Maggie Smith: A Biography (5 page)

Daughters of the University’s intellectual élite, not surprisingly, dominated the school. In Margaret Smith’s time there, one of the school’s star pupils was Paquita Florey, daughter of the Professor of Pathology for whom Nat worked. There were 240 girls on the school roll in 1888; by 1951, when Margaret left, there were 468, and the school’s activities and dormitories (the school always had a proportion of boarders) spilled over into other more modest addresses in the vicinity. She must have thought at times that she was exchanging one cramped environment at home for another at school. Other girls remember her walking into a classroom, bumping into a desk and raising a laugh. Much of Maggie Smith’s physical comedy derives from her limbs seeming to extract themselves gracefully from tricky situations. It is tempting to suggest that her gesticulatory repertoire derives in part from being cribb’d, cabin’d and confined wherever she lived, and wherever she turned, in her childhood.

The school was renowned for its interest in acting. Apart from that early dynasty of Smith girls, there were also the Power sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth, became an eminent economic historian. Beryl Power was deemed magnificent as Flavius ‘with a beard and a whip and a naturally powerful voice’. The plays were usually Shakespeare or Greek-in-translation. Hilda Napier played the lead in
Iphigenia in Tauris
in the translation later introduced to the London stage by Lillah McCarthy. The most distinguished actress the OHS produced before Maggie Smith was Margaret Rawlings, who arrived from Japan in 1920 and was accepted ‘because of worthy and scholarly letters’ written by her clergyman father. Rawlings was an exemplary product of the school who, before gaining a reputation as an outstanding classical tragedienne, graduated from Lady Margaret Hall in the University. Her best friend was one Leonora Corbett who also became an actress and played Elvira, the ghost-wife, throughout the New York run of Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
. Leonora, recalled Margaret Rawlings, used to arrive late each term and regularly confessed to her house mistress that she was plagued by ‘carnal thoughts’. She was invariably consoled with cocoa and bourbon biscuits.

Another OHS actress of a more local provenance, and just a few years ahead of Maggie, was Judith Stott, whose family had a grocer’s shop in Walton Street. She remembered Maggie tap-dancing at a bus stop in Headington. Judith Stott’s example must have been a spur to Maggie’s ambition. After training, she became a prominent West End juvenile, playing the young girl in
The Chalk Garden
opposite Edith Evans in 1956. Judith Stott appeared in countless plays wearing Clark’s sandals and white ankle-socks. She crisscrossed with Maggie for many years subsequently, appearing with her (and Dame Edith) in a television version of
Hay Fever
; succeeding her in the Peter Shaffer double bill of 1962; and remaining friends throughout two decades, during which period she was married to the Irish comedian, Dave Allen: ‘To me, she’s just my Margaret. She’s laughter and tears, and part of my life for so many years.’

Margaret Smith does not loom large in the school history and magazines. She played tennis once for her house, West Club. She earned ‘special congratulation’ as Puck in the lovers’ quarrel scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which her house performed in the Shakespeare Competition (East Club, with ‘the pick of the acting’, took the palm). And a contributor to Violet Stack’s 1963 school history, a senior girl of the day, wrote in half-apologetic retrospection: ‘Could one have attempted to keep in order the naughty little red-headed fourth former, even as far as we tried, if one had known that Maggie Smith would today be playing to packed houses in the West End?’ Miss Stack, who had previously taught at Holloway prison, had been headmistress since 1937. She replaced Miss Gale, who was struck by lightning on holiday; the school magazine reported that ‘although this terrible accident was fortunately neither fatal nor completely incapacitating, it made a return to work impossible’.

The school’s reputation for drama had dipped a little during the war, but that was put to rights by the advent of Dorothy Bartholomew. Miss Bartholomew arrived at the OHS in 1948 and stayed for five years and one term. She was later headmistress of Norwich High School for twenty-two years and retired to a quaint little house in the cathedral close: ‘Margaret was in the Upper Fourth when I arrived and they were very lively, both lots. I thought they were going to be my undoing. I remember her as a very private person. She was certainly naughty, but it was an attractive naughtiness, in a way. I think, looking back now, she already saw where she hoped to go, and maybe we missed out.’

Margaret felt she missed out badly by not being cast as Viola, a fact she would sometimes bitterly refer to in later life. But although Miss Bartholomew saw the Viola Margaret eventually played with the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1952, and admired it, she still harboured reservations:

Miss Bartholomew was quite right. Although adept at ‘putting across’ a revue number, Maggie was never really happy with music on stage and was only too keen to escape from revue the moment she had made her mark in it. Classroom contemporaries Margaret Bonfiglioli (née Slater) and Bridget Davidson (née Senior), who were later respectively head girl and deputy head girl, confirmed that Margaret did rehearse as Feste, and was funny, though she was more renowned as a general wag and everyday comedienne than as a conscientious performer. They deny that Miss Bartholomew had a down on Margaret, even though she was obviously a cantankerous handful in the classroom. But there remains a puzzle as to why she was not cast in the main school production when, according to Margaret Bonfiglioli, ‘her real acting talent had become evident in her inspired and inspiring playing as the Porter in
Macbeth
in the Shakespeare Competition’.

Margaret’s nickname was ‘Woozler’. Everyone, says Bridget Davidson, called her that, but nobody, least of all Maggie herself, recalls why. Perhaps it was a result of some rustic mimicry, a precise evocation of the Banbury or Bidford inflections which the mature Maggie would later evoke so thoroughly as Margery Pinchwife in
The Country Wife
. Of the two lots of the Upper Third in 1947, Margaret, testifies another contemporary, Ruth Clarke (née Ayers), was in ‘the other form’; those girls were inferior except when it came to the Shakespeare Competition, whose trophy, the Power Shield, was named in honour of the Power sisters. In this one aspect of competitive school life, says Ruth Clarke, the ‘other form’ was formidable opposition indeed:

Miriam Margolyes, who was at the school from 1945 to 1959, from the infants through to the sixth form, and who would appear with Maggie in the Harry Potter series and in
Ladies in Lavender
, felt uncomfortable at the school, even though she was ‘a responsible form leader’ and left with an Exhibition to Cambridge, where she emerged as a comedienne of a thousand voices. Her family was Jewish, her father a doctor, and definitely not part of the University milieu.

That factory would be the Oxford Playhouse. Another school friend, Verena Johnston (née Hunt), who, like Ruth Clarke, lived in Cowley, went to the Smith home ‘on at least two Saturday mornings’ to play Monopoly with Margaret and her brothers. Her father, Tommy Hunt, was a theatre fanatic who collected playbills and programmes all his life, and used to take Verena and Margaret to both the New Theatre and the Playhouse. Verena Johnston does not recall Margaret ‘shining’ at school, nor being aware of any class difference between herself and the other girls. But Margaret, she says, was adamant by the age of fifteen or sixteen that the stage was ‘the only thing’ for her. Tommy Hunt advised her of the many pitfalls. She should only go ahead, he said, if it was the only thing in the world she wanted to do. It was.

Margaret had decided she wanted to go to drama school in London. She had set her heart on RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but her parents said she could not leave home in Oxford. Meg wanted her to go to secretarial college and unhelpfully suggested that she could not hope to be an actress ‘with a face like that’. Nat was torn between obeying his wife and pleasing his daughter.

Oxford High School had only fanned the flames of an ambition that was engendered outside. Margaret Smith was, and Maggie Smith is, a voracious reader. During her years at the High School, she devoured a popular fictional series by Pamela Brown, who wrote a children’s novel about the theatre,
The Swish of the Curtain
, in 1941. The book was written because its author, a fourteen-year-old wartime evacuee to Wales, wanted to sustain her playtime theatrical fantasies with her best friend in London. By an extraordinary coincidence, the lodgings which Ian and Alistair had taken in Peel Street, Kensington, were in the house owned by this same Pamela Brown and her husband Donald Masters, a repertory actor. Margaret had read all of Pamela Brown’s ‘Blue Door’ series, and she talked about them with the author when she visited her brothers. Pamela Brown had trained as an actress at RADA and had adopted the stage name of ‘Mela Brown’ in order not to be confused with the famous actress of the same name. She had then become a producer of plays for children on BBC television.

The books exactly reflected Margaret’s developing situation. In
The Swish of the Curtain
, a group of enthusiastic junior amateurs, the Blue Door Company, who have created their own theatre and presented a series of Shakespearean and vaudeville concerts, all progress from Fenchester (a country town of historic interest modelled on Colchester in Essex) to drama school in London; all, that is, except for young Maddy, the cheeky girl who becomes the heroine of the series. In
Maddy Alone
(1945), Maddy’s career takes off in spite of not going to London when she becomes embroiled in professional show business on her doorstep: a film is made for which there is a part for a local twelve-year-old. Later books,
Blue Door Venture
and
Maddy Again
, recount, respectively, the founding of a professional theatre company in Fenchester and the launching of Maddy’s career in television. This last book appeared by popular request in 1956, just as Margaret Smith became Maggie and leapt from miscellaneous work in theatre and television to Broadway.

Pamela Brown died in 1989, shortly after several of her books had been reissued for a new young readership. If Margaret was ever stage-struck it was when she read Pamela Brown. In later life, she often quoted with approval the other Pamela Brown, the actress who, like her namesake, trained at RADA and who played Ophelia to Robert Helpmann’s Hamlet and Millamant to John Gielgud’s Mirabell. This Pamela Brown said, ‘It’s the audience that’s stage-struck, not me.’

In 1951, Margaret was unhappy at school and unhappy at not going to RADA. This tense situation was resolved by Nat going to see Isabel van Beers, a drama teacher who had a travelling brief among the Oxfordshire schools with a regular port of call at the High School. Margaret had responded to her, and Mrs van Beers had been a good deal more encouraging than Miss Bartholomew. Nat had heard she was starting a drama school based at the Playhouse in Beaumont Street. Mrs van Beers, who had spotted Margaret’s ‘built-in timing’, accepted her immediately as one of the first intake of the Oxford Playhouse School of Theatre. Thus she embarked on a two-year course which was to pitch her into the ferment of both the hard professional theatre and the softer, more glamorous whirlpool of University productions. Oxford made her. Over the next four years, she broke many hearts, played countless leads, became a fixture in University revues, a personality in her adopted city and a toast of the Edinburgh Festival.

The Playhouse School was her passport and Mrs van Beers her Svengali. Originally trained in ballet, the formidable and vastly experienced teacher had been sent to study acting in Oxford at the end of the 1920s. Like Margaret twenty years later, the budding actress had plenty of opportunity to rub shoulders with the best. In 1932 and 1933, Isabel van Beers appeared, in a minor capacity, in two of the most renowned of all OUDS productions: John Gielgud’s version of
Romeo and Juliet
, and Max Reinhardt’s outdoor
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. She had married Stanley van Beers, a stage manager with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, and before the war worked in repertory in Leeds, Bradford and Coventry. The couple were later divorced, and Isabel took to teaching, basing herself in 28 Wellington Square, just off Beaumont Street and a stone’s throw from the Playhouse.

The idea for the school at the Playhouse was hatched with Nevill Coghill, the Fellow of Exeter College who was at the heart of Oxford theatre for more than thirty years. Morning classes were held in a little church in St Cross, and the Playhouse stage was made available, five afternoons a week, from 2.30 to 5. Most importantly, the school had an arrangement with Equity, the actors’ union, to provide students for twelve small parts a year within the professional company. Students were also encouraged, if invited, to take part in University and college productions. Thus the students could ‘learn to handle their audiences’ by listening to them, flushing them out and adjusting to their funny ways and habits. This was the most important skill, in Isabel van Beers’s book, and one for which Maggie Smith would become renowned. The fees were twenty guineas a term. The reward was a certificate in acting from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, of which Mrs van Beers was an honorary member.

Margaret had made a great impression on Mrs van Beers on one of her visits to the High School. The tutor gave her a speech of Helena’s in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. ‘She sent it up! A child of fourteen. And I thought, oh my word, this is interesting. She had, even then, marvellous comedy timing, and she never made a mistake. By the time she came to the school it was obvious she was going to be something. She was on one track and her sights were at the top.’

Thus, in October 1951, Margaret Smith made her first appearance on the Playhouse stage as Jean in
The Pick-Up Girl
by Elsa Shelley. A photograph shows her leaning over a banister in a silk shirt, mouth half-open, looking sultry. And in June 1952, as she completed her two-year course, she at last played Viola, in the OUDS
Twelfth Night
. The President of the OUDS, John Wood, renowned later as a leading Royal Shakespeare Company actor, played Malvolio (‘Looking as lean, lanky and statuesque as Don Quixote,’ said the
Oxford Mail
), the future television executive Patrick Dromgoole was Sir Toby (‘A dapper little man … [not the usual] gross-bellied understudy of Falstaff’) and the founding director of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Michael Elliott, who would one day direct Maggie as Miss Julie, was Antonio.

Margaret Smith – the unfamiliar name fooled the OUDS historian, Humphrey Carpenter, who made nothing of it in his celebratory book – shivered in the gardens of Mansfield College every night, praying for rain. As Viola/Cesario she wore black tights, a white full-sleeved blouse and a sword, and she promptly collected her first rave review. The
Oxford Mail
was more than complimentary: ‘Margaret Smith, whose loveliness has a boyish quality about it, made Olivia’s infatuation for her seem quite natural … I was much struck by the simple sincerity of her acting. She approximates very nearly to the Viola of our dreams.’ In the summer vacation, the production toured to Clermont-Ferrand in France, and the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin as part of the Berliner Festwochen.

Margaret was now fully immersed in the life of the University theatre, and its centre was the Playhouse, where the director of pro-ductions was Frank Shelley. She threw herself energetically into productions of both town and gown at a time when the Playhouse was a staging post for the leaders of tomorrow’s theatre, and the OUDS full of ambitious undergraduates and future stage and television luminaries.

One such Oxford idol was Ned Sherrin, whose participation in the University revues was a crucial formative influence on Maggie: ‘I think as she became older she became a little more extravagant, but I remember her as a quiet little thing, rather like one of Trollope’s little brown girls. She obviously had tremendous talent, but she was not flamboyant.’ She did not, for Sherrin and his contemporaries, have the glamorous, remote mystique of Zuleika Dobson in Max Beerbohm’s Oxford love story: ‘Our own Zuleika was a girl called Jennifer Weston who married a property tycoon, and of course Antonia Pakenham [later Lady Antonia Fraser] was up at the same time, floating around town on her bicycle. Margaret was simply considered to be one of the very best actresses.’ But she did make some impression on Oxford fashion. Patrick Dromgoole says that in 1952 she was the first person he knew who bought a pair of jeans and sat in the bath water while wearing them, ‘allowing them to dry to shape around her figure’.

Home was still 55 Church Hill Road, and Meg would dispatch Nat to walk halfway into town if they thought Margaret was being detained at rehearsals beyond a proper hour. They were grudgingly reconciled to Margaret’s ambition and may have been comforted by a perceptive progress report which Frank Shelley sent to Nat in January 1953: ‘As raw material for the stage she is second to none in the school. But … I suspect that her very quickness and impatience to improve herself may at times get in her way, and make her her own “worst enemy”. She must find patience towards her less gifted fellow pupils, and also towards the tutors at the school … Margaret has the essential stuff in her. It takes too long to try and define it; but some of us can recognise it.’

The
Oxford Mail
certainly had. Two months before Frank Shelley wrote his report, he had directed Margaret and Ronald Barker as two naughty children in
The Housemaster
by Ian Hay. The public-school farce also had Francis Matthews in the cast, but the
Mail
was more taken by the OUDS Viola transformed into ‘Button’ Farringdon: ‘How John Betjeman would have approved of Margaret Smith, all legs and too brief “briefies”, in which she hoarded hot sticky chocolate, destined in no time at all to become that great mountainous sports girl, Joan Hunter Dunn. She came as near to being a Great Dane puppy as any mortal, unhelped by Barrie, dare hope. I adored her.’ But not everyone saw her potential. Ronald Barker, destined to become one of Britain’s most popular television comedy actors, was a member of the Oxford Playhouse Company throughout Margaret’s apprenticeship. Years later, at the height of his fame, Barker told a correspondent, B. A. Young, that all he remembered of young Margaret Smith was that he advised her to give up the profession ‘as I didn’t think she had the qualities or the talent necessary! How wrong I was.’

It is worth noting at this early stage that Margaret was as much in demand for serious drama as she was for revue. Either side of her final year at the Playhouse school, she appeared in T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
with the University Poetry Society (the poet Adrian Mitchell was the First Priest) in St Peter-in-the-East Church; with the University Players in Andreyev’s
He Who Gets Slapped
(as Consuela, the doomed love object and bareback rider, to whom, said Frank Dibb in the
Oxford Times
, she brought ‘both vernal freshness and a never self-conscious humour’); and with the OUDS again in February 1954 as Gertrud in Michael Meyer’s first play,
The Ortolan
. Meyer, the Ibsen biographer and translator, was then a tyro novelist and playwright, and his symbolic drama about a young poetess, the protégée of an older woman who cannot have children and seeks fulfilment in the girl’s success, was favourably reviewed by four undergraduates nursing bright futures: Sherrin, Michael Elliott, Peter France, the television presenter, and Monty Haltrecht, the novelist.

Patrick Dromgoole, who appeared in the play and shared Oxford digs with Haltrecht, remembered his friend’s description of Margaret in a minor role: ‘frail as an opalescent moth’. She was, said Dromgoole, ‘the perfect illusion, terribly beautiful, her colour fairly startling, and she was impossibly young, or seemed so, and a bit distant in the sense that no one ever felt very near her’. Harold Hobson, the critic of the
Sunday Times
, found his way to Marston Hall to see
The Ortolan
and was similarly struck: ‘… at one point, when she speaks of a working girl’s dreary chances of a cheap pick-up at Saturday night dances, Miss Smith makes a brief foray out of the play’s general atmosphere of intellectual efficiency into the realm of theatrical emotion’. This first notice in the national press was not only typical of Hobson’s acumen and ability to spot new talent; it isolates for the first time the Maggie Smith way with unsentimental expressions of sadness. The loneliness of her childhood found an outlet on the stage, and it remained characteristic of her first maturity that her flights into Restoration comedy, as well as her swoops into simple revue material, were invariably shot through with a stinging and truthful pathos.

She signed her first professional contract with the Oxford Repertory Players at the Playhouse on 12 June 1954, as an assistant stage manager at a salary of four pounds and ten shillings a week. Her professional commitments, apart from making the tea, included walk-on roles in a series of productions in 1954 and 1955 by Peter Hall and Peter Wood, both of whom were to become distinguished directors. Shortly after Frank Shelley had written Margaret’s progress report, the Playhouse was taken over by Thane Parker, chairman of the London Mask Theatre, a company responsible for the Westminster Theatre and J. B. Priestley’s productions. Parker also administered a little touring outfit called the Elizabethan Theatre Company, which had been formed by a group of Cambridge graduates including Peter Hall and Peter Wood. Parker appointed Hall to the artistic directorship of the Playhouse, where he stayed for nine or ten months before accepting a more promising post at the Arts in London. Peter Wood succeeded him.