Working with Maggie Smith, as I did in The Missionary and A Private Function, meant being in the presence of pure acting gold. Maggie was so skilled and intuitive. She was able to portray maximum emotion with minimal effort. With Maggie, nothing is ever wasted.

The slightest look could contain so much information, the smallest gesture could be so meaningful that you had to be absolutely on your guard to stay near her. The two films we made together were comedies, and Maggie’s impeccable comedic timing was an absolute joy to watch and a privilege to be a part of.

Her humor was sharp and always icily purposeful. I remember eating with her and Alan Bennett in a rather posh restaurant in Yorkshire during the filming of A Private Function, when I discovered a piece of glass in my mixed salad. No big fuss was made. To the manager, Maggie simply described it as “a very mixed salad.”

Maggie made it seem so easy and yet I always felt like something was different. Something was stopped. An impatience with life. That she was blessed with such an instinctive, effortless understanding of what acting entailed caused her to reject anything she perceived as boring and uninspired. She suffered no fools.

She has always maintained that the part of the process she enjoyed most was the rehearsal. Working out how you can make the whole thing as good as possible. Once you got that right, the rest was easy and, as she hinted, less fun.

I consider our work together to be one of the happiest times of my life. I will mourn her passing most sadly, but remember her with most joy.