The Smile of Her: In Conversation With Christine Lahti

Photo Credits: Mark Senior

After seeing The Smile of Her, I left the theatre convinced that Christine Lahti had created something far greater than a memoir brought to the stage. Through touching stories of her mother, her childhood, and her own journey through womanhood, she invites the audience into an intimate reflection on memory, judgement, forgiveness and the invisible burdens we all carry. What stayed with me most was not simply the story itself, but the generosity with which she approached it: a willingness to revisit painful experiences without reducing those who shaped them to heroes or villains.

Following the performance, I had the opportunity to speak with Lahti about the play, its origins, and the experiences behind it. In our conversation, we discussed the challenge of performing such intensely personal work night after night, the women who inspired it, the evolution of feminism across generations, and how a lifetime in Hollywood informed both the stories she tells and the way she tells them. We also explored the role of empathy in her work, the fine line between autobiography and performance, and why she believes understanding another person's perspective remains one of the hardest — and most necessary — lessons we can learn.

What follows is our conversation.

Q: The play ultimately seems less about your mother than about learning to see people beyond our first impressions. Was there a specific moment in your life when you realised that understanding someone doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with or forgiving them?

CL: Yes, while writing this play, actually, and writing my book, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness, my collection of personal essays, I discovered that because I'm playing all those characters in a way, especially in the play, I cannot judge them. I have to get inside their skin, and it allowed me to understand them in a very much more nuanced and complicated way. I also found a lot of forgiveness, self-forgiveness as well. I don't necessarily forgive my brother, but I have much more understanding that hurt people hurt people unless they get help, and that's a pretty universal phenomenon.

Q: One of the ideas that stayed with me was that many of the people you once judged were themselves constrained by the expectations placed upon them. How has recognising that changed the way you look at conflict and relationships today?

CL: Again, my dad and mom were both constrained by their roles. They both played their roles perfectly that they thought they had to play. There weren't many other

options in those days in the 50s. So, yeah, I think they were, both of them were constrained by their roles and limited, and therefore, you know, that gives me much more empathy for the things they did.

Q: You describe womanhood, at one point, as “the wishes we don’t make and the dreams we don’t pursue.” Looking back across your career and your life, do you think younger generations of women are freer to pursue those dreams, or have the obstacles simply changed shape?

CL: Yeah, that's the low point in the script, in the play, for the character when she feels like she's going to have to give up because the misogyny around her is so rampant and overwhelming that she doesn't feel like she can get past it. So, looking back at my career and my life, yes, I do. I do believe that women are freer to pursue those dreams. It's still hard. I think the world is still filled with misogyny, but I think more women are taking up space and having their voices heard and not allowing the abuse and violence that has been enacted towards us to be normalized anymore. Me Too and Times Up were a huge seismic shift for that issue for women and men alike. So, yeah, I think it has gotten better today. 

Q: The play is deeply personal, yet it resonated with so many people in the audience. When writing it, were you consciously trying to tell a universal story, or did that universality emerge naturally from telling your own truth?

CL: Well, I do believe the more personal, the more specific a story is, the more universal it is. But absolutely, I was conscious of wanting to tell a bigger and more universal story about how the patriarchy doesn't serve men or women anymore. Every step of the way. But I did not want to obviously be preachy or do a TED talk. I wanted to tell a very personal story. I think that's why so many people are relating to it because it is so specific and personal, but it's also universal. I mean, what woman hasn't had to navigate misogyny if not in their families out in the world? Every woman on the planet. So yeah, I think it's. I'm so happy, especially. I mean, I knew that older women would relate to this, but younger men and women are really seeming to. It's resonating with them in lots of ways. So that makes me so happy.

Q: Humour plays an important role throughout the performance, even in moments of grief or discomfort. What does comedy allow you to communicate that drama alone cannot?

CL: To me, one of the ways I’ve survived is through gallows humor. I always think there's a very thin line, as Chekhov would say, between tragedy and comedy, and that's kind of where I live most of the time. At least I try to. I find humor in some of

the darkest, most bleak situations, and I think that’s a safe coping mechanism that has worked for me and has definitely been a survival tool for me. 

I think comedy gives perspective. Sometimes it keeps us from becoming victimized by trauma and by the drama that surrounds us. It also gives us a kind of release from pain and trauma, and I think it's incredibly important. 

Q: You’ve had an extraordinary career in film and television, but this is your London stage debut and a one-woman show. How did standing alone on stage, telling your own story, differ from portraying fictional characters throughout your career?

CL: Obviously, playing somebody else's character is a lot safer, a lot less terrifying. Playing myself, telling my story is the ultimate vulnerable, most terrifying, most thrilling, I guess, a thing I could do, because you know I could always blame the writer if people didn't like it. This time I can't really do that. So yeah, it's pretty vulnerable. 

Q: The Smile of Her doesn’t offer easy resolutions, but instead asks audiences to sit with complexity. Do you think audiences today are becoming more comfortable with nuance, or are we living in a time that increasingly demands simple heroes and villains?

CL: In these blockbuster movies - I don't even know who's going to see those anymore. Maybe some adolescent boys. I don't know, but I see these previews and I just can't believe it. It's just buildings exploding and exploding, and cars crashing, and people getting shot, and I couldn't care less, but I think nuanced, complicated human stories are what people hunger for. I know I do, so yeah, I think it is asking audiences to sit with complication and nuance, and I think that's what we all do in our own lives. So I think it's hopefully inspiring to do that and meaningful.

Q: As both the writer and performer, how vulnerable did it feel to revisit memories that are so intimate? Were there stories you chose not to include because they still felt too personal?

CL: There's stories that I chose not to include not because they felt too personal, but because they felt redundant. You know, I've had many other stories of examples of internalized misogyny where I haven't allowed myself to take up space because it felt not normal or too weird. 

Specifically, I was going to direct these one-act plays in college, I'd gotten the rights to the play. I was producing. I was going to act in some of them and also direct many of them. On the first day of rehearsal, I couldn't do it. I couldn't. I especially couldn't tell the boys, the men in the acting company, what to do. I just felt so uncomfortable with that level of authority and that position of leadership that I gave the job to one of the male members of the company. So stories like that were taken out of, you know, time issues. I already have a story, several stories about my own internalized misogyny. So I thought that was, although maybe compelling in certain ways, just redundant. Also, there were many more bad dude stories, and I didn't want to be in any way male bashing. I just wanted to give some examples of how I have navigated that kind of casting couch situation, and how, in some ways, as Michelle Obama says, those men naysayers only made me stronger. I'm grateful to them in a way because they just made that fire in my belly to prove them wrong even more. Just a blazing, roaring, undeniable fire in my belly.

Q: Your mother’s smile becomes a powerful symbol by the end of the play — not of happiness, but of resilience. Has your understanding of resilience itself changed over the course of creating and performing this work?

CL: Yes, her smile is about resiliency and survival. I think resiliency is maybe the key, the key to everything. I didn't say this, but someone said it, and it stuck with me. “It's not how hard you fall or how often you fall; it's how fast you get up”. That's important. And each time, you know, you learn her resiliency, her survival. She's an astonishing survivor. And yes, I spent all those years judging her because I didn't want to be her. I was trying - I wanted - to be more. I wanted more than she had, so I rejected her and judged her, and contributed in some ways to her oppression. I think, to keeping her small, which I completely regret and feel terrible about, but that's why the play is called "The Smile of Her" because it tracks that journey of reconciliation and an understanding and compassion for my mom.

Q: If you hope audiences leave the theatre carrying just one idea with them, what would you most want them to reflect on once they’re back in their own lives and relationships?

CL: The one thing is that the patriarchy is done, it no longer serves men or women. Men, you know, choose feminism. It really, if you look it up, the word is very simply defined. It just means you believe that women and men should have equal rights, but the patriarchy, you think it gives you privilege and power, but it robs you of so much humanity. Like the men in my family, they were not allowed to feel vulnerable. They didn't really know how to love. They only knew how to dominate and control. It’s just not serving anyone. 

So that's the one thing I would hope people leave with is rethinking that whole hierarchy of human worth. It doesn't work. It's made up. It's not serving anybody, and ways in which they can make things more fair in their lives, at home, in their families, at work, lifting people up, not needing to keep people down, but being allies for one another, that kind of thing.

As our conversation came to a close, it became clear that the questions at the heart of The Smile of Her extend well beyond the stage. They are questions about memory, perspective and the difficult work of understanding others - questions Lahti continues to ask both as an artist and as a woman reflecting on a life fully lived.

The Smile of Her will be running in the Marylebone Theatre until August 29th, 2026. Buy your tickets here. 

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Edited by Aminata Ndiaye, Theatre Editor