R.I.P. Dame Maggie Smith

Here are Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams reading Death in Leamington to Sir John Betjeman. It's my favourite of his poems, the one that certainly deserves to live. 

They read it well but not nearly as well as I do, in my head.

Kenneth Williams had nothing good to say in his diary, apparently, about anyone except his close friends Dame Maggie Smith and Dame (!) Barbara Windsor. Here he talks about the former.

Here is Evelyn Waugh writing to Ann Fleming after seeing Maggie Smith’s performances in The Private Ear and The Public Eye on 2 July 1962.

'Miss Smith is a fair treat and the two little plays she is in give her a chance to show it. She will become famous. Perhaps she is already and it is like me saying, keep an eye on a clever young American called T.S. Eliot.'