The Prime of Miss Downbeat

One of her directors calls her Miss Downbeat. Her hairdresser considers her a "depressive maniac." Friends more kindly describe her as "a hell of a vulnerable creature." Maggie Smith herself admits that she can never believe anything good will happen--and when it does, she worries about it.

Maggie had a lot to worry about last week. First, she won an Oscar for her witty and sympathetic portrayal of the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Then, the night after the award, Maggie's opening performance in London's National Theater production of Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem (TIME, Feb. 2) won glowing reviews and further enhanced her reputation in England, where at 35 she is already the leading actress of her generation. All of which only left her rather numb and glum amid the flowers in her dressing room at the Old Vic. "Everybody seems to be raving about the Oscar," she told TIME Correspondent Christopher Porterfield, "but I don't think it will do me that much good."

Maggie feels really alive only onstage. "Everything is sharpened and heightened, and I know what I'm supposed to be," she says. "I feel safer." With her gifts, she should. The ultimate comment on Maggie's precise, disciplined style comes from Noel Coward, who directed her in a deliciously campy revival of his play Hay Fever at the National in 1964. Coward has a horror of "faffing," which is the affected hemming and hesitating that shatters the rhythm of a line or a scene and blurs its point. "Maggie," proclaims Sir Noel, "never faffs." Except offstage. There she talks with nervous, thoroughbred gestures, twiddling with her red hair and smoking too much.

Freckles and Braces. The daughter of a public-health pathologist in Oxford, Maggie grew up with freckles on her face and braces on her teeth. She still recalls her grandmother's remark to her mother when Maggie announced that she wanted to go into the theater: "Oh, you can't let her, not with that face." But it didn't keep her from working her way up from the prompter's chair to walk-on parts as a maid, and then to traditional repertory.

Soon she became the most discovered actress in England. She was one of Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1956. Her performance in the title role of Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary in 1963 sparked a small but satisfying movement in London to change the title to Maggie, Maggie. Then she moved over to the National (where her husband, Robert Stephens, is now the associate director) and stunned the highbrows playing Desdemona to Laurence Olivier's Othello. "Every time, I was greeted as if I'd never been on a stage before," Maggie says, "and always I was Cinderella when the clock struck 12 and the critics went to bed."

Now, all that has changed in England as a result of her dazzling succession of roles, from Miss Julie to The Country Wife, in the nation's top classical theaters. Last week, post-Oscar, it also began to change in the U.S., where she had been a relative unknown. "It would be nice to think that I've made it at last," Maggie says doubtfully, "and that nobody will discover me any more."

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