Maggie Smith: A Biography (33 page)

Edward Albee might have put himself onstage in the mute figure of the young boy in
Three Tall Women
, but that’s it; Alan Bennett is less retiring, often appearing as an actor and performer, though always modestly and discreetly, and usually in his own work. And always as someone very much like himself. He certainly always writes and talks like someone conceived by Alan Bennett, and the schizophrenic nature of an artist feeding on his own character to the extent that he does was perfectly expressed in
The Lady in the Van
, a vehicle as much for his own creative ego as it was for the extraordinary woman he wrote about, Miss Shepherd, who camped in his small front garden in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, in 1974, and stayed there until her death fifteen years later.

Bennett not only memorialised Miss Shepherd in his diaries, on radio and in this stage play (and later, film), but meditated on his own role as her conduit, placing himself in the story, and on the stage, alongside her. With Maggie having a field day as this niggardly, sparrow-like eccentric – a bundle of dun-coloured fun – Bennett was duplicated in the flesh by the actors Nicholas Farrell and Kevin McNally, the first as her flustered, beseeching, often frankly irritated host and neighbour, an irately reluctant Good Samaritan; the second as a steely, seated onlooker, not immune to the opportunities the old bird presented to him as a beady-eyed observer looting material from his own front garden.

It was a delicious set-up, and ten years after Miss Shepherd’s death, Bennett confessed in the play’s printed introduction that he is transported back to the time of her garden residency whenever he hears a van door slide shut.

And he must have cowered in both delight and dismay when Maggie drove the white van on to the stage (twice) at each performance, even treating us to a turn in her ‘second home’, a comical three-wheeler Reliant Robin. The van became her cathedral when the back doors opened to reveal her wrapped in prayer or lost in her musical memories. Miss Shepherd was a former nun who had driven ambulances during black-outs in the war. She had also trained as a pianist in Paris and might have gone mad because she had once fled the scene of a fatal accident. The spiritual centre of Nicholas Hytner’s production was expressed in an overlapping of Beethoven on the turntable in Bennett’s study with news of the cruel truncation of her own musical career. Despite the interference of various doctors and one representative, over-earnest social worker, and despite the author’s own exasperation, the play becomes an exercise in biographical retrieval, and a moving one.

Maggie didn’t allow a scintilla of sentimentality to creep in. She was, in the best possible way, absolutely frightful: arms permanently akimbo, those witty elbows now dangerous weapons, her large watery eyes at once beseeching tolerance and beatification, her darting tongue flicking like a lizard’s on a rock. She emanated a strange amphibian quality, graced in grime and grimace, a madcap Everywoman. In some ways she was a seedy political shadow of Mrs Thatcher, in others a premonition of Nigel Farage and his UKIP party of disaffected Little Englanders, with plans for a new Fidelis party and a cabinet office where Bennett imagined disconsolate colleagues lining up for orders and abuse on a daily basis. In between entertaining visions of the Virgin Mary (often decked out as Queen Victoria, or in a sari), Miss Shepherd would badger Bennett for the private addresses of major politicians – Harold Wilson, Mr Heath, Enoch Powell, or ‘Enoch’ as she called him – so that she could send them copies of her cranky pamphlets. She assumed a sort of spurious celebrity while clearly living as a recluse, and Bennett wryly observed that she would consider her elevation (thanks to his efforts) to a secondary plateau of genuine celebrity after her death no less than she fully deserved. So it is a lovely twist that Bennett allows Miss Shepherd to rewrite her own funeral, rising imperiously from the grave in a scene of celestial ascension and not-too-tacky a transfiguration.

The play was presented at the Queen’s by Robert Fox, continuing the association with Maggie and Nicholas Hytner that he’d started with
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Three years after
The Lady in the Van
, Fox initiated another West End play for Maggie, reuniting her on stage with Judi Dench. David Hare’s
The Breath of Life
, directed by Howard Davies, took £2 million at the box office before it even opened at the Haymarket (a huge advance in 2002), but despite polite reviews and great public interest – the show was a hit, selling out for its limited run of eighteen weeks – the play proved earthbound, and even tempted one or two critics to suggest it was singularly lacking in the degree of animation implicit in the title. Fox maintains the critics were wrong, suggesting that their reaction would have been different had the play been presented at a less glamorous venue than the Haymarket and not as a ‘commercial shoo-in’, which riled them.

David Hare has written some stonking roles for actresses in a long and distinguished career, but this, even Fox admits, was not his finest hour. And it was hard to see, or say, exactly why. This is the downside of theatre magic and mystery. Why didn’t it happen? Everything about it sounded so promising. Hare himself said he wanted to describe two women with a long past behind them but the expectation of a considerable future ahead. As the Maggie character said, in a sentiment she herself would whole-heartedly approve, ‘It’s boring living in the past; you always know what’s going to happen.’ The playwright insisted that he hadn’t written the play with Dench and Smith in mind but, as it turned out, this was the biggest conjunction of home-grown stars in a new play since Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud teamed up on Harold Pinter’s
No Man’s Land
in 1976 at the National.

Maggie played Madeleine Palmer, a retired museum curator specialising in Islamic art, visited at her Isle of Wight hideaway by the novelist Frances Beale (Judi Dench), whose husband, a radical lawyer and Queen’s Counsel, was Madeleine’s lover; he’s now decamped to Seattle with a younger model. The action of the play was continuous over twenty-four hours, a new alliance forged between the two women though there wasn’t all that much in the way of head-to-head collision, as if Hare had somehow mislaid the ignition key to his own dramatic engine. And stuttering away in the background was an idea that the strained friendship implied a similar tension in Anglo-American relations, the waning of a transatlantic love affair. Frances has arrived in the first place because she is researching her memoirs and, as both women have been abandoned by the unseen cad, she is seeking closure and an end to the pain. Dench spent most of the evening sitting and writhing on the edge of tears, while Maggie fired off the odd squib. Her remark that all people did on the Isle of Wight was gardening and expiring reminded me that Alan Ayckbourn’s unfriendly epitaph for his adopted home town of Scarborough was that there was nothing to do there except buy shoes and get drunk. Maggie’s Madeleine recounted how she had met Martin Beale in Alabama during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and that he took her to orgies and, later, a Test Match. She hadn’t destroyed Frances’s marriage, exactly, she averred, but retrospectively undermined it during her twenty-five-year affair.

The play was no better received when revived in 2011 at the Lyceum in Sheffield, with Isla Blair as Frances and Patricia Hodge as Madeleine. Critics lamented the lack of show in the showdown, and were again surprised at the absence of rancour or recrimination in the proceedings. An exasperated Lyn Gardner in the
Guardian
went even further, attacking the whole premise of the play which, she said, ‘showed complete disdain for the quiet, valuable lives of women across the world who make such a wonderful contribution in bringing up the next generation, and who live lives just as rich as those who strut and shout on public stages’.

Hare did write one terrific role for Judi Dench in
Amy’s View
, one of the seventeen plays he has had performed at the National so far, and he has written roles that have been brilliantly occupied by the likes of Penelope Wilton, Kate Nelligan, Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Irene Worth, Nicole Kidman and Carey Mulligan. In marked contrast to, say, John Osborne, he has been conspicuously successful in writing for women. It just didn’t happen this time out. Maggie hasn’t had any luck with Harold Pinter, either, having only ever performed a few of his lines in the screenplay he provided for the film of
The Pumpkin Eater
. And when Deborah Warner suggested to her, across the table at her (Maggie’s) seventieth birthday party, that she might like to consider playing in Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
with Fiona Shaw, she roared with laughter, thinking this was the funniest idea anyone had ever come up with. She’s nothing if not modern as an actress, but literary or theatrical modernism was never her bag.

So instead of taking
The Breath of Life
to Broadway, she happily concurred in a plan Robert Fox hatched with co-producer Duncan Weldon to take
Bed Among the Lentils
to Australia and New Zealand (Auckland and Wellington) on a three-month tour in 2004, reprising her double-act, too, with Margaret Tyzack in
Soldiering On
, and hiring Anthony Page to direct the tour. They opened in Sydney, moving on to Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide (Fox says Maggie was very funny about Adelaide; partly because there were so many dead bodies around after a plethora of murders).

Maggie thought she’d never go to Australia if she didn’t go now. She thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and struck up a great new friendship with the painter Margaret Olley. She received the most incredible response, says Page, the minute she opened her mouth on the stage, ‘and Margaret Tyzack was brilliant, too’. She was lionised at dinners and parties and Page remembers one particular occasion when everyone wanted to sit next to her after the Sydney opening. ‘She wouldn’t have any of that,’ recalls Page, ‘and insisted that I sat on one side of her at the table and Ken [Page’s partner] on the other side, so we could sort of act as a buffer, fending everyone else off. The Australian producer’s wife wouldn’t give up so easily and asked if she’d like, one day, to do a harbour bridge climb, clamped to the structure with all the equipment, and so on. “No, I don’t think so,” Maggie said. But the woman persisted saying, “Oh you really should. It’s so wonderful; my husband and I went up there on our honeymoon.” “Well,” replied Maggie, “I’m surprised the marriage lasted.” And that shut her up, very quickly.’

There was another three-year lull before Maggie’s third and final bout with Edward Albee,
The Lady from Dubuque
, which would prove her last West End appearance in 2007, not by design, necessarily, but by the demands of filming and the continuation of
Downton Abbey
. Until
Downton
, television appearances were comparatively rare, but worth the wait.
Suddenly, Last Summer
was followed by just three major television films for the BBC: Julian Jarrold’s
All the King’s Men
(1999), Simon Curtis’s
David Copperfield
(also in 1999), and Stephen Poliakoff’s
Capturing Mary
(2007), one of her most distinctive performances which also reunited her with a playwright whose
Coming in to Land
at the National had been a rewarding experience.

The first two were co-productions with WGBH, the Boston-based non-commercial television station, thus guaranteeing exposure on the American networks. In the case of
All the King’s Men
, in which Maggie played a radiant, red-haired Queen Alexandra in glittering costumes, audiences were reacquainted with one of the most unusual Great War stories, that of the 5th battalion of the Norfolk regiment (drawn from workers on the Queen’s Sandringham estate) who simply disappeared in the mist at Gallipoli. The producer was Gareth Neame, the future executive producer of
Downton Abbey
, and the battalion was led by David Jason as Captain Frank Beck, married to Phyllis Logan,
Downton
’s Mrs Hughes. It’s a fine film, and Maggie does her stuff, but she does no more than meets the requirements of a routine study in beadily observant and emotionally generous old-style royalty, although there’s always something satisfactorily ‘askance’ about her brushes with the privileged élite; and there’s a lovely moment when Captain Beck’s watch, a royal gift, is found, still ticking, on the battlefield, as though confirming the unbreakable link between Queen and subjects across the globe.

Julian Jarrold, who made his name with the feisty Brit-com movie
Kinky Boots
, cast Maggie in another ‘lost’ story,
Becoming Jane
(2007), as an imperious dowager – social mobility was becoming a ‘little Smith girl’ (as Edith Evans called her) speciality – Lady Gresham, a wealthy acquaintance of Jane Austen’s family whose nephew Wisley (Laurence Fox) was a prime suitor to Anne Hathaway’s budding novelist. This was a backstory ‘making of a novelist’ contribution to the thriving Jane Austen heritage industry, with beautiful locations (the movie was shot in Ireland, rather than Austen’s home county of Hampshire), correct period costumes and a clever elaboration by scriptwriters Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams on the well-documented early friendship of Jane Austen with a young lawyer, Tom Lefroy.

James McAvoy translated Tom into a wild Byronic figure and possible template for Mr Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
, the novel Jane sits down to write (and read from) as the credits loom. She’s already started on a manuscript then titled ‘First Impressions’ and after accepting Wisley she falls back under Tom’s spell, only to ‘sensibly’ dampen her ardour when she realises that his first duty is to support his family and dependants. Thus the spinster artist, who knew something of passion, thanks to Tom, is born. It’s a clever construct, not without foundation, and Maggie plays her part in it vividly, in a few scenes, conjuring the harsh society world Jane Austen relished and simultaneously flinched from. ‘It was fun doing the film,’ Maggie told me. ‘It was in Ireland, of course, on a shoe-string, no time, the usual …’

She exhibited what Jarrold viewed as ‘similarities to Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
Pride and Prejudice
’ but with hidden vulnerabilities, which stemmed from the pain of never having had children and her controlling power over Wisley. In
Pride and Prejudice
, Lady Catherine haughtily tells Elizabeth Bennet: ‘Your father’s estate is entailed on Mr Collins, I think. For your sake, I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s family.’ By the time Maggie came to her other great dowager in
Downton Abbey
she had changed her tune to a more flexible Edwardian view of lineage and inheritance.

The second BBC/WGBH movie for television took a more traditional line on another great English novelist, Charles Dickens, in resisting any speculation on the author’s evolution beyond the simple and indisputable fact that the ever popular
David Copperfield
is semi-autobiographical – and that Betsey Trotwood, whom Maggie makes the beating heart of Simon Curtis’s affectionate and highly enjoyable film, is one of the great characters of English literature. It’s a three-hour production, and was originally shown in two parts over the Christmas holiday weekend in 1999. The cast includes such popular character actors as Bob Hoskins as a genial Mr Micawber, Nicholas Lyndhurst as a carrot-headed, mean-mouthed Uriah Heep, Trevor Eve as a wonderfully despicable Mr Murdstone and Ian McKellen as the sadistic schoolmaster Mr Creakle, voice as dry and husky as a sandpaper parchment, mouth as slobbery as an eel. McKellen had himself played the older David Copperfield in a 1966 BBC serialisation (the second of the corporation’s three adaptations to date) with Flora Robson as Betsey; now Maggie’s Betsey formed an alliance with a showbiz first-timer as the young Davy – Daniel Radcliffe.

This was ten-year-old Radcliffe’s first professional role and I don’t mean it as a major insult to say that he exhibits all the still, phlegmatic, almost anonymous ‘ordinariness’ that makes Harry Potter such an appealing hero; Harry’s wizard powers are always seen as something over which he has no real control and which come alive in circumstances demanding the uncomplicated exercise of his instinct for decency, fortitude and bravery. Young Copperfield – who is sonorously informed by Murdstone that life’s struggles lie ahead and that it is time to begin – endures not dissimilar trials to Harry’s at the abusive, bullying hands of his stepfather, the sadistic regime of the schoolmaster, his apprenticeship in the blacking factory in London and the journey on foot, penniless and alone, to Dover. There, he finds his one surviving relative, his great-aunt Betsey, who greets him with a frantic dismissal (‘Go away! No boys here …’) before collapsing into one of her own garden bushes and rising to chase some unattended donkeys from her sloping lawn.

The comedy of Betsey’s initial unfriendliness is based, Maggie makes clear, on her disillusion with men of all sorts since her bitter experience of them, though Adrian Hodges’ script has deleted the errant husband who, in the novel, turns up at odd moments to demand money. From the first reel, when Maggie enters like a whirlwind in expectation of a young baby girl – ‘She must be called Betsey Trotwood Copperfield,’ she instructs a bemused and uncomfortable Emilia Fox as Clara Copperfield – to her fearsome attack on the exposed Heep, grabbing Lyndhurst by the lapels of his jacket and shaking him like a rag doll, and her unconditional generosity towards the emigrating Micawber family, she is a moral weathervane, undergoing an improving transformation herself.

Dickens’s Copperfield narrates his own story (this version uses neither Radcliffe’s voice nor a fresh-faced older David’s, Ciaran McMenamin’s, but Tom Wilkinson’s) and comments on Betsey’s handsome, though facially inflexible, features, noting in particular her very quick, bright eye. Maggie’s Betsey suggests this brittleness, but develops her performance as one of progressive unbending of her unbending side, especially in her guardianship of David and the hospitality she has always shown towards the touchingly simple-minded Mr Dick (beatifically played by RSC veteran Ian McNeice, who had popped up in
Judith Hearne
). While she bathes David, she recalls how her husband treated her cruelly – ‘that’s what men do, as far as I can see’ – and when he falls asleep, she’s won over completely. So won over, that she recommended young Radcliffe for Harry Potter two years later; you do note, in the Harry Potter series, how Professor McGonagall will often brush Harry with the slightest of affectionate gestures, something that might date from this first work experience together. But no one flares up like Maggie can, and her attack on Trevor Eve’s murky Murdstone is a high point of ferocity, accusing him of breaking Clara’s heart and breaking the boy, too, as an instrument for his own guilt. And she has another donkey-related broadside for Murdstone’s metallic sister, Jane (Zoë Wanamaker, as righteously prim as a picky parson), as they leave her premises: ‘Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and I’ll knock your bonnet off. And tread on it, for good measure.’

There was a time when our leading dramatists were regularly represented on television, but that has all changed with the incursion of American drama series –
Mad Men
and
Breaking Bad
are both cited by Julian Fellowes as a direct influence on
Downton Abbey
in terms of pace and narrative propulsion – and the collapse of the idea of a televised ‘single play’ or film unless it’s the ponderously evoked life of a celebrity, preferably a comedian with flaws – Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd have all been memorialised in this way – or a politician or a celebrity such as a Great Train robber, pop singer Cilla Black or a mass murderer. It seems a lifetime ago – well it is; it was 1983 – when Alan Bennett’s
An Englishman Abroad
(with Alan Bates and Coral Browne, directed by John Schlesinger), William Trevor’s
The Blue Dress
(starring Denholm Elliott, Virginia McKenna and Susan Fleetwood) and David Hare’s
Saigon – Year of the Cat
(Stephen Frears directing Judi Dench and Frederic Forrest) were all aired on different channels on the same November night; and that was just three days after a Channel 4 screening of Mike Leigh’s
Meantime
with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Discussing the work of the great television dramatist Dennis Potter (best known for
Nigel Barton
,
Pennies from Heaven
and
The Singing Detective
), Melvyn Bragg said that his was the representative talent ‘which made television the true national theatre and the place where this country talked to itself’.

So when the BBC commissioned an interrelated tripartite drama from the experienced dramatist (and filmmaker) Stephen Poliakoff, it was both a major event and an ideological aberration, a throwback, almost.
Capturing Mary
was set in the same luxurious Georgian town house as the first drama,
Joe’s Place
, and they were both shown within a week of each other, with the middle, much shorter monologue,
A Real Summer
, as a link, or bridge passage. This link featured Ruth Wilson as Mary Gilbert, a journalist and witness to the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Mary’s story, in full, is told by Maggie in
Capturing Mary
, recalling her life, and tragic exploitation and decline, when she revisits the old house and is shown around by the still resident young caretaker Joe, played by Danny Lee Wynter. As she sits with a cup of tea, she hears the sounds elsewhere in the house of ping-pong, opera, drawing room conversation. And she revisits in her mind’s eye the glamorous soirées once held here for the rich and famous – Alfred Hitchcock, Ava Gardner, E. M. Forster – which she attended as a shooting star of Fleet Street, a journalist hailing from Manchester tempered in the postwar hothouse of Oxford University, and already notorious for demanding more sex, and more reality, in the movies. She sees her younger self, played by Ruth Wilson, intrigued by a mystery man, Greville White, at one such gathering. Greville, played by David Walliams, the star of the scatological, satirical sketch show
Little Britain
, knows everyone and doesn’t do anything. He’s one of those cultural and social power-brokers who have nothing to exchange except their own limpid vanity, self-importance and creepy, deferential manner, making themselves indispensable to the movers and shakers they both aspire to become and wish to undermine. And Mary is soon firmly in his sights. Inveigling her down to the wine cellar, away from the throng, Greville exercises a controlling grip on Mary by telling her the terrible truth about the establishment: its orgies, forays into sexual abuse and degradation, anti-Semitism, cruelty and lies, the whole disgusting underbelly of the upper classes and their high society hangers-on.

She promises never to spill the beans although, ever since the Profumo affair in 1963, right through to the rituals surrounding the public disgrace of countless politicians and media figures which multiply by the year, it seems unlikely a journalist such as Mary would have remained quiet for all this time, even though she loses her job as ‘the voice of youth’ thanks to Greville (she believes). But Maggie presents a forlorn character cast adrift from her own past. She’s managed to lead a reasonably successful life in magazine journalism, but she’s missed her chance, and the boat, and is now a sad-eyed giraffe mourning the loss of her talent.

Maggie sympathised to a degree with Mary Gilbert: ‘She started at the same time as I did,’ she said in a rare promotional interview. ‘It can happen. Something horrid that will change your life. Something that won’t go out of your mind.’ Ruth Wilson, who had lately made a television film of
Jane Eyre
(opposite Maggie’s son, Toby Stephens, as a memorable Rochester) scripted by Poliakoff’s wife, Sandy Welch, responded to the sexual dynamic in the piece as it dealt with the great wave of change, and also power, between men and women in the 1950s and 1960s. And there was something uncannily and convincingly similar in the coloration and flayed intensity of younger and older actresses in the same role, a story of corrupted innocence and bad experience lived by one and recollected in tragic tranquillity by the other. There’s a great scene at the end when Maggie goes for a walk in Kensington Gardens, near the house, with Joe, hoping she might by chance see Greville after all this time. And she does. But unlike her, he hasn’t aged. She’s laid the ghost, but she’s become one herself, drinking on a park bench, crying for her youth, alone.