Maggie Smith as Hippolyta / Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Stratford Festival, 1977).Stratford Festival
In the mid-1970s, Maggie Smith was an Oscar-winning but dissatisfied film star looking for a way to recharge her acting batteries.
She found the answer at Canada’s Stratford Festival.
Ms. Smith’s four extraordinary seasons at the festival, 1976-78 and 1980, would see her take on challenging roles, give some of her finest stage performances and add lustre to Robin Phillips’s legendary tenure as artistic director.
Ms. Smith was playing Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in a 1975 touring production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives when Mr. Phillips approached her. Unhappy both with her screen career and the state of British classical theatre, she jumped at the chance to join the Canadian repertory company and flex her acting muscles.
Alan Scarfe as Bottom and Maggie Smith as Titania (front) with Robin Nunn as Peaseblossom, Bob Baker as Cobweb, Keith Batten as Moth and Robert Ruttan as Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Stratford Festival, 1977).Stratford Festival
Although Mr. Phillips, her compatriot, only knew her slightly from his time as an actor in Britain, he proved to be her perfect director, helping her escape the acting mannerisms that she freely admitted she’d fallen into and giving her unlikely roles, such as the titular queen in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – an assignment that frankly terrified her. “I thought the part was beyond me,” she confessed at the time.
At Stratford, she also acquired the ideal leading man in fellow British actor Brian Bedford. The two proved a scintillating comedy team, first as a married couple beset by jealousy in Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman (1977) and later as the wittily warring Amanda and Elyot in the festival’s version of Private Lives (1978). They would joust again, as Beatrice and Benedick, in a hit 1980 production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
However, it was Ms. Smith’s dramatic portrayals that held critics and audiences in awe. In her first season, she starred as Masha, alongside Martha Henry as Olga and Marti Maraden as Irina, in an exquisite production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by John Hirsch, that is still talked about. Her Lady Macbeth was also deemed the bright spot in an otherwise dreary staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Maggie Smith as Masha, Marti Maraden as Irina, Amelia Hall as Anfisa and Martha Henry as Olga in Three Sisters (Stratford Festival, 1976).Stratford Festival
During her time at the Stratford Festival, Ms. Smith was fiercely committed to the company, attending classes, sitting in on rehearsals and happily taking smaller roles as part of the repertory system. She and her husband, playwright-screenwriter Beverley Cross, also did their best to blend into the Stratford community, and she enrolled her two young sons – her children with her first husband, actor Robert Stephens – in local schools.
Ms. Smith’s final season, 1980, featured a singular triumph, embodying the author Virginia Woolf in Virginia, a play by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien that drew from Woolf’s own writings. The Guardian critic Michael Billington wrote that Ms. Smith “has no peer at conveying the qualities of passion and insecurity – qualities ideal for Virginia Woolf,” while The Globe and Mail’s critic, Ray Conlogue, confirmed what Ms. Smith, in her Stratford adventure, had set out to do: “By superb discipline she has left behind comic mannerisms and arm-fluttering, finding a more suitable wealth of gesture and vocal nuance,” he wrote.
Maggie Smith as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Stratford Festival, 1977).Stratford Festival
Ms. Smith departed the festival on that high note, her exit coinciding with the end of Mr. Phillips’s reign. Although she wouldn’t tread the Stratford boards again, in 2012 the festival honoured her with its Legacy Award. “Nothing has ever come up to the years I spent at Stratford,” she told the audience when accepting the award at a ceremony in Toronto.
“Maggie Smith’s arrival at the Stratford Festival was a moment of rebirth, both for this theatre and also for her work,” the festival’s current artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, said in a statement. The roles she played at Stratford brought out “a warm, lyrical aspect of her being. They revealed her heart.”
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