In the early 1960s Maggie Smith was courted into Laurence Olivier's newly formed National Theatre company at The Old Vic after he recognised a kindred theatrical ferocity. What began as admiration quickly mutated into a famously prickly professional rivalry: Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon were also part of that ensemble, and critic Michael Coveney later described a contest of speed and skill between Olivier and Smith. The rivalry reached a physical apex during a 1964 production of Othello when, according to Smith's own later recollections, Olivier struck her across the face hard enough to knock her out. Smith publicly recounted the incident decades later — on The Graham Norton Show in 2015 and in the 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame — and theatre histories have since treated the episode as emblematic of the fraught power dynamics and combustible tempers that sometimes simmered beneath the façade of Britain’s National Theatre at the time. The event did not derail Smith’s career; if anything, it underscored both her resilience and the combustible atmosphere of a company stacked with towering talents and clashing egos.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1960s
Laurence Olivier's 1964 Strike: The National Theatre Blow That Knocked Maggie Smith Out
Maggie Smith / Laurence Olivier / National Theatre's Othello (1964) / 1960s
In the early 1960s Maggie Smith was courted into Laurence Olivier's newly formed National Theatre company at The Old Vic after he recognised a kindred theatrical ferocity. What began as admiration quickly mutated into a famously prickly professional rivalry: Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon were also part of that ensemble, and critic Michael Coveney later described a contest of speed and skill between Olivier and Smith. The rivalry reached a physical apex during a 1964 production of Othello when, according to Smith's own later recollections, Olivier struck her across the face hard enough to knock her out. Smith publicly recounted the incident decades later — on The Graham Norton Show in 2015 and in the 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame — and theatre histories have since treated the episode as emblematic of the fraught power dynamics and combustible tempers that sometimes simmered beneath the façade of Britain’s National Theatre at the time. The event did not derail Smith’s career; if anything, it underscored both her resilience and the combustible atmosphere of a company stacked with towering talents and clashing egos.
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