Her redoubtable character in Downton Abbey may be about to rekindle an old love, but Dame Maggie Smith has opened up about the loneliness she feels in real life.
The 79-year-old actress says she has still not been able to fill the “awful” and “deafening” void left by the death of her second husband, playwright and librettist Beverley Cross, in 1998.
Dame Maggie, who plays Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham in the hit ITV drama, said: “They say it [the pain] goes away but it doesn’t. It just gets different.
“It’s awful, but what do you do? After the busyness you are more alone, much more. A day that is absolutely crowded keeps your mind away from why you are alone but when it stops, that is the deafening silence.’
The double Oscar winner married Cross — best known for his translation of the French farce Boeing-Boeing — in 1975, and they were together until he died.
The actress was previously married to the actor Robert Stephens, the father of her two sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. In a candid interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dame Maggie, who has won a new fanbase thanks to her leading roles in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, also reveals for the first time that she is no longer under the illusion that acting for the camera is an easy ride compared with live theatre.
“In the theatre you knew you had to go there and you had a length of time to prepare yourself and then you did it,” she says. “But TV is like being on demand every minute of what seems to me to be 12-hour days or more.
“Wherever I got the idea that working in film or TV would not be so stressful as the theatre, I do not know. It’s an incredibly tough life. Bette Davis was right. Old age is not for sissies and old age is not for television because it is so relentless.
“The young are terrific but even they get tired.” Dame Maggie revealed she loved her scenes with Downton co-star Penelope Wilton, who plays friend and confidante Isobel Crawley.
She added: “Penelope and I have a great time. We play endless Bananagrams [a word game]. She makes me laugh a lot and we talk about the books we read.”
The actress, who is set to start work on a film version of Alan Bennett’s The Lady In The Van, said she regarded her role as Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter as “her pension” and was delighted to have been able to help pay for the education of her five grandchildren: “I’m on my own, so it’s lovely to help them.”
