Maggie Smith: A Biography (28 page)

Michael Ratcliffe, dismissing the piece as ‘a fey heritage comedy’, declared that the play’s greatest mystery was the failure of Lettice and Lotte to end up in bed together. Margaret Tyzack says that lesbianism, even crypto-lesbianism, was never even discussed by anyone on the production. The idea would certainly never have crossed Maggie’s mind. She was absolutely aghast when Ingmar Bergman had asked her, during rehearsals for
Hedda Gabler
, apropos of her interest in Mrs Elvsted’s long hair, if she had ever experienced any physical sensations towards her own sex.

This was Shaffer’s first out-and-out comedy since
Black Comedy
in 1964, in which Maggie had also scored a great personal triumph, but as part of a coherent National Theatre ensemble. Shaffer is a magpie writer. The genesis of Lettice Douffet owed something not only to Jean Brodie, but also to E. F. Benson’s overbearing heroine, Lucia. The reviews were generally uneasy about the play and divided on Maggie’s performance. Irving Wardle tipped his hat to ‘an original and hilarious treatment of an important and theatrically neglected subject’ but complained that the play kept coming to a stop for memory speeches and that the two characters were of decidedly unequal interest.

And the issue of mannerism was reintroduced with unwonted savagery by Martin Hoyle in the
Financial Times
. There were no two ways about it: Maggie got right up his nose. He bemoaned ‘another revue turn’ and, having dismissed her Lettice as ‘gratingly superficial’ and ‘a grotesque comic caricature’, added insult to injury by complimenting Judi Dench and Peggy Ashcroft on their method of using their own personalities to illuminate character before settling on Alison Steadman as the ideal example of an actress who is unrecognisable from one part to the next. Even if this were true, which in Steadman’s case it is not, the assertion that a performance in the theatre should be as unrelated as possible to the fixed personality of the actor is as tendentious as it is impracticable. But it is a common assertion, and one that has been entered as evidence against many great actors, even those who are palpably ‘self-transformers’, like Olivier. The charge that an actor is always ‘the same’ seems to me to be self-evidently crass. The sameness of the actor from role to role is the most obvious thing about him, even if he starts each time with the blank neutrality of Alec Guinness.

As Michael Blakemore says, the making of a remarkable actor depends on the extent to which he is an interesting person in the first place. ‘And Maggie is a very sharp, very intelligent, witty lady.’ Dull actors are the actors whom you never recognise from one part to another, mainly because you can never tell what they are really like. The additional trouble with Maggie, of course, is the armoury of her technique. The wrist-flapping and whirring of circles in the air were a part of the comic apparatus that had got her into trouble before. But, as Michael Ratcliffe pointed out, following hard on the heels of her ‘marvellous performances in plays by Cocteau and Poliakoff … we now know she is acting like this because she wants to and not because she can no longer do anything else’.

Maggie certainly felt the play needed cranking up and worked very hard, every performance, to get it going. But the idea that her gestures and inflections were some random selection of uncontrolled whimsicalities was surely wide of the mark. The play needed her gestural aggrandisement, even if, as John Dexter felt, the opening scenes were feebly superfluous. There was more of a hectic flurry to Lettice Douffet than to Maggie’s stiller comic creations for the simple reason that Lettice was habitually putting on an act to disguise the emptiness within. And she was a frustrated thespian. The irritation quotient stems from the frantic pace of the sculptural gesticulation, which in Maggie’s case is executed with the style and precision of a speeded-up Kabuki onnagata. The character’s nerves are always likely to get on ours. For this reason, Maggie can simply fail to strike on your box, but such is the fate of any performer. She struck on Frank Rich’s all right. The
New York Times
critic saw the play in London and guaranteed its safe passage across the Atlantic, hailing ‘the camp performance of our time … she seems to be Mr Shaffer’s sexually ambiguous answer to Auntie Mame, or perhaps his sentimental gloss on the Madwoman of Chaillot.’

Bernard Levin wrote a long letter to Maggie after the opening and she told him later that she had cried. ‘This was not affectation,’ said Levin. ‘I think this wonderful brittle façade she puts up is in fact a sort of protection against her doubts about her quality. She shouldn’t have any doubts, but she clearly does have them, to my astonishment, to everyone’s astonishment, and that’s the softer side of her, the vulnerable side. She had cried because I had told her how very good she was. And I was very touched by that side of her.’

The performance became the talk of the town. Fellow professionals wrote fulsome letters, and John Gielgud, who opened next door at the Apollo in February 1988 in Hugh Whitemore’s
The Best of Friends
– his last stage appearance – asked Maggie to dine with him one evening, if she was not too tired. He thanked her for some flowers she had sent him and, moved by the extraordinary reception he had received on his own first night, said that ‘now we can rejoice in each other’s overflow’.

But Maggie did not feel like doing very much in the way of rejoicing. She found the play as draining as anything she had ever done, and she was not well. The thyroid condition which was eventually diagnosed as Graves’ disease caused her acute discomfort. And she had been working on two films, both about alcoholics, one for Jack Clayton and one for BBC television, which had been among the most emotionally exhausting of her career. They had not exactly driven her to drink, but they had certainly pushed her as far as she had ever gone in her screen performances.

For someone who came from a strict and religious background and who had seriously flirted with the idea of converting to Roman Catholicism, Maggie’s twin portrayal of ladies disappointed in God, Alan Bennett’s Susan in
Bed Among the Lentils
and Brian Moore’s Judith Hearne, drew on some deep reserves of feeling and confessional anguish. In her stage and screen work of the 1980s she had demonstrated that the pathos endemic to her work as a comedienne could be redistributed as the chief aspect of her acting persona. The comedy and tears of her earliest revue sketches, tempered by her years in the classic repertoire, equipped her to play the modern tragedy of an ordinary woman as well as any other actress of her day. And she had no qualms about making her spinsters spinsterish or her married frumps frumpish.

Jack Clayton had wanted to make a film of Brian Moore’s first novel,
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
, for nearly twenty years. A Catholic himself, Clayton responded profoundly to the novel’s portrait of a spinster in conflict with the sensuality of her own nature, the screen of social desperation drawn like a mask over the heroine’s loneliness and secret drinking. He was not the first with aspirations of a dramatic transfer: in her classic review of Clayton’s film, Pauline Kael revealed that José Quintero had once hoped to stage the story with Geraldine Page; that John Huston envisaged the screen role for Katharine Hepburn; and that other nearly-Judiths included Rachel Roberts and Deborah Kerr. Nobody had matched the rights and the financing until Clayton, backed by Denis O’Brien of HandMade Films, cast Maggie as the impoverished spinster in a skilful and sensible adaptation by Peter Nelson. Nelson’s main innovation was to move the action from Belfast to Dublin, with the consequent loss of one layer of Judith’s spiritual alienation in a primarily Protestant community. Like Joyce in Bennett’s
A Private Function
, Judith is a part-time piano teacher with hopes of self-improvement. But there is no materialism or dynamism of any sort attached to these hopes. They are merely tickled into something resembling life by the appearance in Judith’s boarding house of her landlady’s brother, the widower James Madden, played by Bob Hoskins, who has returned to Ireland after thirty years in New York.

This deeply courageous film about escape, dependency and betrayal is possibly the best rebuttal of my own submission that Maggie has often been conservative in her choice of role. There is no hiding place in this portrayal, and no attempt at softening any blows. Maggie’s acting is of a complexity and technical perfection unsurpassed by any other British performer of the past few decades: there is not one single hint of false sentiment, superfluous gesture, inappropriate nasal intonation, attenuated diphthongs, wrist acting, brittle evasion or any other of the objections sometimes raised against her. Another crucial quality, noted by Victoria Mather in the
Daily Telegraph
, is that although Judith Hearne is a withered, drab and nervous figure on the outside, Maggie invests her with ‘an inward soul of bright innocence’.

Maggie inspects the characters assembled at the boarding-house breakfast table with more nervousness than when she beadily contemplated the refined guests in the Florentine
pensione
in
A Room with a View
. The landlady’s son, wonderfully played by the big-bellied RSC actor Ian McNeice, is a loutish poet, claiming several more years of pampered lodging at home while he writes his ‘masterpiece’ and slopes off to debauch the maid every night. The agony of eye contact with Bob Hoskins as the returning prodigal gives way to the most tentative of dimpled smiles when they make a date to go to church together. Maggie has to nudge him awake during the sermon and mildly rebukes him for dressing like a comedian. He has noticed her rings and, taking them to be a sign of wealth, cruelly arouses Judith’s affection while planning to exploit her as a sponsor for his hare-brained scheme of starting ‘an American eating-place right in the centre of town’.

He invites her to a movie and a meal. The movie is
Samson and Delilah
starring Victor Mature, of which Groucho Marx said, ‘No picture can hold my interest when the leading man’s bust is bigger than the leading lady’s.’ Judith’s world is circumscribed by others’ expectations, notably those of the Church and of Wendy Hiller as a cantankerously pious aunt whom she was obliged to nurse after she suffered a stroke and who continues her mawkish tyranny over Judith from beyond the grave. Judith has a mobile shrine of her aunt’s photograph and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But the shrine is really a devotional triptych, completed by the secret bottle. When she learns that Hoskins’s bumptious James Madden is a fraud with a record of failure and footling menial jobs, she literally shakes with tears, turns the Sacred Heart to the wall and sips at her whisky. The camera stays on her unadorned face of pain for what seems like the time it would take to say a rosary.

We cut to the physical sweatiness of Hoskins boarding the landlady’s daughter (‘just a little fun’ is his prelude to a rape) and back again to Maggie clutching her bottle and gibbering a banal song: ‘When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.’ In the privacy of her room, prayers are followed by alcoholic wipe-out and unconscious reverie on the floor. Judith begins her descent to the abyss by losing some of her teaching jobs and confessing more than she has dared before to a priest who absolves her, but declines to give her a penance. She embellishes and twists the story of how Madden has proposed to her, clutching a third glass of sherry in a family sitting room, moving just slightly into overdrive, eyes big and absolutely open to the lens and the inquisition of an unseen audience. With the last of her money, and a bottle in her handbag, she moves into the Shelbourne Hotel. She tells the priest: ‘I can’t believe any more. I’m all alone … I just don’t believe God is there any more.’ And in the most extraordinary scene of all she runs up the aisle of the church and shouts, ‘I hate you’ at the tabernacle, repository of the living body of Christ.

In a nursing home, surrounded by white linen and the white habits of Carmelite nuns, Maggie’s Judith acquires the mad and powerful radiance of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, or of Lucia di Lammermoor singing her mournful aria, or of Mary Tyrone riding high on her sweet powders in the last scene of
Long Day’s Journey into Night
. (Too late now, but Maggie should have played this role with Robert Stephens as her husband and their two sons as their two sons.) Her hair is plaited on one side of her face, her two holy pictures to hand: ‘They always make a new place home.’ Madden, now employed as a van driver, returns to pay a visit. At last, he proposes marriage to Judith, adding the disastrous rider that she must have some money after all, as he found out that she had stayed in the Shelbourne. When Judith later leaves the home, she hands a crumpled piece of paper to the taxi driver on which is written Madden’s address. The camera once again lingers, searching for clues, anxious to know if, at last, this is to be the really brand-new start she deserves. But Maggie’s taut mask, frankly lined with a history of disappointment, is giving nothing away.

The film was made quickly, in seven weeks, and Maggie was in almost every shot. Jack Clayton recalls that her concentration was unbelievably intense. She stayed in a different hotel from everyone else in Dublin, not to be awkward, but to concentrate on the loneliness. There was, however, something temperamentally suited to Maggie about Judith’s condition and she submerged herself in the role with relish. Clayton says she hardly took advantage of the dialect coach provided, but her accent is, as usual, spot on and faultlessly maintained. The same cannot quite be said for Bob Hoskins’s blustery Madden; he tackles the role like a rampant rugby player, diving in energetically and not all that convincingly as an Irish American. But his charm and emotional sincerity come through and he much enjoyed working with Maggie for the first time: ‘What surprised me is Maggie’s so generous. You think a talent of that quality would swamp you a bit. She doesn’t.’ Hoskins was also convinced that she would win her third Oscar: ‘I think [the performance] will put another fellow on Maggie’s shelf.’

Although Maggie was honoured with best actress awards from BAFTA and the
Evening Standard
, the film was never considered at the Oscars and its distribution was scandalously limited. Why? The matter rankled with Jack Clayton and points up the dangers inherent in the monopoly system of screen ownership.
Judith Hearne
was premiered in New York in December 1987, but did not reach London until exactly one year later. It was held up by a dispute between HandMade and Cannon, the distributors, over debts on another film. The dispute meant that Cannon dropped the film and it therefore found only limited showing in three independent London houses. And in America, a small company handling the distribution failed to provide copies of the film to the Academy membership voting for the Oscars and subsequently went into receivership. Maggie seemed not to be bothered. As usual, all her concern had been focused on the work itself. Clayton confirms that she is unaware of where the camera is, unlike some of the old Hollywood stars, like Joan Crawford, who knew where every lens and light was stationed, and that she therefore trusts the director to an unusual degree. She never looks at rushes and indeed rarely watches the finished film. She is reluctant to join the publicity circus, as reluctant as the most difficult of donkeys being led to market.

Clayton knew that Maggie’s ‘difficulty’ was not an affectation. ‘I’ve worked with a lot of actors who didn’t like doing publicity, but they always did it when asked on behalf of the film. Maggie is the only one who won’t. But it’s not just that. I’ve never seen her at a party. I usually have drinks on my sets every Friday and I used to have to really persuade her to come. Once she was there, of course, she enjoyed herself as much as anyone.’ Clayton admits that he admires her as much as any of the great actresses he directed: Simone Signoret in
Room at the Top
, Deborah Kerr in
The Innocents
or Anne Bancroft in
The Pumpkin Eater
.

Bed Among the Lentils
is a close companion piece to
Judith Hearne
. So close, it nearly overlapped in the shooting. Maggie went straight from one to the other, losing a week’s holiday in between because of a slight hold-up on Clayton’s film. This meant that she had to learn the new script during the first week of rehearsals. ‘She was pretty exhausted,’ remembers Alan Bennett, the author and director, ‘but that turned out to be no bad thing, really. I didn’t have much to do. She did it the first time just as she did straight on the screen. I was bothered that she might slightly camp it up, but she didn’t at all. She’s got very good taste. There’s a bit at the end where she lets her voice break when she’s talking about the affair she’s had, but she does it without any self-pity. It’s just wonderful and I think she did that on the last day of rehearsal, and then she did it on the take, but she fluffed the final line so we had to do it again and I was frightened to tell her, really. But she did it again, and in the end we used the first take anyway and lived with the fluff because the first take was better.’

Maggie’s solo was one of six monologues by Bennett, produced by Innes Lloyd, which went out under the generic title of
Talking Heads
. Bennett himself delivered one of them, as a mother-fixated adult bachelor. Other studies in loneliness, compromise and bafflement were entrusted to four superb actresses – Thora Hird, Julie Walters, Stephanie Cole and Patricia Routledge. Each character was poised between black-outs in a purgatorial state of reflective isolation. And the impulse behind each monologue was a desire to make something of recent events, or at least to explain them to anyone who might listen. Bennett’s style is too idiomatic, inflected and poetically entranced with the material detail of ordinary life to be totally bleak. But there was something Beckettian about these cries from the genteel suburban wilderness. Life had been tested, ever so quietly, and found to be wanting: Beckett with knitting, place-mats and doilies. In his introduction to the published texts, Bennett wrote: ‘Though much of the church stuff in
Bed Among the Lentils
(including Mr Medlicott the verger) comes from my childhood, the disaffection of Susan, the vicar’s wife, I can trace to opening a hymn book in the chapel of Giggleswick School and finding in tiny, timid letters on the fly leaf, “Get lost, Jesus.” ’

Maggie’s Susan was suspended between seething resentment and a sort of bursting sexual anger. She glared and vibrated like a terribly cross stick insect. The first line said it all, but there was plenty more to follow: ‘Geoffrey’s bad enough, but I’m glad I wasn’t married to Jesus.’ With bold, descriptive strokes, and bolstered by Maggie’s perfectly pitched, semi-sarcastic delivery, the sanctimonious life of a village parish and its boyishly good-looking, ambitious young vicar, Geoffrey, was painted by Bennett in the first few paragraphs. In this first of five pungent little ten-minute scenes, Maggie’s hair is severe, her make-up non-existent, her head tilted slightly into the camera. She is as spare and scrubbed as her own kitchen table. She lets slip that she spends a lot at the off-licence. She is despondently out of kilter with the smug little world she describes and is animated by expatiating on its deadliness.

Next, we see her in the church, on the steps of a side-chapel, wearing a brown coat and polishing a candlestick. She is describing a lunch she and Geoffrey have given to the visiting bishop: ‘Disaster strikes as I’m doling out the tinned peaches.’ Escape from the suffocation of serving as a wifely appendage is afforded by the regular trip to a little Indian shop behind the infirmary in Leeds. The owner is called Mr Ramesh and he sells everything. In the third scene, Maggie is at first standing in the kitchen near the Aga and then sitting down and leaning on her elbow, to the left, on a towel rail. Slightly more akimbo, her comic pulse races as she lays into the kind of activity she herself should have pursued as a member of the Women’s Institute. Jam-making. And flower-arranging. ‘If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arrangement.’ She anatomises the show of ‘forest murmurs’ arranged by Mrs Shrubsole on the altar and recounts how she proves its threat to human well-being by kneeling down and falling over, banging her head on the Communion rail. Later that night she drives into Leeds and Mr Ramesh shuts up shop and takes off his clothes.