MAggie Smith was an actor of legendary wit and style who, even offstage, seemed to have the ability to deliver a one-line zinger. There’s a lovely moment in Roger Michell’s TV movie Nothing Like a Dame in which the assembled quartet (including Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) are asked to talk about the difficulty of living with a title. Joan Plowright says it’s even worse for her because she not only has the look of a Lady, but also that of a Lady through her marriage to Laurence Olivier. With exquisite timing and finding the perfect verb, Maggie looks at her old friend and says, “Joan, honey, you’re just going to have to struggle with it.”

Smith’s achievements on stage and screen are well documented, but I was fortunate to witness a lesser-known side of her work: her seasons at the Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, from 1976 to 1980. She recounted ever told me that she had to go to work in Canada because of her private life. I wondered if it was also her private life that, despite being a huge West End success in 1972, led to accusations that she was becoming a prisoner of her comic mannerisms. Whatever the motivation, her work in Stratford, Canada, had a directness and sincerity that amounted to a reinvention of herself.

Sadly, I missed her opening season, in which she played Cleopatra and Millamant in The Way of the World, but I was there in 1977 and was impressed by what I saw. Among her roles were Titania and Hippolyta in Robin Phillips’ beautiful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I have rarely seen them better played. Her Hippolyta had the sadness of a conquered queen and her Titania was not a fluttering fairy, but a troubled figure. She resisted Oberon’s claims to the changeling in her possession, recalling how his mother was a supporter of her order, but that “she, mortal for that boy, died…And for her sake I will not part do from him.” Maggie Smith went straight to the heart with those lines.

I saw her again in 1978 as a sparkling Rosalind in As You Like It and as a raven-haired Lady Macbeth with boundless ambition and limited imagination. Speaking of Duncan’s murder, she cried, “A little water purifies us from this act—how easy it is,” leaning with fatal myopia on the word “easy.” To be honest, she surpasses a slow production with two intervals. When I came to her house the morning after the first evening to interview her, her husband, Beverley Cross, suggested I take the phone off the hook. “For what?” she asked somberly. “It’s not likely anyone will call.”

But in 1980 she enjoyed another triumphant Stratford season. As Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, opposite Brian Bedford as Benedick, she suggested a bruised heart beneath a facade of jokes. She also enjoyed great success playing Virginia Woolf in a one-woman play by Edna O’Brien. What she noticed was the character’s mix of passion and insecurity; she jumped for joy as she and Leonard became the center of literary London, but also indicated, by a tightening of her body and constriction of her gestures, that Virginia was gradually retreating into a suicidal loneliness.

I will remember many other performances by Maggie Smith, from her comically angular Myra in Coward’s Hay Fever to her radiantly poised Jean Brodie in the film of the Muriel Spark novel, and her Lady Bracknell-esque widow in Downton Abbey. But I will always remember that in moving to Ontario she rediscovered the clarity, sincerity and emotional openness that were at the heart of her best work.