What a dame!
When the great Sir John Gielgud died back in 2000, Dame Maggie Smith said, ‘We shall not see his like again. It is the end of an era.’ We shan’t see her like again, either. Maggie Smith was a one-off, unique and irreplaceable. It has been one of the privileges of my life to be able to call her a proper friend. I think she let me get close to her only because she knew I had been a friend of Kenneth Williams – her friendship with Kenneth was one of the unalloyed joys of her life. They didn’t simply sound alike. They were on the same wavelength. In the late 1950s, when they appeared together in the West End in Bamber Gascoigne’s revue Share My Lettuce, at one performance Kenneth killed one of Maggie’s biggest laughs with a bit of over-the-top improvisation. During the interval, an irate Maggie went...
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