Maggie Smith: A Biography (36 page)

One distinguished director not associated with the show said it was disappointing that Maggie hadn’t been stretched, or asked to do anything new, in the role. My response is that she does something unique with Lady Violet, as she did, really, with Lady Bracknell; she presents someone she, personally, probably doesn’t much like, while gaining the maximum purchase on what’s funny or not very nice about her. Which is why her performance is so compelling. When each scene starts, you really don’t know where it’s going, because her temperament is always going to get in the way. ‘I’m a woman,’ she says early on, ‘I can be as contrary as I choose,’ and she’s always chivvying along Penelope Wilton as her neighbour, Isobel Crawley, a few rungs down the ladder, with killer lines like ‘Just because you’re an old widow, I see no reason why you should eat off a tray.’ There’s a great moment in the fifth series when she looks down on the party people and acridly remarks, ‘They’ve cast the net wide tonight.’ She has a tricky relationship, too, with her manservant Spratt (a lovely picture of muted malevolence by Jeremy Swift), who tries to undermine her with his long-running objection to the new housemaid, Denker, played by Sue Johnston: ‘You’re testing me, Spratt, and I warn you, testing me does not bring out the best in me.’ This conflict comes to the boil, literally, in the surrogate soup episode, when Denker’s recipe (produced under cover by Sophia McShera’s delightful, self-improving Daisy in the Downton kitchens) is savagely exposed by Spratt as not her own at all, and then brutally discarded; it’s a high point of Maggie’s performance that she turns on Spratt with such an undiluted venom.

There’s always something ticking away with her, you feel, waiting to explode. ‘No one wants to kiss a girl in black,’ she ominously tells fellow Essex girl Michelle Dockery (she’s from Romford) as Lady Mary, the earl’s first daughter, in the first episode of the first series, and she’s equally frank when Penelope Wilton raises the issue of what to call each other: ‘We could start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham,’ she suggests, just this side of satirical oleaginousness. But her first big moment of revelation is when she cedes her habitual triumph at the village flower show – she’s been recipient of the best bloom in the village prize since time immemorial – to footman Moseley’s (Kevin Doyle) elderly father. And her reaction to Lady Mary’s bedroom romp with a well-connected Turk is to suggest that, were she to go abroad for a while, ‘You can normally find an Italian who isn’t too picky.’

There’s a constant, clever undermining of her own character, as others perceive her, which makes her fascinating. She also, quite shockingly, sees across class boundaries, with foreboding: ‘God knows who the next heir will be,’ she says. ‘Probably a chimney sweep from Solihull.’ The modern world, generally, is a problem, and Maggie’s dowager sums up all
Daily Telegraph
leaders on the subject with pinpoint and terrifying accuracy: ‘give power to these little people’ – and she’s talking about the transparently decent Scottish doctor (David Robb) who keeps his flame flickering for Isobel Crawley all the way through – ‘and it goes to their heads like strong drink’. In the next minute, she’s asking if the telephone (a new contraption) is a means of communication or a means of torture, and she’s expressing in a phrase the fears of an older generation today about social media. But she also goes quickly from harsh gorgon to melting gorgonzola, skewering the vicar who’s dithering over whether or not to marry the village girl to a war hero on his death bed (‘I’ve got a cold,’ she says, unexpectedly dabbing her eyes); and it’s she who knows that the war may be at an end, but the upheaval’s only beginning.

No British actress today has a larger global reach than Maggie Smith, thanks to this programme. By the end of the fifth series in 2014, the show was distributed in 250 territories, including North America and China, and was established as the biggest ever British television drama series export. There’s no doubt, either, in anyone’s mind, least of all the
Downton Abbey
producers’, that Maggie is the star of the show, and for two reasons: she is the biggest name on the marquee (as she has been for most of her career) and is therefore a magnet for other big names, and notably fine young actors, to appear alongside her; and she plays a role which has enormous appeal. She is, says
Downton
writer Julian Fellowes – who writes every episode, sharing the load only briefly, twice, in the first series – touching ‘something diurnal about people’s values, even though she is old-fashioned in one sense, and she never, or at least very rarely, does anything you could think of as mean. Lady Violet is judgmental and absolutist, but not mean. She usually takes the audience with her in the positions she occupies.’

The position is similar to that of Lady Bracknell, stern but compassionate under the steely façade, utterly representative of the background she comes from – country house aristocracy – and horrified at the very idea of something called ‘the weekend’. Shooting parties, house parties, dinner parties and similar social functions are simply not bound, where she comes from, by the concept of professional work, or that of a daily routine having any kind of competitive function. The crisis in the future of the great house is the dramatic springboard of the series, precipitated by the distant disaster of the sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912 on which perished the Earl of Grantham’s two nephews, heirs apparent to the estate. The earl (Hugh Bonneville) has three daughters, none of whom can inherit the title or the estate or indeed the fortune of the earl’s American wife, Lady Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), whose money has been ‘contractually incorporated into the comital entail in perpetuity’; and it’s that American money Maggie’s Lady Violet wants, in the first place, disengaged from the entail (that is, the succession and the estate).

Her steeliness and disapproval characterise the performance from the get-go, and she makes her presence felt every time the issue arises. And from this stems her hawkish, slyly confrontational attitude towards everything that ensues: the arrival of her cousin Isobel’s son, the lawyer Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), who might be a suitable match for the earl’s first daughter, Lady Mary; the do-gooding conciliatory outlook of Isobel herself – ‘I wonder your halo doesn’t grow heavy, it must be like wearing a tiara round the clock,’ Maggie says with the expression of someone sucking on a lemon; and then, after the catastrophe of Matthew’s death in a car crash immediately after the birth of a male heir to Downton (this thunderbolt was unleashed in the Christmas Day special at the end of the third series), her struggle to countenance Lady Mary’s confession to a trial by dirty weekend in Liverpool of a prospective replacement husband’s suitability within the sheets: ‘Can we be confident there will be no unwanted epilogue? … In my day, a lady was incapable of feeling physical attraction until instructed to by her mama.’

She is the gauge, and sometimes the moral compass, for all melodramatic developments: the revelation that the visiting Turkish diplomat has died during an undercover bedroom tryst with Lady Mary, as if being in her bedroom at all wasn’t bad enough (‘No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house’); the furore over Lady Edith’s (Laura Carmichael) love child, Marigold, being taken in by pig farmers on the estate; or the earl’s unwillingness to share a recovered letter from the deceased Matthew stating that he wanted his wife to be his sole heir, not their son (‘When you talk like that I’m tempted to call for your nanny and put you to bed without any supper’).

Downton Abbey
is filmed mostly on location at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, a privately owned Jacobethan edifice with a park designed by Capability Brown that represents the height of baronial splendour and privilege in the late Victorian and Edwardian ages. In 1922, the fifth Earl of Carnavon, Highclere’s owner, discovered, with Howard Carter, the tomb of Tutankhamun, often described as the first ‘global world media event’. It is neatly ironic, then, that the present Earl and Lady Carnavon, who still, as it were, live above the shop, should preside over another ‘global world media event’, as the mummies and daddies of Downton are disembalmed among their own hallways, bedrooms, library and reception rooms. The below-stairs kitchen scenes are filmed in Ealing Studios, the village and church scenes in Bampton, in Oxfordshire, while Lady Violet’s Wren cottage on the Downton estate is Byfleet Manor in Surrey, built in the seventeenth century on the site of a hunting lodge given by Edward II to his reputed lover Piers Gaveston.

The anxieties over the future of Downton, the slow acceptance by the earl of his daughter’s and son-in-law’s farming and modernisation plans, the status of the house in the community, the running costs, the adaptability – Highclere Castle really was transformed into a hospital for wounded soldiers on the front in the First World War, just as it is again (for officers only) in the television series – all act as metaphors in the ongoing struggle to preserve these great country houses in the twenty-first century. The earl talks a lot about what he’s duty bound to preserve and fight for, but it’s his mother, Lady Violet, who represents the innate dignity and values of the tradition, the authentic historical line which weathers the storm of the passing times and changing mores while sticking up for the old ones. Surveying the impromptu convalescent ward of the injured and mutilated she mutters, ‘It’s like living in a second-rate hotel where the guests keep arriving and nobody seems to leave.’

In 2012, Alan Bennett’s play
People
at the National Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner, came across not only as a satire on the preservation and survival theme of
Downton Abbey
but as a commentary on the real-life wheezes and money-raising ruses most of the major stately homes and grand country houses now adopt to keep going. Highclere Castle has
Downton Abbey
filming there for six months each year. The bedraggled, cash-strapped female companions in the run-down fifteenth-century Yorkshire house in
People
– and ‘Downton Abbey’ is in Yorkshire, not far from Ripon and Thirsk – are wooed by representatives of the National Trust and a consortium of camel-coated auctioneers but decide instead that first dibs should be given to a low-rent film company making pornography. Julian Fellowes enjoyed the play but felt it was a little out of date. ‘That was much more how it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Now the younger generation have moved in and taken over, transforming the land into home farms, outlets and factories. Families that managed to hold on to their estates are now, on the whole, in much better shape.’ Lady Violet, no doubt, would be very glad to hear it, though one can’t help feeling that the whole process down the years would send her into the sort of instant apoplexy followed by serene scorn and dutiful acceptance that Maggie manages to convey in almost every other line of the
Downton
script.

Downton Abbey
, says chief executive producer Graham Neame, is a precinct drama; except that it’s set in a castle, not a police station. By series three, we’d advanced to the spring of 1920 and Maggie’s function as a tart, unforgiving observer of the changing social scene was underlined in such remarks as ‘an aristocrat with no servants is as much use to the county as a glass hammer’. Time is moving on, and the Irish chauffeur, young Tom Branson (very well played by new star Allen Leech), who had married the earl’s second daughter, Sybil, and become ‘family’, is now dressed, in her eyes, ‘as the man from the Prudential’. Inspecting a new downstairs recruit, she says he resembles a footman in a musical revue. On the other hand, and there’s always that with Violet, she remarks on the earl’s third daughter Lady Edith’s (Laura Carmichael) journey into journalism with a quasi-feminist reflection that a woman’s place is in the home, ‘but I don’t see the harm in having fun before she gets there’.

It’s this mixture of what should by rights and tradition happen, and what actually does, that gives the series its sense of flux and development. The marriage of Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley was the plot prompt for the first three series, while Violet charts the changing social landscape (in which she wants no part) by remarking that, as the family has already absorbed a solicitor (Matthew) and a car mechanic (Branson), they might as well put up with a journalist (Lady Edith) in their ranks. Much of this disapproval about the changing world is inflected through social gatherings that, in her view, have gone downhill anyway, judging by the looks she dispatches from a full quiver – occasions such as the ghillies’ ball (and she first went to one at the royal residence in Balmoral, where ‘all the men were as tight as ticks’), the cricket match, even a routine house party: ‘I’m afraid Tom’s small talk is very small indeed,’ she says. ‘Everyone can’t be Oscar Wilde.’ ‘That’s a relief!’ And that last riposte carries with it a shudder of disapproval of, and dismay over, the whole Oscar Wilde story, not to mention his plays.

The Maggie dowager construct had begun with Julian Fellowes’s Oscar-winning script for Robert Altman’s
Gosford Park
in 2001. Maggie, Fellowes says, had always been a haunting presence in his life, someone who, as an actor, developed into a strange persona who could flip between emotional states without changing gear. He saw her play Desdemona opposite Olivier as Othello – ‘Shakespeare usually bores me to death’ – and he’s never forgotten that night at the Old Vic. ‘I could see then that she could play tragedy one minute, comedy the next, and you do know, as a writer, that she can put “funny” and “moving” together like nobody else.’
Gosford Park
, he says, was a surreal adventure, with me ‘determined to put some of my old boys in it – I always write parts for older actors – and Bob was convinced that he couldn’t get great actors to do tiny parts for no money unless they could sleep in their own beds at night’. The key compromise was that they would film at Wrotham Park in North London, a Palladian mansion previously used for Kenneth Branagh’s
Peter’s Friends
, ITV’s
Jeeves and Wooster
series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, various ‘costume’ movies (
Vanity Fair
,
Sense and Sensibility
,
Jane Eyre
) and Simon Cowell’s fiftieth birthday party. The finance was minimal, so the ‘overnight’ budget was contained. And Fellowes’s baptism of fire, as he calls it, with Maggie, happened when she asked him a question about the marmalade; she didn’t understand what it was about the importance of it. ‘So I told her that a great aunt of mine had said that every house that’s properly run has its own jams and jellies; if they’ve run out, it’s not properly run.’ Instantly, she said, ‘I’ve got it.’