especially "A Room With a View," one of the most enchanting of her comic performances, where Charlotte's eyes are wary and wide and, though she's only a poor cousin, her tone almost always conveys distressed bourgeois taste. Smith gets at this subject matter -- the ragged efforts of the disenfranchised to maintain not just dignity but some vestige of style -- from both ends of the tonal spectrum, high comic and tragic. It's rich territory.

We're fortunate that Smith works so much, turning out at least a picture a year, returning regularly to the West End stage (in productions that often make the voyage to New York) and surfacing on television. Her only serious competition as the most gifted English-speaking actress alive today is Vanessa Redgrave, who shares her knack for turning a tiny role into the most memorable corner of a movie, but who has been less lucky -- or less wise -- in her choice of starring vehicles. At 65, Smith shows no indication of slowing down, and she still possesses the quality Kerr seized on 30 years ago when he wrote, "Miss Smith is what is meant by an alternating current."

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