Maggie Smith: A Biography (15 page)

Although Maggie has made several recordings of Shakespeare, and there is both a record and a film of the NT
Othello
,
The Country Wife
is the only play she has ever recorded in an original production for BBC Radio. She did so in 1985, with Jonathan Pryce as a darkly lubricious Horner (Keith Baxter was silkier but less dangerous at Chichester), Barbara Jefford as the fulsomely insatiable Lady Fidget and John Moffatt as the surely definitive Sparkish. Maggie’s radio performance, though slightly riper, is very much a recreation of the Chichester version: as crisp and rosy as a fresh young apple, with a precise Oxfordshire accent and a musicality unsullied with mannerism. When you hear Maggie, spuriously concerned about her husband, her ‘dear Bud’, ask, ‘Why dost thou look so fropish? Who has nangered thee?’, savouring those two unexpected syllables of ‘frop’ and ‘nang’, you cannot imagine anyone else ever sounding so charmingly mock-innocent or so deliciously flavoursome. These months mark the high point of Maggie’s stage career in Britain. The fact that Robert played Archer and Tesman to her Mrs Sullen and Hedda, two of her greatest stage performances, indicated that, although the marriage still prospered, Robert’s visible, public role in it was becoming more of a supporting one. And by winning an Oscar, Maggie changed her footing within the profession and upped her market value way beyond Robert’s.

The Beaux’ Stratagem
opened in Los Angeles, where the NT was on tour, in January 1970. Billy Wilder took Jack Benny to the first night. According to Christopher Downes, the great comedian recognised the gift for which he himself was renowned above all other entertainers. ‘Gee, what about that girl’s timing!’ he said of Maggie to Wilder. The three-week season in the huge and intimidating Ahmanson Theatre was the first of several appearances Maggie and Robert made there over the next few years. She had a ready-made Hollywood following, on account of the success of
Jean Brodie
. And in the New Year’s Honours list back home, she had been appointed Commander of the British Empire, CBE, along with Joan Plowright and Kenneth More. The Los Angeles season also featured Olivier’s production of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
, in which Robert played the louche battery commander Vershinin and Maggie played Masha, the middle sister whose dull marriage to a schoolmaster is briefly, and tragically, enlivened by her infatuation with the visiting army officer. Masha was really Plowright’s role, but she had been unable to make the trip. The Ahmanson was picketed during the opening night intermission by student radicals accusing the National Theatre of being ‘an airless mausoleum’. The re-viewers thought otherwise. Maggie’s reception was ecstatic. The Los Angeles drama critics gave her their best actress award. Olivier never allowed Maggie to share Masha in London with Plowright. He could not afford another blow to his wife’s pride comparable to those she had already suffered over Hilde Wangel and Beatrice. In any case, Plowright was an exceptionally fine Masha. The production was recorded, like the
Othello
, on film.

Christopher and Toby were left at home with their grandparents while Maggie and Robert took a house in Malibu for the duration and soaked up the adulation. In the
New York Times
of 22 February 1970, under the headline ‘The New Young Lunts?’, Walter Kerr (husband of the author of
Mary, Mary
) applauded two performers who subtly signalled that they were fighting hard for an eternal promise that was probably going to turn out to be false. When they were at last torn apart, Kerr noted Maggie’s discovery of sounds below the level of speech that would interest, and perhaps surprise, Jerzy Grotowski. This reference to the fashionable Polish avant-garde guru hinted at something disturbing and elemental in the performance, and the significance of acting with her volatile and seductive husband added another layer to the mixture. Robert’s flirtatiousness was almost his professional trademark. On being chided by Olivier for this, he retorted, ‘But I learned how to do it all from you!’

Maggie told the author and critic Ronald Hayman, ‘I think of Robert as an actor when we’re working, and not as my husband. But I can see that it’s easier for an audience to watch two people who are married playing two characters who are married. It’s all done for you.’ For his part, Robert told Hayman that their work on stage was never staled by custom or familiarity: ‘I’m always constantly surprised by Margaret. There are certain actors and actresses with whom you can never vary anything … But I wouldn’t say that I knew beforehand the way in which Margaret was going to speak some line. I’m constantly dazzled by a different reading or a different approach to a line.’

If they were the new Lunts, there seemed little chance of a repeat of the famous occasion when Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne ‘dried’ on stage together. The deathly silence was broken by the audible delivery of the next line by a prompter. Still neither actor spoke, and the prompt came again. Silence. Another prompt. Alfred turned crossly to the stage-management corner and hissed, ‘We know what the line is, but which one of us says it?’ Maggie also relished the story about Lunt’s failure to get an easy laugh on a line in which he requested a cup of tea. After weeks of puzzling over this, Fontanne finally asked her husband why he didn’t simply ask her for a cup of tea instead of asking the audience for the laugh. The Lunts, like Robert and Maggie, had made their own way as actors before appearing together for the first time in the 1924 production of Molnár’s
The Guardsman
, source of both the above anecdotes. The difference was that they were married while working separately for a long time prior to that historic success. Marriage for Robert and Maggie was inextricably linked to their work together, specifically at the National. Maggie eventually performed Molnár’s comedy not with Robert, but with Brian Bedford in Canada. There were, however, many plans to exploit the marriage on stage and screen, most of them emanating from Robert. It is ironic that this should have been so at the very time when Maggie, in Farquhar and Ibsen, portrayed the richly comic and profoundly tragic consequences of a wretched marriage.

She and director Gaskill picked up exactly where they had left off in
The Recruiting Officer
, and by the time
The Beaux’ Stratagem
returned from Los Angeles and opened at the Old Vic on 8 April, Maggie’s Mrs Sullen was a full-blown masterpiece of comic acting. At six o’clock that morning, Maggie heard that she had won the best actress Oscar in Hollywood. Her friend from the
New Faces
days, Alice Ghostley, collected the award on her behalf in the Music Center adjacent to the Ahmanson. She had unexpectedly beaten off challenges from Jean Simmons in
The Happy Ending
, Liza Minnelli in
The Sterile Cuckoo
and Jane Fonda in
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Her triumph was shared, at a distance, with John Wayne, who belatedly won his first Oscar for
True Grit
, and John Schlesinger, who was declared best director for
Midnight Cowboy
, which was also voted best picture. This was second time lucky for Maggie: she had been nominated in the supporting actress category for
Othello
. Gaskill recalls thinking how oddly low-key, and typically English, was that first-night reception at the Vic for someone who had just won an Oscar.

Farquhar’s last play is about divorce, with many references to the poet John Milton’s tracts on the subject. Two buccaneering gallants, Archer and Aimwell, arrive in the sleepy town of Lichfield and upset various apple carts. Archer homes in on Mrs Sullen, a London beauty driven frantic by boredom and shrewish by a sodden, elderly husband. Gaskill cleared the stage, and his designer partner on
The Recruiting Officer
, René Allio, delicately, but not preciously, conjured an English cathedral city in russet canvases and Queen Anne interiors, with an ochreously shaded High Street and a glimpse of the church beyond. The atmosphere was light and vaporous, conducive to the tasteful expression of high spirits. Benedict Nightingale in the
New Statesman
noted Maggie’s artful aggression and its effect on Robert:

Of all Maggie’s stage performances, it is Mrs Sullen that inspired the most impressively evocative writing from the critics, just as Edith Evans had started critical adjectives dancing in 1927 when she scored the biggest success of her career thus far in the same role. Maggie’s tilted nose and chin conveyed a heavenly contempt for men that was irresistible; her surreptitious smile betrayed a willingness to forgive a lesser species; and her swooping descent from decorum to appetite was epitomised at the moment when Robert’s Archer refused her money with a bow and she stood, purse held in her still-outstretched hand, while her eyes ran like zip fasteners up and down his extended leg.

She was a tight-laced beanpole, graceful, swaying and tender, who thawed among her own languid phrases and angular gestures. Her playing drew from Ronald Bryden a splendidly phrased comparison with some exquisite Douanier Rousseau giraffe, peering nervously down her nose with huge, liquid eyes at the smaller creatures around, nibbling off her lines fastidiously in a surprisingly tiny nasal drawl. The overall and overwhelming beauty of Maggie’s Mrs Sullen derived from the fact that her humorous façade masked the imminent possibility of tragedy and despair. And it proved, perhaps more so than any other of Maggie’s London performances, that the best of comedy always fends off disaster and that whereas farcical comedy ends in laughter, the true spirit of emotional comedy could just as easily end in tears. Gaskill thought she had matured immeasurably as an actress since they had worked on
The Recruiting Officer
, and remembers most the way she handled the speech which closed the first half. Gaskill adored Farquhar, but knew this poetic passage was feeble. He wanted to cut part of it, but Maggie asked for it back and, he says, ‘shaped it wonderfully. She played it in a pure classical style, quite breathtakingly’:

Maggie and Robert themselves were getting along quite well, but they were certainly not of ‘concurring tempers’. In late June they opened at the Cambridge Theatre in
Hedda Gabler
, and John Moffatt, who was playing Judge Brack, overheard many big rows through the dressing-room walls. Robert would occasionally forget to waken Maggie at the appointed time as she slept between matinée and evening performances, and she would fly into a rage. The National had extended its activity into the Cambridge, and the Ibsen was joined in repertoire there by
The Beaux’ Stratagem
in August. Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated Stockholm production of
Hedda Gabler
had visited the Aldwych Theatre as part of the World Theatre Season of 1968. Bergman had never directed a play outside Sweden, but was coerced into doing so in London by Olivier, to whom he habitually referred, with heavy sarcasm, as ‘the Lord’. Michael Meyer, whose translation was used, has recounted the dim view Bergman took of the play and expressed his own view that the production was a very striking evening, but only for someone who neither knew nor liked Ibsen.

The text was heavily cut. Great liberties were taken, some of them repeated in later productions, most notably the collaboration between the director Deborah Warner and the Irish actress Fiona Shaw at the Abbey in Dublin in 1991. There was no portrait of General Gabler and there were no vine leaves in Loevborg’s hair. Instead of the controlled revelation of Hedda’s pregnancy, Maggie appeared in a wordless prologue, pushing frantically at an unwanted bulge in her stomach, apparently on the point of vomiting. But there was something electrifying about this production, and certainly about Maggie’s performance. Robert Stephens says, quite unequivocally, that it is the best production of anything he has ever been in. John Moffatt says that, years later, he talked about it with Maggie and they agreed they had not encountered an experience like it since, nor a director: ‘What that man could do in a few seconds, the way he could transform a performance with one little remark. I could go on all day about it.’

Bergman was going to set up the recreation of his Stockholm version for about ten days and leave London to fulfil other commitments while Olivier took over. The billing would read something like ‘Ingmar Bergman’s production supervised by Laurence Olivier’. But he suddenly found he could rejig his plans and return for a week or so before the opening. He repeated an experiment he had tried, with success, before. He left the actors with masses of notes, asked Olivier to relinquish his ‘assistant director’ role (Olivier was only too happy to oblige) and instructed them to rehearse for a maximum of four hours a day, on their own. No one was to disturb their work. In his autobiography, Bergman says that the only reason he did
Hedda
in the first place was that the brilliant actress Gertrud Fridh had no leading part that autumn. He set about his task with some reluctance, but found that ‘the face of its weary supreme architect was unmasked’ and that ‘Ibsen lived desperately entangled in his furnishings, his explanations, his artistic but pedantically constructed scenes, his curtain lines, his arias and duets. All this bulky external lumber hid an obsession for self-exposure far more profound than Strindberg’s.’

Michael Meyer, on the other hand, rated
Hedda Gabler
one of the most economically written of all great plays, which Bergman cut as though it were a film. Much of the humour, said the increasingly humourless Meyer, went out of the window. So, for that matter, did the windows. The stage was a red vault with a screen down the middle. On one side, the text was enacted while, on the other, the actors, primarily Hedda, explored unspoken emotions. Bryden assumed that this interpretation was based on the Freudian case history of Emilie Bardach, the elegant, repressed Viennese woman Ibsen had met and flirted with on a Tyrolean holiday in 1899. And he thought that this admittedly brilliant but non-naturalistic treatment deprived the play of its mystery and Maggie of the opportunity to exploit her gift for lacing her games in polite society with scornful artificiality. Irving Wardle, too, considered the device distracting, though Maggie Smith’s reactions, he said, like those of Gertrud Fridh, were ‘powerful and stylistically beautiful’.