It’s what she doesn’t say

London —  “Usually the parts I get now are cameos or bits and pieces,” Maggie Smith observed, her eyebrows arching into an expression of mild surprise. “Cameos are lovely, but you do feel slightly detached from the film being made. Everyone else is busy and knows each other, whereas you’re just nodding in and nodding out.”

To Americans who know their Academy Awards trivia, Smith is a versatile veteran who won the best actress Oscar in 1968 for playing the title role, a stern Scottish schoolmistress, in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and a supporting actress award for “California Suite” (1977) -- ironically, for playing an actress who failed to win an Oscar. Her most recent brush with Oscar was a supporting actress nomination for “Gosford Park.” To the British, Dame Maggie (she was thus honored by the queen in 1990) is a national treasure, the greatest stage actress of her generation and, at 68, still the leading box office draw in London’s West End, along with her close friend Judi Dench.

But to all children and teenagers who revere “Harry Potter” Smith is Professor Minerva McGonagall, the brusque but warmhearted schoolmarm at Hogwarts -- a role she describes as “Jean Brodie in a witch’s hat.” It may have made her famous to a new generation, yet it’s essentially another cameo: “It’s odd when you’re just saying tiny little brief things, which in my case in the ‘Harry Potter’ films is mostly: ‘Go back to your classrooms!’ or ‘Go back to your dormitories!’ That’s what I seem to say all the time.”

No surprise, then, that Smith is pleased by her latest work on film, “My House in Umbria,” an HBO movie based on the book by Irish writer William Trevor. It airs tonight with Smith playing Emily Delahunty, an English romance novelist living in a rural Italian villa. Not only is hers the lead role, but Smith is also in almost every scene. “Being involved day after day and frame after frame was rewarding, to feel your effort made some difference,” she said. “You understand the whole structure of the film, rather than drifting in and out. Then it becomes more like working in the theater.”

In “My House in Umbria,” an explosion shatters the train carriage in which Emily is traveling. Five passengers die, but she and three more survive. One, Aimee, an American girl of 8, is stricken mute by the trauma. Emily invites the survivors to convalesce at her idyllic home, and they start to heal, mentally and physically. But then Aimee’s uncle (Chris Cooper), a childless, dry-as-dust academic, comes to take her back to America. Concerned that Aimee will not flourish in a joyless home, Emily urges him to let her stay in Umbria; her desperate attempts to change his mind include flirting embarrassingly with him and engaging in some inappropriate intimacy.

Was this over-the-top behavior hard to play? “Something else to play is what it was,” said Smith, characteristically changing the subject. “Chris Cooper’s a bloody good actor, you know. I was delighted about his Oscar, thrilled for him.”

Something ‘so gossamer-like’

She reflected on this one recent afternoon in a suite of a chic hotel, paid for by HBO, close to her apartment in the Chelsea district. (Her main home is in Sussex, south of London.) “Hmmm, nice, isn’t it?” she murmured, inspecting the light, airy room. “I might spend the night here.”

Smith is widely regarded as reclusive; she rarely does one-on-one interviews. With her precise, cut-glass tones, she is daunting company for the easily intimidated. She affects a weary, faintly disdainful air, and one imagines in certain moods that she can be withering. But on this afternoon she was warm, relaxed and funny. Smith’s wit is hard to nail in print, reliant as it is on apparently neutral comments being accompanied by a repertoire of eloquent sighs and facial expressions: meaningful sideways glances, raised eyebrows, eyes rolling heavenwards. “She can be one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet,” says a longtime colleague, theatrical producer Robert Fox.

Still, no one would call her an easy interview. She will not talk about her private life (“Well, what is there to say?”) and prefers not to discuss her work. Why is that? “I just don’t think it’s possible to talk about something that’s so gossamer-like,” she says of acting. “Talking about it -- comedy, anyway -- makes it disappear. You can’t analyze things like that, I don’t think, and it certainly isn’t up to me to analyze it. And I couldn’t anyhow.”

Yet she concedes that on stage, a facial expression from her and a specific intonation of a word can produce a frisson of pleasure in an audience: “Yes, but it’s hard to know why. And it doesn’t happen the same way all the time.”

Would we damage the process by talking about it?

“Absolutely, because then it becomes manufactured. It’s surprise that works, the unexpectedness. I couldn’t for the life of me set down how I do it. I know when a moment’s not working, but I can’t pinpoint what it is.”

So why does she choose certain roles? “There’s no pattern or rule. I don’t plan ahead. You don’t know who’s going to write what, you can’t possibly know. On the whole, I think actors just do what comes along. That’s why it was so extraordinary to get ‘My House in Umbria.’ That doesn’t happen very often. We’re always moaning on that there aren’t enough parts for my age group, and in fact they are a bit thin on the ground. Of course, it was ever thus. It isn’t just my generation that’s been picked on.”

Why Harry Potter? “Well, it’s a pension, isn’t it? Let’s be realistic. I’d be insane not to do it. I also like the books. It’s tough on the children because it’s been their life for years now. It’s a big commitment.

“I can’t believe Daniel [Radcliffe, who plays Harry]. I’d worked with him ages ago in the only other thing he’d done, really: ‘David Copperfield’ for the BBC. He was enchanting, but he was a tiny person. Look at him now.”

While the “Harry Potter” franchise is lucrative (Smith is now working on the third film in the series, “The Prisoner of Azkaban”), it doesn’t endear her to film acting: “I’ve done a whole day, I work again on Thursday, odd bits through April, then for some inexplicable reason two days in July. You go back, you say: ‘Go back to your dormitories!’ and you think: My God, they’re still at it. Those poor kids, with bags under their eyes. Poor lambs, they do work hard. They have tutoring as well. It makes me feel quite faint. I’m exhausted getting from one end of the studio to the other.”

She has her gripes about stage work too, especially in London’s West End. “The crowds, the noise; it’s become a depressing place. It’s squalid. They managed to clean up New York, so I don’t see why they can’t do the same in London.”

Still, the stage remains her first love. “I feel more at ease in the theater than I do in life. I don’t know why. It’s more secure, maybe. I think a lot of actors feel that way, playing a part for a couple of hours. You know who you are for a bit. It’s quite a holiday, not having to fathom it out.”

For all her world-weary demeanor, Smith rose to the occasion when asked about the value of acting in a public space: “What I find extraordinary in theater is the immediacy of working with an audience, a whole house full of people. To know you can have everybody listening and reacting to what you are doing, there’s nothing quite like that. You get it in the audience too, when you’re moved by something. At its best, theater can be transporting.”

There wasn’t much left to say, and Smith strolled back through the hotel to the sunny sidewalk outside, for the short stroll back to her apartment. Finally, she gave a dazzling smile. “Ah, well,” she said. “Back to my dormitory!” And she turned on her heel and walked away.

*

‘My House in Umbria’

When: Premieres tonight at 9

Where: HBO

Credits: Directed by Richard Loncraine; screenplay by Hugh Whitemore, from a novella by William Trevor; produced by Ann Wingate, executive produced by Frank Doelger.

Starring: Maggie Smith, Chris Cooper, Ronnie Barker, Benno Furmann, Giancarlo Gianinni, Timothy Spall.

Rating: The network has rated the film TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).