Breaking Baz: Maggie Smith “Could Make Grown Men Cry” Because She Was A Perfectionist And Giant Of The Stage – In “Top Tier” With Judi Dench & Ian McKellen
deadline.comMaggie Smith was a constant in the life of producer Robert Fox for half a century. She could “make grown men cry,” says Fox, because “if you weren’t 100 percent on top of your game, you were dead in the water, and she was right.” Fox produced Dame Maggie in some of her greatest stage hits from Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage to David Hare’s The Breath of Life, in which she and her best friend, Judi Dench, shared top billing at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket.
Dame Judi got the No. 1 dressing room. “But Maggie wasn’t fussed because she joked that Judi, she’d say, “had all those people in from Surrey to see her, so she needs the space.’ She wasn’t at all unhappy about it.
She’d watch all of Judi’s guests troop in to see her. She’d say: ‘Look, there they go. Don’t come and see me. And she knew the reason they weren’t coming to see her,” Fox says. “They were too frightened to go and see Maggie, that’s why,” explains Fox.
But they still loved her. Maggie Smith, who died Friday at 89, was a creature of the theatre, says Fox. RELATED: UK, Hollywood Pays Tribute To Iconic Actress Maggie Smith: “She Could Eat Anyone Alive, And Often Did” She was one of the theatre gods along with other greats of her generation including Dame Judi, Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Joan Plowright — those four often were inseparable — and Dame Vanessa Redgrave.
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