Maggie Smith: A Biography (2 page)

The hands, the gestures, what the director Robin Phillips, with whom she spent those seasons at the Stratford, Ontario, festival in Canada, once called ‘those witty, witty elbows’, the quizzical tilt of head, all are part of a technical mechanism whose inner working remains a mystery. Her friend and fellow actor Alec McCowen says that with most actors he can see how the wheels go round. With Maggie, he can’t. Others have puzzled for years over her way of making a line, or a word, sit up and bop an audience on the nose. She once complimented the Irish actor Joseph Maher for ‘never answering last night’s question,’ by which she meant that he played off exactly what came to him from the other actors. Maher confessed that he thought that was what actors were supposed to do. ‘You find me five people who can,’ Maggie snapped back. Maher also notes the insertion of an intake of breath, even a tiny ‘d’you know’, as a missing beat in a line that might not otherwise stand up and be funny. This is a good example of a purely instinctive technical gift, and only used very sparingly. Nicholas Pennell, who acted in Canada with Maggie, also thought long and hard about this trick, and reckons it is a way of ensuring that the line sounds as if it is being spoken for the very first time. Little repetitions come into it, too, sometimes almost imperceptibly. Pennell has heard a particular phrase repeated, very quickly, not to reiterate meaning, but to cancel it, so that attention is engaged by starting on an entirely different tack.

The American film critic Pauline Kael said of Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall
that she raised anxiety to an art form. The phrase has often been reapplied to Maggie Smith as a way of dealing with that peculiar tetchiness and angularity, as well as the speed of thought and motion, which is her ineradicable trademark. Because of her concentration and intellect, the fluffiness of her acting never curdles, though detractors sometimes complain of emotion that is entirely self-generated or mannerisms that are over-familiar. Maggie’s reaction is to shrug sympathetically and mutter that she can’t help being lumbered with her own deficiencies, as she adopts yet another gloomy view of the perennially hostile world. She uses her moods of depression to reactivate her determination to work out the best way of doing the next line, the next scene, the next play, the next film. Another profound aspect of her mystery is the fact that so much is buried and bottled up inside. As Angela Fox, mother of Edward, James and Robert, once said, ‘You couldn’t act like Maggie unless you’d known deep personal emotion. Vanessa’s the same.’

Few actors come wittier than Maggie Smith. It is not so much that she deals in polished, highly quotable aphorisms, as did Mrs Patrick Campbell, say, or Coral Browne. With Maggie, it is her slightly jaundiced and highly critical way of looking at the world that both makes her funny and characterises her acting. She cannot help being funny. Harold Clurman once said she thinks funny. She enjoys nothing more, when in the mood, than a good calumniating gossip. ‘Laying people out to filth,’ she used to call it when opening the file on friends and foes with her sons’ nanny Christine Miller. The waspishness of her nicknames for colleagues is invariably tinged with a precise germ of observation. Thus, Michael Blakemore is either ‘the wily Aussie’ or ‘Crocodile Blakemore’; Vanessa Redgrave ‘the red snapper’; Patrick Mower, who played opposite her in London in Tom Stoppard’s
Night and Day
, ‘the lawn-mower’, with a drawling emphasis on the ‘lawn’; Peter Shaffer, ‘Ruby’; Brian Bedford simply ‘the Duchess’, as in the Duchess of Bedford; and Michael Palin, with whom no fault can be found, even more simply, ‘the saint’.

Like John Gielgud, Maggie is widely imitated in other people’s conversations, but remains entirely inimitable. Gielgud impersonations always suggest that the actor was ever so grand, which is the one thing he was not. No one, of course, is a better mimic of everyone else than Maggie herself. And like the late Coral Browne, and indeed another demon perfectionist with a devoted cult following, Patience Collier, Maggie thrives in the company of homosexuals. This may have something to do with the elimination of sexual tension in the relationship or the fact that theatrical gays are often funnier and more fun to be with than their straight counterparts. But she has always needed close and confidential gay friends. Kenneth Williams was Maggie’s closest friend in her early days. He recounted how, when they were going round Fortnum’s together, Maggie was aghast at the prices in the lingerie department. ‘Seven guineas for a bra?’ she exploded. ‘Cheaper to have your tits off!’

Another Williams story has survived many reworkings. When Williams was cast as the young boy in Robert Bolt’s
Gentle Jack
, Edith Evans was outraged. In her most extravagantly baroque and fluting of voices, she complained to the management, ‘But you can’t have him, he’s got such a peculiar voice.’ This pot-and-kettle story was recirculated when Maggie was said to have expostulated in a similar manner on hearing that Geraldine McEwan, another husky specialist in the loaded coloration of vowel sounds, was to succeed her in the London cast of Peter Shaffer’s
Lettice and Lovage
.

When Maggie went to New York with
Lettice
, an all-dancing, all-singing black entertainment about Mahalia Jackson, performed by Queen Esther Marrow and her Harlem Gospel Singers, moved briefly into the Longacre, the theatre which backed on to her own. She was furious at having her backstage peace and calm shattered by the frantic and ecstatic singing going on next door. Executives of the Shubert Organization, who owned both theatres, were summoned to a matinée performance. After much rubbing of hands and beating of chests, they came up with what they hoped would be a satisfactory solution. Apologising for not having thought of it before, they said that they had some wonderful thick black velours which they could string around the inside back wall of both theatres, thus insulating Maggie and her fellow actors against the invasive gospel singing of Queen Esther and her exultant congregation. Maggie went off for a break and returned to the theatre for the evening performance. The company manager met her with the good news: ‘I think you’ll be very pleased, Dame Maggie. We’ve hung all the blacks.’ Maggie threw him a severe riposte: ‘Well, I don’t think there was any need to go that far.’

There are two versions of a jovial altercation with Ronald Harwood, author of
Interpreters
, in which Maggie appeared with Edward Fox, and the second of her movies to be called
Quartet
. Even her closest friends have to judge very carefully as to when is the right moment to pay a backstage visit. Harwood was impervious to such niceties and was always popping into the dressing rooms of the Queen’s to jolly along the actors in a play that had not been a resounding success. In addition, Fox and Maggie, not the most compatible of co-stars, were hardly speaking to each other. Eventually, Maggie had had enough and when Harwood put his head round her door yet again he promptly had it bitten off. ‘Hello, Ronnie,’ enquired Maggie coldly, ‘and what are you up to now?’ ‘Struggling with a new play, darling,’ Harwood replied. Maggie paused and inspected her nails, ‘So are we, dear.’ (The other, apocryphal version suggests that Harwood replied to Maggie’s question with ‘Trying to finish a new play, darling.’ To which Maggie impatiently snapped, ‘Try finishing this one first.’)

The hasty three-week filming of the National Theatre’s
Othello
with Olivier at Shepperton Studios in 1965 entailed a lot of rushing about for Maggie (as Desdemona), who was appearing at the time in
Miss Julie
and
Black Comedy
at Chichester. She was flown by helicopter between the theatre and the studios and was met on the first day of this arrangement by the director, Stuart Burge, who had gone out to give her some rehearsal notes. As Maggie emerged in a tangle from beneath the whirring blades, she exclaimed to Burge: ‘Christ, I never thought I’d look down between my legs and see Guildford.’

Sister Act
was a 1992 riff on Billy Wilder’s masterpiece
Some Like It Hot
in which Maggie played a Mother Superior and Whoopi Goldberg a nightclub singer who has witnessed a murder and is taking refuge in the convent disguised as an inmate. She’s a nun on the run. On location in Reno, the actors experienced some difficulty with the narrative logic, or lack of it, in the script. The Pope was supposed to have sent a message to his subordinates, but it was not clear how the plot line could have accommodated his intervention with any plausibility. How could His Holiness have contacted the underlings? ‘By fax vobiscum, I presume,’ offered Maggie from the sidelines.

Whenever Maggie bumps into Alec McCowen, she makes him do his ‘turtle routine’, for reasons which are now lost in the mists of time but have something to do with the fact that McCowen has an old joke in his repertoire in which he impersonates a turtle. ‘Hello, turtle,’ Maggie says, and off he goes, doing his turtle business, bubbling his cheeks and clawing the air in doggy-paddle-cum-breast-stroke movements. Does this palaver dignify, you may ask, one of our most eminent senior actors, a CBE and, what is more, a native of Tunbridge Wells? ‘Oh, Alec’s always been about twelve,’ Maggie chortles. Her long-serving dresser, Christopher Downes, was a great collector of Maggie’s barbs and asides and immodestly recounted one involving himself at a busy party. Downes was deep in conversation with another guest who was asking, ‘Yes, Christopher, but what do you actually do?’ At that precise moment, Maggie was wafting past with a tray and threw her voice back over her shoulder: ‘He saves people’s lives.’

This airiness, this waspishness, is displayed to great effect in many of her movie performances, and also as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in
Downton Abbey
. In the series so far, Maggie’s dowager has duelled memorably with Shirley MacLaine, visiting Downton as her daughter-in-law Lady Cora’s flamboyant mother; Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) in every scene they share; even a tall new recruit to the downstairs staff: ‘Are you really that tall? I thought you might be walking on stilts.’ Each line is coloured with either mockery or disbelief, even if it doesn’t always rise to the standard of Oscar Wilde or indeed Julian Fellowes himself at his best. She and Fellowes first collaborated on Robert Altman’s
Gosford Park
(Fellowes won an Oscar for his screenplay), an upstairs/downstairs murder mystery movie set in 1932, eight years after the end of the fifth series of
Downton
. Maggie played Lady Constance Trentham, a visiting aristocrat at another grand country house for a weekend shooting party where the guests include the composer Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Northam) shortly after he’s made an unsuccessful movie. ‘What was it?’ asks Maggie, searching for the title, ‘The Dodger?’ ‘
The Lodger
,’ replies the composer, through half-gritted teeth. (The 1927 Alfred Hitchcock silent movie was not really a flop, and is now rightly considered a cult classic.) ‘It must be so disappointing when something … flops … like that,’ she coos, unhelpfully, with a slight twist of her wrists, inviting a slap that no one would dare administer.

Just before the first airing of
Downton Abbey
, Fellowes and Maggie worked for a second time together on a film called
From Time to Time
, he as writer and director, she as the middle-class incumbent of a country estate whose grandson, during the Second World War, is sent to stay after his father goes missing, presumed dead, in action. There’s an extraordinary moment when she stops at a doorway as it seems she has at last reached a sort of rapprochement with her sceptical young grandson, and says simply, starkly and unflinchingly, that she loves him more than anyone else in the world, apart from her own son. Most actresses would garnish this line with an emotional hiccup, or teary sniffle. Not her. She’s adamantine stern, and all the more moving.

It occurred to me watching this movie that Maggie has become increasingly adept, indeed expert, in working with children over the past twenty years – in
The Secret Garden
, the Harry Potter movies (she said that her performance was, basically, Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard’s hat, and was her pension for life; and that was nine years before
Downton Abbey
started!),
My House in Umbria
, Emma Thompson’s second
Nanny McPhee
film – and I imagine that’s palpably to do with the fact that she seems to treat them as adults in her acting. She’s also an enthusiastic grandmother to the five children of her now middle-aged actor sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. Their favourite granny highlight is the moment in
Nanny McPhee
when she sits in a cowpat.

Golden times belong, by definition, to the past. But the past fifty years of Maggie’s continuous career might soon qualify, not least because of her stage work in Alan Bennett, Edward Albee, Restoration comedy and Shakespeare (more of that in Canada than in England, alas), but also because of the way her screen acting has refined itself from comic extravagance to the raw, naked business of emotional exposition and truth-telling. Twenty years ago, it seemed to me that Maggie sustained within herself this battle between an unrivalled technical expertise and stark emotional revelation. But that expertise has been channelled, almost brutally, in the service of the latter function, and her performances, both on screen and stage, have acquired a severity that softens, rather than a flippancy which stiffens, so that even Lady Violet in
Downton Abbey
is someone you don’t mess with before you realise there’s a twinkle and a vaguely malicious humour round the edges.

Before
Downton
, her last television drama was Stephen Poliakoff’s
Capturing Mary
, in which she gave a remarkable performance of both collapse and reminiscence as a woman stripped of her own talent by a vile intellectual seducer. Half the film, as far as her part in it was concerned, was in voice-over, but it is typical of her forensic methodology that she learned the entire script, off-stage cues and all, and recorded those voice-overs ‘live’ in character, costume, and on the set. This encapsulated her habit of both performing a role and standing outside of it, a unique ability long ago noted by Tom Stoppard, lending an air of spontaneity and critical wisdom to every role she plays.