But Smith's chief glory is her vocal prowess. She turns nasality into a virtue, whipping it up into a kind of mock-aristocratic fog, and her buzzing sibilance leaves a silvery trail through her lines -- sometimes suggesting a man in expert drag working a sly parody on femininity. Her voice can be plush or glassy, or break up into little glittering pebbles; she can pull hard on the syllables as if they were taffy or fold her voice into paper-thin layers or fly into a startlingly high, catfight shriek or an abandoned whine. She takes pauses at odd times and then sprints through the punctuation to collapse over the finish line in a kind of neurotic exhaustion. She can convert a line into a trademark stutter without actually changing the words.

To American audiences she is best known for her Oscar-winning performances in the 1969 "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" -- which made her a star on this side of the Atlantic -- and in the 1978 film of Neil Simon's "California Suite," as well as for a series of character parts in both British and Hollywood pictures. Your first encounter with Smith may have been in one of the all-star, lushly dressed mysteries she flits through, "Death on the Nile" and "Evil Under the Sun," where she elevates Agatha Christie to the high-comedy plane. Or it may have been as Charlotte Bartlett, the fussy cousin invited to chaperone Helena Bonham Carter on an Italian vacation in the film of E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View." She has appeared in movies as disparate as "Sister Act," "The First Wives Club," "Hook" (as Robin Williams' foster grandmother, providing the only spark of genuine magic in this deflated fairy tale), "Tea With Mussolini" and the Ian McKellen "Richard III." Within the last half-year she has shown up in two BBC productions on Masterpiece Theatre -- as the Queen of England in "All the King's Men" and as Aunt Betsey Trotwood, a little marvel of a performance, in the most recent "David Copperfield."

Smith first appeared onstage as Viola in "Twelfth Night" in 1952, but her professional career began with a Broadway revue called "New Faces of 1956," and she appeared in her first movie, a forgotten noir called "Nowhere to Go," in 1958. She joined the Young Vic Company the following year and won acclaim for playing in Shakespeare and James Barrie, Eugene Ionesco and Peter Shaffer, but it was the title role in the Jean Kerr comedy "Mary, Mary" that made her a London stage star. In 1963 she was invited to join the National Theatre, where she remained until the early '70s and where her acting began to acquire legendary status. You'd read about Maggie Smith as Beatrice or Masha or Miss Julie; in Ingmar Bergman's black-and-scarlet-toned "Hedda Gabler" ("There is a dry bitterness, a kind of ad humor, to her portrayal that ... is both sardonic and pathetic," wrote the New York Times' anonymous London correspondent); in Henrik Ibsen and Noel Coward; and especially in Restoration comedy, which is where she won her warmest reviews and evolved her magically eccentric style.

Walter Kerr, writing in 1970, tried to particularize her unconventional stage presence: "She looks like a pair of scissors ... a closed pair that cuts even when closed. She must be, I think, the narrowest creature ever to come through a stage door ... The range comes in part from her hands, which occasionally seem larger and more mobile than she does ... The velocity comes in part from her speech, which seems to have been recorded at 3-3/4 and played at 7-1/2 without the least loss of intelligibility." Harold Clurman wrote of her later (marvelous) performance in Tom Stoppard's "Night and Day," "Easy and always on target, she is above all endowed with a capacity to think funny," and that accurate description glances back at her training in the high comedies of George Farquhar and William Wycherley. And Benedict Nightingale said of her in "The Way of the World" that "everything about her, from her eyebrows to her larynx to her slightly flouncing torso, seems mocking or self-mocking or both."

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