Maggie Smith: A Biography (23 page)

The backstage politicking was hotting up and the theatre went through a period of financial decline and artistic uncertainty until John Neville, another British director, steadied the ship in the late 1980s. In due course, Robin was appointed artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre but resigned almost immediately for reasons that have never been made clear. He spent five years (1990–95) as artistic director of the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta, before resuming a freelance career. Undoubtedly, Robin must be credited with salvaging and relaunching Maggie’s stage career. And although his plans to re-enter London in triumph, with a full season including Ustinov as King Lear, were in tatters,
Virginia
and Maggie’s performance would come to the Haymarket at the start of 1981. This event, more than the takeover in
Night and Day
, marked Maggie’s official return to London.

The first-night audience at the Haymarket on 29 January 1981, which included John Gielgud, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Plowright, John Osborne and Harold Pinter, reflected the heightened sense of anticipation. The play begins and ends with the words ‘Something tremendous is about to happen’, a description of the one experience, death, that Virginia told Vita Sackville-West she would never describe. This paragraph was delivered by Maggie in a voice of quiet apprehension. At the end, her voice soared, exultant and golden. In between, we had an expressionistic distillation of what Virginia Woolf herself called ‘moments of being’.

Throughout the 1970s, subsequent to Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf biography, hardly a Sunday had passed, it seemed, without the publication in one of the newspapers of yet more revelations and secondary material about Virginia and the Bloomsbury set. Maggie’s performance achieved the extraordinary feat of entering a plea for privacy on the writer’s behalf. Edna O’Brien’s script did not refer to the everyday trials and tribulations of running the Hogarth Press, and contained not a whisper of the pamphleteering literary feminist. The social whirl of London and the Woolfs’ country retreat at Rodmell were vague, unpopulated backgrounds against which Maggie registered disgusted shivers at all intrusions, a shuddering distaste for the physical life in general and for copulation in particular, and an impatient desire to be left alone. As Quentin Bell said of the novels, an audience actually heard Virginia Woolf thinking.

Virginia
had received only seventeen performances in Stratford, but Michael Billington caught one of them and declared this the best role written for a woman since Miss Brodie was in her prime. In London it was apparent that a great tragi-comic actress was restored in full bloom, and Jack Tinker’s comment that Maggie’s Virginia contrived to look ‘as though she was indeed born with one skin too few to survive in this world’ was prophetic of one or two self-lacerating performances to come. In the
Evening Standard
report of how the judges decided on giving Maggie her third best actress prize, Bernard Levin said that her achievement in keeping him awake and interested in a play about Virginia Woolf, a writer he hated, was not to be underestimated.

The production was minimalist, with photographic images of the eerily haunting branches at Rodmell and the streets of London projected on to an arrangement of scrims. There were no properties, and just two chairs. The whole presentation seemed designed to show how Maggie had stripped down her engine and reassembled the parts after giving them a good clean. Nicholas Pennell was Leonard Woolf and Patricia Connolly Vita Sackville-West, the latter playing a fine scene culled from the book written in her honour,
Orlando
. O’Brien had distilled the entire play from the novels, the diaries and Quentin Bell’s biography. She described the process of possession to Lucy Hughes-Hallett: ‘The play came from inside me, but it is all Virginia. I worked like a sleepwalker, like a medium. It is a wedding for the two of us. For her, I hope, it is a resurrection.’

Pennell and Connolly had come to London from Canada with Maggie and Robin. One night, there were flashing lights before the curtain rose, traced to a lady in the front circle wearing a dress heavily adorned with sequins. When told about it, Maggie asked, ‘Is she hanging from the dome and revolving slowly?’ But the sequins were not, it transpired, the real cause of the trouble. A light in the fridge in the downstairs bar had short-circuited all the auditorium lighting. Nicholas Pennell remembers above all the relish with which Maggie acted:

Jollity took a jolt halfway through the twelve-week run when Maggie’s brother, Alistair, dropped dead of a heart attack one Sunday in Tigbourne Court. His demise, at the age of fifty-two, was totally unexpected. He had no record of ill health. Ian was the twin who had been rejected for National Service in 1951 on health grounds. Pennell called Maggie to sympathise, assuming that the Monday-night performance would be cancelled. But she was determined to go on, and said she wanted ‘to get concentrated’. Pennell and Patricia Connolly joined her in the theatre at about three o’clock and went through some physical stretching exercises for a couple of hours in the front-of-house area. They returned to the dressing rooms through the darkened auditorium. Pennell recalls that, as they came up the stairs to the stage and went through the proscenium arch that divides reality from fiction,

Ian Smith, the surviving twin, thinks that Maggie has difficulty in expressing emotion and may sometimes give the impression that she does not care very much. She did care very much about Alistair’s death, but she never transmitted what she felt to the family. The matter was simply not to be discussed.

Tigbourne Court, which had been bought for £37,000, was sold for £185,000. Shân, Alistair’s widow, decided that she would not move with Maggie and Beverley, but that she’d be better off on her own. She found a comfortable house in Milford, three or four miles from Tigbourne, with stables for her horse. Beverley found a well-concealed farmhouse in Sussex. It was more manageable than Tigbourne, on two floors and not too big. The original farmhouse dated from the late fifteenth century and a farmer had added some rather fine Georgian extensions in the early nineteenth century. The place had fallen into disrepair until it was acquired by a prominent QC from a dowager aunt and fitted out with proper plumbing and other amenities. Maggie and Beverley moved in during 1981, lived there happily until Beverley’s death in 1998, and Maggie is there still. The boys were enrolled at Seaford College, a minor public school situated on the downs between Petworth and Chichester which neither of them much enjoyed, though both proudly claim to have passed more O-Levels than their mother. Maggie had insisted on them knuckling down to their work. Christopher persisted into the sixth form and successfully took A-Levels in English, history and politics. Toby was mightily relieved to be out of Tigbourne Court, liberated from its airiness and bigness, and its situation on an increasingly busy main road. ‘Also, Surrey is such a boring county, with horrible places like Godalming. Sussex is really nice.’

In the 1980s, Maggie appeared in some very reputable films, but still the ‘great film’ eluded her. On the stage she brought only one of her Canadian performances to London – Millamant, in a new production by William Gaskill. The decade ended with the tumultuous commercial and critical success of her performance in
Lettice and Lovage
. She would always remain imperishably funny. But perhaps those heart-stopping moments of doubt, insecurity and anguish as Stoppard’s Ruth Carson and as Edna O’Brien’s Virginia Woolf were indicators of some extraordinary non-classical tragic work to come, on both large and small screen.

One of the distinctive features of Maggie’s film career in the 1980s was that she appeared in movies that had more appeal for her than for the accountants in her agents’ office. In her time at Fraser and Dunlop, Jimmy Fraser handled the film contracts and Peter Dunlop the theatre business. However, their influence on what she actually did was minimal. Dunlop retired in 1980, shortly after the mix-up over
Night and Day
. In July 1981 Maggie announced in
Variety
that her sole worldwide representation was now handled by James Sharkey at Fraser and Dunlop. Or rather, Sharkey made the announcement, which featured a photograph of Maggie in
The Guardsman
at her most impishly soignée: hair up, eyes soft and sparkling, full lower lip, a jewelled halter. Sharkey was at that time the most widely respected and brilliant of all actors’ agents. But Maggie didn’t take much notice of him, either. By 1984 she had joined Laurence ‘Lol’ Evans, chairman of International Creative Management and Olivier’s general manager at the Old Vic in the 1940s. Evans was the doyen of the ten-per-centers. His all-star list included Olivier, Rex Harrison, John Mills, Albert Finney and Peter Hall. Maggie was even more of a mystery to Evans and, in the serene, secure twilight of his career, he happily went along with anything she wanted to do. By the end of 1991, Evans, too, had become a back number as he was eased into a consultative retirement and the younger, more dynamic Duncan Heath took charge of Maggie’s affairs at ICM. She summed up by commenting, ‘Nothing ever seemed quite right after Peter Dunlop.’

Maggie was increasingly attracted to smaller-budget, reputable ventures in preference to the international blockbuster projects that left her little chance to get her teeth into a good part. On both stage and screen she can be squeamish about bad language, and in this respect is unprepared to betray either the propriety of her lower-middle-class upbringing or the genuine instinct she has for not alienating a broad popular audience. Like all the great stars of old, she believes in exercising good taste wherever possible in matters of apparel, manners, public statements and morality. She can, of course, swear like a trooper when she’s in the mood and behind closed doors. When William Gaskill sent her a copy of Howard Barker’s rewrite of
Women Beware Women
, she was aghast at the barrage of filthy language and explicit sexual discussion, and turned him down flat. She had also turned down his invitation to appear as a cannibalistic Queen Victoria in Edward Bond’s
Early Morning
. Similarly, when she was invited to impersonate Peggy Ramsay, the straight-talking agent of the dramatist Joe Orton in the film
Prick Up Your Ears
, her reaction to Alan Bennett’s screenplay, which dealt in homosexual promiscuity and murder, was to retreat behind the excuse of not wanting to embarrass or upset her sons by appearing in such a film (the role was memorably taken by Vanessa Redgrave, though the agent’s bird-like frailty and coruscating waspishness were much more Maggie’s forte).

But it would be wrong to claim that she was completely unadventurous in her choices of material. After her final seven-month season in Stratford, Ontario, she had a week’s holiday and then, typically, went straight to Paris with Beverley to join the Merchant Ivory shoot of Jean Rhys’s first novel,
Quartet
. Jean Rhys, a favourite novelist, was, like Virginia Woolf, someone whose every written word she had long since devoured. Like her responses to most things, Maggie’s response to literature is instinctive and intuitive. In drama, the challenge of Shakespeare and Congreve is inexhaustible because the writing demands the utmost technical concentration. It also offers the attractive challenge of playing women who assert their individuality in the face of social and marital constrictions. For similar reasons, Maggie has always found inspiration in the high stylists of the feminine consciousness: Woolf, Rhys, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, E. F. Benson and many of the women writers published or reissued by the distinctive and aptly named Virago Press. There is a definite link in the 1980s between the spiritual nutrition Maggie found in her reading and the projects she undertook. The producer of
Quartet
, Ismail Merchant, the director James Ivory, and their regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, were embarked on a series of literary adaptations on low budgets that found large audiences attracted to their visions of faithful and respectable nostalgia. Ivory is not a galvanic or deeply imaginative sort of director, but he does deliver pretty packages. As Pauline Kael has said, ‘he’s essentially a director who assembles the actors, arranges the bric-à-brac and calls for the camera’.

The autobiographical heroine, a doomed Creole waif, played by the beautiful Isabelle Adjani, is corrupted by the married partnership of the writer Hugh Heidler and the painter Lois after her husband has been convicted of trafficking in stolen works of art. The Heidlers, played by Alan Bates and Maggie, had been modelled by Jean Rhys on her Parisian Svengali, Ford Madox Ford, and his wife Stella Bowen. The setting was mostly Montparnasse in 1927, and the full period flavour was dutifully milked. There were stunning scenes set in their proper locations of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a steely art-deco restaurant, and the virtually unchanged ballroom of the Hôtel Pavillon Opéra, where Maggie glittered menacingly in a silver sheath dress, green eye make-up, and a silver skullcap. Maggie had never worked with Alan Bates before (they both appeared, later, in
Gosford Park
), but the pairing is a major factor in the film’s attractive surface. There is something compulsively sinister in Bates’s devious hedonism for which Maggie dutifully pimps, confiding to Adjani through clouds of cigarette smoke that her husband is not always ‘nice’ to her, and that she is accustomed to his extramarital adventures. Like all the Merchant Ivory adaptations, however, the movie fed off the original by softening the novel and failing to match its essence with a transforming artistic identity of its own. It is also fatally careless with the storyline, so that it is almost impossible to know exactly what happens at the end. There is no such confusion or ambiguity in Rhys’s narrative.

The acting all round was very good, with some delightful vignettes from British actors Sheila Gish, Anthony Higgins and Bernice Stegers, but Maggie walked off with the best actress prize in the
Evening Standard
Film Awards in an exceptional year for British movies. Other winners were
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(best film), Bob Hoskins making his decisive breakthrough in
The Long Good Friday
, and Colin Welland’s screenplay for
Chariots of Fire
.

After the bohemian quartet came a thoroughly mawkish ménage à trois (at one point the film’s working title),
Better Late Than Never
, written and directed by Bryan Forbes and a strong contender for Maggie’s worst film. The main point of interest is that it was also David Niven’s last picture (he died in 1983), and the third he made with Maggie. Niven played Nick Cartland, a seedy nightclub singer, ‘England’s soufflé of song’, who is summoned to Monte Carlo by a lawyer (Lionel Jeffries) to compete for the guardianship of a ten-year-old girl, Bridget, who might or might not be his granddaughter. Maggie is the stern child-minder, Anderson, ‘not Mary Poppins’, whom Nick and Bridget tease with such rollicking wheezes as blue soap, rubber eggs and whoopee cushions.

The mechanics of the comedy are pretty hopeless and an overall air of shoddiness is not dispelled by some attractive locations in the South of France nor by the Niven character’s bottom-chasing antics on the beach. He picks up an over-made-up pneumatic good-time girl called Sable who turns out, most unfortunately, to be an apprentice embalmer. Mixed in with the awful soundtrack by Henry Mancini and a charmless child actor, the film leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

After this aberration, Maggie’s only two ‘international’ blockbusters of the 1980s – the mythical epic
Clash of the Titans
and a second Agatha Christie luxury-cast mystery insouciantly unravelled by Peter Ustinov’s tunbelly Poirot,
Evil Under the Sun
– come as a considerable relief. Both have their merits. The first was scripted by Beverley, who had not worked with or for Maggie since she appeared in
Strip the Willow
in 1960 (a projected Stratford collaboration on a Cross script about the Brontës,
Haworth
, had been scrapped at the time of Robin Phillips’s first illness in 1978; the play was premiered, starring Polly James, at the Birmingham Rep in 1981). The second reunited Maggie with several of the
Death on the Nile
team: screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, Ustinov, Jane Birkin and her favourite costume designer, Anthony Powell.

In
Clash of the Titans
Maggie plays the goddess Thetis, antagonist of Perseus, and tetchy inamorata of Zeus. As the latter is played by Laurence Olivier, presiding over an idealised, antiseptic Olympus where the other white-gowned goddesses include Claire Bloom, Ursula Andress and Susan Fleetwood, the ancient Old Vic rivalry is lightly resumed. Olivier had resolved never to act on a stage with Maggie again after
The Master Builder
, and Maggie’s Thetis, albeit only in a reported incident, once again ‘bests’ the old boy: she recounts with relish how Zeus once disguised himself as a cuttlefish in an attempt to seduce her, but that she beat him at his own game by turning herself into a shark. Beverley had taken spirited liberties with Greek mythology in racily retelling the Perseus legend. Perseus is obliged to return to Joppa and rescue Andromeda from a deformed suitor, Thetis’s son Calibos; he must answer a riddle, capture and tame the last of the flying horses, Pegasus, and enter the temple of Medusa; there, after being attacked by snakes and a two-headed wolf, he cuts off Medusa’s head and, with her eyes, petrifies the monster Kraken, whom Zeus has unchained from the ocean bed to ravish Andromeda and destroy Joppa. (‘Great Zeus,’ says Maggie, ‘it is now the eve of the longest day’; ‘Very well,’ replies Olivier, ‘release the Kraken!’)

The last sequence owes something to the assault on Fay Wray and New York City by King Kong, and indeed this homage is intentionally perpetrated by the film’s co-producer and special effects wizard, Ray Harryhausen, who was a protégé of King Kong’s creator, Willis O’Brien. Harryhausen, in addition to creating the pterodactyl which carried off Raquel Welch in
One Million Years BC
, had provided the special effects for another Beverley Cross-scripted film,
Jason and the Argonauts
. The influence of
Star Wars
could be seen, too, in Harryhausen’s golden owl, a speaking mechanical android whose appeal to audiences was similar to that of R2D2 in the 1977 George Lucas fantasy. But the film really belongs to the general tradition of Hollywood escapist adventures, and Beverley had cast his net wide. The hairy, sexually frustrated Calibos was obviously related to Shakespeare’s Caliban, and the sea-monster Kraken had arrived from Norse mythology via Tennyson. There were also magical swords, enchanted shields, invisibility helmets, the belief in the overwhelming power of a kiss and even three blind witches, the grotesque Graeae, who share one single crystal eye; they were unrecognisably impersonated by Flora Robson, Freda Jackson and the Irish actress Anna Manahan.

Maggie comes a cropper when the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda is anointed by Siân Phillips (playing Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia): her statue crashes hilariously to the ground and breaks up while her gigantic face continues to mouth demands for the life of the woman who spurned her son. At least Maggie could not complain in this scene that her head was too small. The effects of the flying horse, the speaking owl and the disintegrating Kraken are indeed enjoyable – in a
Harry Potter
-ish sort of way – even if in long shot the bestiary now resembles those plastic animals one used to find in breakfast cereal packets.

Not much more of a performance was demanded of Maggie in
Evil Under the Sun
, and, as a result, she resorts to a lot of wrist-flapping as the cheerfully coarse-grained Daphne Castle, a royal ex-mistress and hotel proprietor, who is in love with the murdered woman’s husband (Denis Quilley). Christie’s 1941 novel had been moved by Shaffer back to the 1930s – thus justifying lavish holiday costumes and the songs of Cole Porter – and transported from Cornwall to a remote Tyrrhenian island. The principal location setting was Majorca, with its travel-brochure beaches, craggy cliffs, turquoise lagoons and subtropical gardens. Quilley’s doomed wife, the actress Arlena Marshall, played by Diana Rigg, represents a rivalry with Daphne going back to their days together as chorus girls: ‘She could always throw her legs up in the air higher than any of us – and wider!’ The twosome momentarily bury the hatchet in a squirm-inducing, badly sung rendition of Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’.

As Diana Rigg’s character has already refused to appear in a show called ‘It’s Not Right and It’s Not Fair’ because, she says, it sounds like a black man’s left leg, she receives no less than her just deserts when she is strangled on the beach. The incident is presaged by one scene
Variety
thought worthy of Luis Buñuel: Maggie is shocked on a walk through the lush landscape by the sight of a dead rabbit with worms crawling through its innards. Maggie, understandably, is anxious to pin the murder on anyone but herself, and her performance improves slightly as she is quickened into anxiety by circumstances. But Diana Rigg is not the only stiff on board. The cast includes cardboard cut-outs by Sylvia Miles as an importunate producer (incongruously paired with James Mason) and Roddy McDowall as a campy showbiz columnist called Rex Brewster, reinforcing the idea that he is a dull facsimile of the real thing, Rex Reed, with a succession of lame and spiteful aphorisms. Ustinov cumbersomely unravels the mystery in a narrative punctuated by flashbacks. The movie was deemed inoffensive enough to be chosen as the Royal Film for 1982, the third time Maggie had been implicated in that command event (her other ‘royal’ films to date were
Jean Brodie
and
California Suite
, both considerably superior and more ‘adult’).