Maggie Smith: A Biography (24 page)

In concentrating on a now highly paid film career in between the seasons at Stratford, Maggie had not had time to take up any offers on television. She had not made any television appearances in Britain since going to Canada, but she now returned to the medium with a performance in a William Trevor story, dramatised by Bob Larbey, that is a crucial statement of poignant, funny isolation on the journey from Virginia Woolf to the fraught heroines of Brian Moore and Alan Bennett in
The Loneliness of Judith Hearne
and
Bed Among the Lentils
. She began to specialise in ladies on the brink, alone in their rooms and on the verge of some cataclysmic, menopausal breakdown. Essential to this is the cast of the actress’s mind, which had always suggested that relations with the opposite sex were seriously overrated. Funny ladies – Beatrice Lillie, Ruth Gordon, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Lily Tomlin – were traditionally slightly beyond the pale, freakish, sexually intimidating, even neutral. Maggie, with blazing individuality, combined their cavalier raucousness and low view of masculine rapacity with an aching physical plausibility, an obvious capacity for being attractive.

This unique admixture of spiritual hauteur and physical need set off some fascinating alarm bells in the gallery of characters she now began to create. In William Trevor’s
Mrs Silly
, directed by James Cellan Jones for Granada TV as part of an ‘All for Love’ series, Florence Barlow is a divorced vicar’s wife whose son, Michael, is wrenched from her by the expectations of a snobbish preparatory school which she visits like some pathetic intruder, clumsily mistaking the headmaster’s wife for the matron.

Maggie’s remarkable performance both prefigures and complements the more widely acclaimed interpretation of Susan, the vicar’s wife, in
Bed Among the Lentils
. The overpowering sense of social ostracism is in both cases compounded by one of resilience and dignity in defeat, though Bennett provides an additional strain of sarcastic commentary. The Trevor heroine is less complicated, but conceived on the tragic scale by dint of piercing observation and emotional truth. Physically, Maggie’s Florence has the stark angularity of a Modigliani portrait and the chattering, incipiently out-of-control disposition of any inner-city bag-lady. The looming gulf between herself and her son is a dark pit into which she is starting to fall.

Another small-screen project, a co-production between the BBC and Hungarian television, was not nearly so memorable.
Lily in Love
was an unhappy rewrite by Frank Cucci of
The Guardsman
, directed by Károly Makk and starring Maggie and Christopher Plummer as the married protagonists. Plummer played an actor, Fitzroy Wynn, a Broadway has-been with unfulfilled ambitions to be a cinema heart-throb, while Maggie was Lily Wynn, an authoress whose next comedy screenplay, with a good-looking, sexy male leading role, was deemed unsuitable for her spouse. The Molnár conceit is reworked as a ruse by Fitz disguised not as a Russian guardsman, but as ‘Roberto Terranova’, an absurd blond Italian actor from Parma (a town famous for its hams) who seduces Lily on location in Budapest. It is quite a controlled and attractive performance by Maggie, and she looks beautiful and elegant. She seems, for purposes of minimal plausibility, to suggest that she knows Roberto is Fitz all along. But everything that is funny and ambiguous in the Molnár play is trampled in a crassly inappropriate script which sounds as though it is being made up on the spot. Maggie confessed to an interviewer that work on the set was complicated because she had trouble understanding what the director was saying. She referred to the film as ‘the ghoulash’ (and to her co-star as ‘Christopher Bummer’): ‘It was all slightly horrendous. You didn’t know where you were half the time. Usually in the wrong place.’

The British film industry of the 1980s was relaunched on a wave of investment and optimism unprecedented since the 1950s. Like all such hallucinations, it proved as temporary as it was briefly dazzling. The rise and fall of Goldcrest, the emergence of David Puttnam as an independent producer of real flair and the increasing investment raised by co-production with television companies were all significant elements in the boom. When the tide receded on this era in British movie-making, Maggie was seen to have been involved in at least two films of especial interest. They were both produced by HandMade Films, the company financed and run by ex-Beatle George Harrison and producer Denis O’Brien, which had been responsible for such exuberant British movies as the Pythons’ mock-Biblical
Life of Brian
, Peter Nichols’s
Privates on Parade
and Barrie Keeffe’s
The Long Good Friday
.

The first,
The Missionary
, starring and written by Michael Palin, is not a total success, but is certainly, as David Robinson said in
The Times
, ‘a superior comedy as British comedies go’; the second,
A Private Function
, also starring Michael Palin but written by Alan Bennett, is not only one of the funniest, and most nearly perfect, British films of the century, but also, as Philip French said in the
Observer
, ‘as authentic a picture of the darker side of postwar Britain as our cinema has given us’. I would be tempted to submit
A Private Function
as the best movie Maggie has appeared in. It is entirely typical of her that she should have fallen in with two of our most irreverent and talented satirists, Palin and Bennett. Both are university wits, performers with no formal training or theatrical background, and influential humorists. Palin, in his Monty Python mode, sparring partner to John Cleese and Terry Gilliam, operates in the robustly surreal and funny-voice tradition of Lewis Carroll and
The Goon Show
of BBC Radio in the 1950s (which starred Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers); while Bennett, who made his name alongside Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in the revue
Beyond the Fringe
in the early 1960s, had emerged as a substantial playwright, mixing the incisive Yorkshire wit of his social commentary with beautifully rhythmed verbal tapestries.

Neither had had any previous contact with Maggie. Richard Loncraine, the director of
The Missionary
, had asked Maggie to take part in a Gerald Durrell film which never got made,
My Family and Other Animals
, and she had expressed interest. He sent her a copy of Palin’s script for
The Missionary
and the two of them, Loncraine and Palin, went along to meet her at the Berkeley Hotel. Palin remembers being apprehensive because, as he says, he was still ‘overawed by great names, and certainly theatrical great names; most of our work in Monty Python had been fairly self-contained up to that point. And we played all the women, too.’ It was the day after Maggie had received the
Evening Standard
award for
Virginia
and Palin says that while she was not exactly disparaging about this, she was palpably uninterested in such highly organised expressions of adulation. She had a vodka and tonic and a chat. Palin and Loncraine were prepared to change the script, allow her to make her own schedules, and come in as late as she liked in a white Rolls-Royce. They would have done anything to have her in the film. But Maggie, as usual, specified neither ifs nor buts. She simply said she would do it. Palin asked Michael Caine for some advice when acting with Maggie. Caine merely said, ‘Watch her. She’ll have that scene from under your feet.’

Maggie plays Lady Isabel Ames, the sexually frustrated wife of the richest man in England (a classically gruff and treasurable performance by Trevor Howard in one of his last films). She offers to finance an Edwardian home for prostitutes in the East End of London if the do-gooding cleric, played by Palin, will go to bed with her. When she visits the home and finds three of the fallen inmates romping lasciviously with the missionary, she withdraws her support and the girls are thrown out on the streets once more. The priest is engaged to a girl (played by Phoebe Nicholls) who is afflicted with a perverse passion for filing cabinets. A rather messy plot separates these two, consigns Maggie to a bizarre shooting accident on the Scottish moors and sends Palin back to the East End, where Maggie joins him after the house of correction is closed down in 1907.

It is a lively but unsatisfactory film, made for a mere £1.5 million, a curious mishmash of Shavian morality, merry facetiousness and class-conscious satire. It prompts loose comparison with the famous 1930s case of the Rector of Stiffkey, who disappeared each Monday morning from his Norfolk parish to consort with shop girls and prostitutes before returning in time for the following Sunday’s services. Just as the Stiffkey padre would solemnly inform his young ladies that God had no objection to sins of the body, only sins of the soul, so Palin embarks on his bedtime salvation duties with many a quotation from Saint Paul. Maggie looks marvellous in silks, brocades and fine hats and her acting is so good it nearly blows a hole in the mixed-quality fabric of the film itself.

For all its imperfections, Maggie much enjoyed working with Palin on
The Missionary
and was happy to join him again on
A Private Function
. Palin had interceded on Alan Bennett’s behalf and they all had as jolly a time as it is possible to have on a film with Maggie Smith. It was mostly shot in Ilkley, in West Yorkshire, under the first-time direction of Malcolm Mowbray, whom Maggie would refer to alternately as ‘Our great leader’ and ‘Moaner Mowbray’.

The film has a period setting, on the eve of the 1947 royal wedding between Princess Elizabeth (who became Queen in 1952) and Prince Philip, later the Duke of Edinburgh. Bennett’s Yorkshire community is a microcosm of postwar ‘austerity’ Britain rekindling the pecking order in social aspirations against a still restrictive background of food and petrol rationing and busy licensing authorities. Palin is Gilbert Chilvers, a call-out chiropodist who uncovers a conspiracy to rear an unlicensed pig and slaughter it illegally for a civic banquet in celebration of the royal wedding. Maggie is Joyce, his ambitious wife, a piano teacher and cinema organist who wants her future to live up to her past; her father had a chain of dry cleaners and the family ‘regularly used to take wine with the meal’.

Bennett, the Oxford-educated son of a Leeds butcher, is almost the perfect writer for Maggie: stylish, discreet, with a double purchase, affectionate and wry, on the everyday speech of ordinary people. His idiomatic style is perfectly matched by Maggie’s scathingly risible determination to move up the social ladder. Taking afternoon tea in the Grand Hotel is her rightful milieu: ‘This is where I belong; put me in a long dress and surround me with sophisticated people, and I’d bloom.’ Bennett stings and stabs, but in the gentlest possible way. Those ‘sophisticated people’ would be anything but. Litotes, the expression of an affirmative in which the negative is ironically implied, is a speciality of both this writer and this actress. And Maggie, as she showed in Stoppard’s
Night and Day
, loves to perform, simultaneously and miraculously, both inside and outside a character, precisely on the line while reinforcing either its inherent contradiction or an objective critical slant.

This technique is sometimes mistaken for mere camp. Camp comes into it, certainly. But, like Lettice Douffet, we must remain enemies of ‘the mere’. There is something essentially funny, as well as genuinely subversive, in Maggie’s comic shrugs of rueful and analytical scorn. As Joyce, the Lady Macbeth of Ilkley, she wickedly encourages Palin’s delightfully slow-witted Gilbert to steal and kill off the pig, thus thwarting the local bigwigs who have denied her husband a new clinic in the High Street parade of shops. She will deal with them from a position of supremacy: ‘It’s not just steak, Gilbert, it’s status’; or, more to the point, ‘It’s not just pork, Gilbert, it’s power!’ The other characters are written and acted with a lip-smacking Gogolian relish: Bill Paterson’s sweatily dedicated food inspector, John Normington’s lily-livered solicitor, Tony Haygarth’s cowering, blotchily complexioned farmer and Pete Postlethwaite’s amorous butcher, who fondles the buttocks of his beloved ‘war widow’ with as much loving attention as he devotes to the porcine carcass on his professional slab. Best of all is Denholm Elliott’s intemperate doctor who deplores the spectre of a socialist Britain where ‘scum’ rise to the top and where, on the National Health Service, ‘anyone can come and knock on my door and demand treatment’. He gives this country ‘five years’.

Bennett is an intelligent satirist and a serious historian; the lingua franca of showbiz doesn’t come into it, except obliquely. The ‘private function’ is both the projected dinner party and a reference to the grim habits of the pig. The farmer has placed his illicit charge on a diet of shredded rats and garbage, thus causing severe incontinence and an unprecedented pungency of domestic aromas in Joyce’s kitchen area. Joyce’s mother (the beatifically lobotomised Liz Smith), who lives in the same house, thinks that the furtive smuggling of the pig is something to do with getting her into an old people’s home. ‘I won’t show her it,’ says Maggie, ‘she’s seventy-four and it’s past her bedtime.’ Once Joyce has fixed her deal with the top brass, she turns with equal matter-of-factness to her own private functions: ‘Right, Gilbert, I think sexual intercourse is in order.’

Several pigs were used in the shoot, but the main bulk of bacon belonged to Betty, a cross-breed of the floppy-eared Large White family and the prick-eared, more alert Tamworth clan. The supplier was Intellectual Animals (UK), a company specialising in clever beasts for filmmakers. Maggie was so impressed by Betty’s talent and sensitivity that she said she would always think twice in future before referring to any colleague as ‘that pig of an actor’. The pig brought out the best in Maggie. One instance of quick improvisatory thinking is treasured by Palin: