Actresses: Maggie, Maggie

For the past seven weeks, according to Variety, The V.I.P.s has been among the top ten moneymaking movies now playing in the U.S. It’s not much of a movie, and the reason people were going into the theaters at all was to see Elizabeth Taylor. When they came out, likely as not, they were asking: “Who is Maggie Smith?”

Maggie Smith plays a secretary to one of the V.I.P.s. Since the movie is one of those Farmers Hotel assemblages of separate stories, Maggie and Elizabeth never appear together, which is too bad. For when Maggie Smith is on the screen, the picture moves.

The girl who effects this contrast is a British actress with dark red hair, a smile that could win a war or at least make one worth losing, and “a light in her eye”—as one London critic rhapsodized—”which would melt the heart of a gun dog.” At the moment, she is starring in the London production of Jean Kerr’s Mary, Mary, and, as another critic summarized the reaction of all, “the night belongs to Miss Smith—laconic and nervous, superb in comedy, touching in pathos, a gem of an actress, a dish.”

Next spring she will play Desdemona to Sir Laurence Olivier’s first Othello. Last January she was named the outstanding actress in the West End during 1962 for her part in Peter Shaffer’s linked one-acters, The Private Ear and The Public Eye.

She is 28 and was reared in Oxford, where her father is a public-health pathologist. For an actress, she has a fantastic lack of ego. “I’m a pinhead who’s all eyes and teeth,” she says. “I’m dull, uninteresting, shy, ordinary. No scalding sex life. No scandal. No punch-ups.* Even my best friends tell me I’ve got a nice bashed-in face.”

Most audiences would dispute her, and so would her fellow actors. After a season with the Old Vic, she played opposite Olivier in Rhinoceros. “Marvelous,” said Sir Larry. Richard Burton was wary of doing a scene with her in The V.I.P.s and, as he had feared, she took the scene away from him. “Grand larceny it was,” he said without rancor.

* Fist fights.