It's the meeting theatre-lovers have been waiting for - Maggie Smith and Judi Dench together in a specially written play by David Hare. Charles Spencer celebrates their careers.
It is the double act of one's dreams, right up there with Morecambe and Wise, Jeeves and Wooster, Marks and Spencer, Nureyev and Fonteyn, Matisse and Picasso.
On October 15, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith open together in the West End for the first time, in David Hare's new play The Breath of Life.
The producer Robert Fox hasn't taken out a single display advertisement, neither actress has been wheeled round the interview circuit, but the three-month run is already almost sold out. Dench and Smith are perhaps the only British actors who can fill a theatre on the strength of their names alone. Together they are box-office dynamite and, if Hare has produced a play worthy of their great and distinctive talents, we could be in for the kind of theatrical occasion of which legends are made.
When I compare these actresses to Matisse and Picasso, whose joint show drew huge crowds to Tate Modern , I am not being entirely facetious. Smith and Dench couldn't be more different, but I would hate to have to rank one above the other.
Smith is the Picasso of the partnership - angular, challenging, manifestly intelligent, difficult. She has always had more than a touch of mischief, even devilry, about her. Dench is more like Matisse - fleshy, welcoming, instinctive, warm. No one ever speaks a bad word of her. At the height of her career, she has reached a state of secular beatification.
Yet, despite their vastly different styles, they share certain qualities. Like the painters, both are instantly distinctive, not least through their marvellous voices.
Everyone who has ever written about Dench has tried to describe that amazingly touching and eloquent instrument but no one has done so better than the journalist Alan Franks, who wrote that her husky voice, with its "involuntary breaks and slight sob can charge spoken lines with the poignancy of a blues".
Smith's voice is very different, brilliantly precise and with a nasal twang that can lend even the most unpromising lines a devastating wit. It's one of the reasons why her famous insults are so cherished and so often impersonated in the theatre world.
She was, for instance, famously unhappy with Nicholas Hytner's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Would she be taking it to Broadway, she was asked. "Broadway? I wouldn't take it to Woking," she replied.
On another occasion, Ronald Harwood stuck his nose into her dressing-room when she was appearing in his mediocre Interpreters and excitedly announced that he was now starting work on a new play. The actress fixed him with her basilisk stare and sweetly inquired: "Why don't you try finishing this one first?"
The strange thing is that the professional paths of Smith and Dench have so rarely crossed, despite careers and lives that often eerily echo each other, beginning with their birth within a couple of weeks of each other in December 1934, Dench the daughter of a York GP, Smith the daughter of a medical technician.
The two actresses became friends when they appeared in a couple of shows together at the Old Vic in the 1959-60 season and shared a dressing-room. "Jude was playing the ingenue - and I was not," said Smith at a recent Bafta tribute to Dench. "What I remember most about that time is that it was the beginning of friendship, and I remember laughter - more than anything in the world. Judi has been a huge support, and hugely loyal."
However, since those Old Vic days their only professional contact has been in two films - Merchant Ivory's A Room With a View (1988) and Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini (1999). Smith made the latter shortly after the death of her husband, Beverley Cross, and has acknowledged the support Dench gave her then. Recently, she has done the same for Judi following the death of Dench's equally beloved husband, Michael Williams. Such emotional ties seem to promise well for Hare's play, which concerns the meeting of two women, a retired curator (Smith) and a popular novelist (Dench) who once shared the same man.
Smith was initially the brighter of the two stars. She was one of the key figures in the early days of Olivier's National Theatre, where she met and married Robert Stephens. They looked like a star couple to rival Olivier and Vivien Leigh, but the marriage was turbulent and certainly not helped by Stephens's drinking. Smith returned to her first love, Cross, marrying him within months of her divorce from Stephens.
As well as enjoying success on stage, Smith became a bona fide movie star, winning the Oscar for best actress with her wonderful and surely definitive performance in the title role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Another Oscar followed - for Neil Simon's California Suite - in 1978.
Infuriatingly, much of her best classical stage work took place not in England but in Stratford, Ontario. Bernard Levin described her Rosalind there as "one of the most glorious Shakespearean treasures of my life. She spoke the epilogue like a chime of golden bells; but what she looked like as she did so, I cannot tell you because I saw it through eyes curtained with tears."
In contrast, Judi Dench has only recently become a movie star (she won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1998) after a lifetime devoted to classical theatre and an endearing sideline as the star of the much-loved sitcoms A Fine Romance - in which she appeared with her husband - and As Time Goes By, with Geoffrey Palmer.
She enjoyed glorious seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has been a pillar of the National Theatre, triumphing as an improbable but bewitching Cleopatra (despite her fear that she "would be no more than a menopausal dwarf"), as a strangely lovable Lady Bracknell (a role also taken by Smith), and as the raddled proprietress of a Soho drinking club in Rodney Ackland's neglected 1940s masterpiece, Absolute Hell. If I close my eyes, I can still hear her desperate hungover howls at the end of the Ackland, which seemed to issue from a soul in torment.
What both actresses share, apart from great voices, is an ability to turn the mood on a sixpence, moving from beautifully observed comedy to a sudden, piercing emotional candour that seems to lay bare their very souls. I think of Smith's astonishing performance as Susan, the alcoholic vicar's wife in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, of Dench's tears of exhaustion and relief at the end of de Filippo's Filumena, which seemed to release a pent-up dam of emotion right round the auditorium, and can only conclude that we are blessed to be living in an age when two such glorious actresses are in their prime.
Thanks to Anne Marie Bourdon for sending me this article which appeared in the Telegraph (UK) on October 1, 2002.