ABOUT DAME MAGGIE

The choices of English newspapers that I can read without a subscription are narrowing.The Independent is stingy, allowing only 3 free reads per month, and the Times of London simply will not allow non-subscribers to read at all.  The Spectator would not let me in, because I had exceeded my allowance, and I had not clicked on their site for ages.  What's that about?  Anyway, I can still read the Guardian (Thank heaven!), but for how long?  And The Daily Mail, in which there's a lovely article about Maggie Smith.

Dame Maggie and I are the same age, but she lost the love of her life, the playwright Beverley Cross. Her words about her loss are poignant.

'Is it lonely?’ She replied: ‘I don’t know. It seems a bit pointless. Going on one’s own and not having someone to share it with.’

Warming to the theme of aging she also said she didn’t like it and added: ‘I don’t know who does. Noel Coward-- and I don’t mean to name drop.

'But he said,”The awful thing about getting old is that you have breakfast every half-hour.” And that’s sort of what it is. I can’t understand why everything has to go so fast.‘

Nor do I understand why everything must go so fast.

Interviewer Steve Kroft asks her: ‘But you have no interest in finding someone else?’

Dame Maggie replies: ‘Absolutely not. I – no way’.

We're together there.  I don't think there's any way that I could learn to live in intimacy with another person at my age.  And by intimacy, I do not necessarily mean sex. Dame Maggie and I have in common that we are both survivors of breast cancer.

If Maggie continues to work, I'll be more than grateful.  In the late 1980s, from a second row seat at the Gielgud Theatre in London, I had the great pleasure of seeing her in Peter Shaffer's play, Lettice and Lovage, written especially for Maggie.  Her performance was beyond superb.  Although there are other performers in the drama, Lettice, Maggie's character, carries the play.  It's a night I'll never forget.  Tickets were scarce, but the concierge at the hotel managed to find a single seat for me.  To the right is a scan of the copy of the play which I bought that night.