Maggie Smith: A Biography (8 page)

McCowen was enormously taken with her: ‘I remember thinking, when is she going to do something? I looked at her face and nothing seemed to be happening. But when I looked on the monitor, I realised everything was happening. Her acting was all in her head and very underplayed. It was a tender little play and she gave a very sensitive performance.’ Peter Wood says that he had to hold the viewfinder up to his eyes so that the actors could not see him snivelling: ‘The periphery of the emotional situation was very precise; they acted beautifully, in concentric rings. Alec’s role was tenth cousin to Jimmy Porter [in
Look Back In Anger
], only Welsh, and Maggie had come to commune with herself.’

It was because of
Sunday out of Season
that both McCowen and Maggie were invited by Michael Benthall to join the Old Vic in 1959. One detail of this transaction still rankles with McCowen. During early rehearsals for that first season, the actors were marking out the moves when Benthall shouted at Maggie and McCowen from the back of the stalls: ‘You’ll have to speak up, we can’t have any of this television acting here.’ This insult to two of our most conspicuously audible actors was doubly hurtful because they were only ‘blocking’: ‘But he was a strange man, Michael Benthall,’ says McCowen, ‘who used to give with one hand and take away with the other. He didn’t much like people liking him, I don’t think.’

Maggie completed a hectic television schedule which included Christopher Fry’s
A Phoenix Too Frequent
and Somerset Maugham’s
For Services Rendered
. Most of Maggie’s early work on television has been lost or wiped. The cavalier attitude of its own custodians towards the nation’s small-screen culture, in the age before video recordings, let alone DVDs, is a scandal of the postwar era; in Maggie’s case, the loss is particularly regrettable if one judges it by the quality of her performance in the Maugham, which has luckily been preserved. She plays Lois, the youngest of three daughters in a country household torn apart in the dreary aftermath of the First World War. Maugham’s bitter 1932 play was confirmed as a Chekhovian classic by this production, and its urgency and pathos are well served by the immediacy of a ‘live performance’ on television. The male casualties of war sit on the sofa, though Maggie as Lois is threatened less by bombs than by bombazine. She wants out, action, the bright lights, something to look forward to. She paints a serious, thoughtful portrait of a girl waking up to her own ability to exert power over men. She exudes confidence and poise, and does not use her ‘revue’ intonations, but the clear, cool voice of the real actress. It is a lovely performance, truthful and sharp, in a very good company.

At the end of 1958, Maggie appeared briefly in the only out-and-out West End flop of her career,
The Stepmother
by Warren Chetham-Strode. The débâcle was most keenly felt by Kate Reid, the distinguished Canadian actress who was making her London début. She played the new wife of a man haunted by the memory of his crippled first wife, and Maggie flitted on as a variety agent’s secretary called Vere Dane, stealing the notices in a scene where she instructs an office boy in the art of coping with a would-be trainer of performing elephants. On tour, Maggie’s humour and pathos were noted in the
Yorkshire Post
. Desmond Pratt said that her brash Cockney forthrightness was mixed with ‘a deep sympathetic understanding of the secretly forlorn’.
The Times
approved ‘a delightfully wristy performance’. Kate Reid recalled that Maggie’s hair was dyed ‘very, very blonde, almost pink’ and that she cried a lot in rehearsals.

Maggie took this role partly on the rebound from a strange rebuff by Charles Laughton, in which her old Oxford admirer, John Beary, also played a part. Beary had been working in Ireland, but was now employed as an assistant to Laughton, who was appearing in, and directing,
The Party
by Jane Arden. Laughton went to see Maggie in
Share My Lettuce
at Beary’s suggestion, invited her to audition for the role of his daughter and subsequently to dinner. Beary saw the whole affair as his great chance of reclaiming Maggie. Laughton said that she ‘showed some signs of genius’ and reminded him of Laurette Taylor. But the next morning, the final girl came in to audition. It was Ann Lynn, and she was cast on the spot.

Beary says that Maggie was so shocked by this apparent rejection that she decided at that moment to do no more revues and to enter the lists as a serious actress. She became a contender. And Beary was romantically thwarted for the second time. In June 1959, the
Sunday Times
identified a representative cross-section of the British cultural élite, and the film critic Dilys Powell nominated in their number Maggie, whom J. W. Lambert apostrophised as ‘a popper-in of great talent’. In August, Maggie returned to Edinburgh with the Old Vic company as Lady Plyant in Michael Benthall’s production of Congreve’s
The Double Dealer
.

Benthall had run the Old Vic since 1953, and Maggie was one of several newcomers who bridged the gap between these last days of the old rep and the incoming era of subsidised theatre. In 1963, Laurence Olivier would take over the Old Vic as the first artistic director of Britain’s new National Theatre, and Maggie would be one of his twelve contracted actors, most of them unknown or recruited from the Royal Court. At the end of the 1950s, she represented the transitional phase, as well as that future in embryo, along with Judi Dench, Barbara Jefford, Alec McCowen, Stephen Moore and John Woodvine. John Moffatt recalls that she fitted into a very happy company which is ‘unfairly despised’ because of what happened afterwards. The leading actors were Fay Compton, Joss Ackland, Walter Hudd, Robert Harris, John Justin and Donald Houston. In 1960, Judi Dench and John Stride would make their names in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of
Romeo and Juliet
. Michael Elliott ran the final Old Vic season after Benthall left in 1962, and then everything changed.

Judi Dench, Moyra Fraser, Maggie, John Moffatt, Alec McCowen and Joss Ackland became a particularly close group of friends within the company. They had Sunday lunches in each other’s houses and suppers after the show. For McCowen, it was ‘by far the happiest company I have ever worked in. That company symbolises for me the theatre and my time in it. Some of the productions were terrible, but not all. The happiest show I did there was
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, which was appalling, but a riot to be in. It was always very hard to get up the stairs in the interval because Moyra Fraser and Maggie had invariably collapsed with laughter and were rolling around hugging each other in these huge skirts.’ Although Maggie was ever a worrier and self-doubter, McCowen says she ‘was not so much a moaner in those Old Vic days’. He noticed the difference, the more downbeat approach, years later when they filmed
Travels with My Aunt
with George Cukor. ‘Every morning on
Travels
, the greeting would be “Don’t feel like it today” or some such phrase; but then this spirit for comedy bubbles out in a totally mysterious way.’

Judi Dench shared a dressing room with those very merry wives. ‘Maggie always had the most beautiful clothes. She taught me always to buy not one pair of shoes but two or three identical pairs of what suited you. I had never met anyone like that before, and I’ve always done this ever since. She came to see me at the Vic the year after she left and she was wearing the most beautiful white coat. I jumped on her back and she spilt a glass of tomato juice all down the front. But I don’t think she had two of those! To me, she’s always been immensely funny, and always so chic with that wonderful, shiny hair.’

Judi and Maggie got to know each other in Edinburgh because Miles Malleson, a senior character actor who was as renowned for his bottom-pinching exploits as he was for his halitosis, was pursuing both of them. Judi Dench says, ‘We were rather frightened of him, but I expect he only wanted to take us out to tea.’

The Double Dealer
had not been produced since 1916, and Alan Pryce-Jones in the
Observer
, lauding Congreve as ‘a supreme poet of the corrupt ephemeral’, declared, presciently, that such a rare approach to playwriting needed a National Theatre to do it justice: ‘Since the contemporary theatre has no experience of Restoration comedy, the company must be congratulated on doing as well as they do. They must not, however, sneeze when they take snuff.’ The London reviews were generous, but it was Bernard Levin in the
Daily Express
who really threw his hat in the air, and not for the last time:

Lady Plyant is a tyrant at home, a coquette abroad. Maggie, consigning her elderly husband to a permanent state of subjection and sexual starvation, must have driven poor old Miles Malleson as potty on stage as she did off. The spirit of independence in marriage and the enunciation of wittily brutal conditions laid down within and without the married state are hallmarks of the comic heroines who became Maggie’s speciality: Rosalind, Beatrice, Silvia, Mrs Sullen, Margery Pinchwife, Maggie Wylie and Amanda Prynne. From Shakespeare to Restoration comedy, J. M. Barrie to Noël Coward, Maggie knew instinctively how to make herself stylishly available on her own terms. Levin declared that
As You Like It
, in which Maggie played Celia to Barbara Jefford’s Rosalind and Alec McCowen’s Touchstone, marked the end of a seven-year lean spell at the Vic, and that the theatre was now ‘a place to visit for pleasure rather than duty’.

But new notes of critical dissension heralded a debate over mannerism which was to loom large across the years in any discussion of Maggie’s acting. In the
Sunday Times
, J. W. Lambert entered the first caveat: ‘Maggie Smith mangles her phrases [as Celia] with a quite striking absence of ear’; and Edward Goring in the
Daily Mail
, noting that previous queens in
Richard II
at the Old Vic included Peggy Ashcroft, Margaret Leighton, Renée Asherson and Claire Bloom, stated that Miss Smith ‘is more suited to comedy … The flat, tremulous voice manages a tear-choking note but carries stronger echoes of Maggie, almost of our Eth of
The Glums
. Regal robes and one of those medieval gilt hairnet affairs sit uneasily on the dizzy bombshell of
Share My Lettuce
.’

Her extraordinary inflections have always been part of her repertoire. Alec McCowen can still hear today the sonic imprint Maggie left on Celia in phrases such as ‘lame me with reasons’ (‘lame’ given syllabic extension and a mocking, viperish tincture); ‘like a dropped acorn’, said of Orlando found lolling under a tree; ‘I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it’ on arrival in Arden; and ‘Alas, poor shepherd’, a poignantly heartfelt ejaculation. McCowen, no technical slouch himself, says that this colouring of the words, the unexpected highlighting of phrases that normally pass unnoticed, put her, for him, in the same class as Edith Evans. ‘We knew she was a very special actress, even in that company; we were all pretty good. But to do this with Celia! Barbara Jefford was a bloody good Rosalind, but she must have been quite surprised.’

Maggie was disappointed not to be playing Rosalind herself. She was also passed over for Gwendolen in
The Importance of Being Earnest
(again, Barbara Jefford, still young but vastly more experienced, got the role). Michael Benthall made amends by giving her the leading role in J. M. Barrie’s
What Every Woman Knows
and thus set the seal on her stardom. The opening night was 12 April 1960. The
Daily Sketch
reported twelve curtain calls under the heading of ‘Maggie – a Star at 24’. The
Daily Mail
review was headlined ‘Maggie’s night at the Old Vic’, and the critic reported ‘very loud cheers’ and ‘the arrival of Maggie Smith as a fully-fledged comedienne’.

Barrie’s play, dating from 1908, when it was seen as a loose retelling of the early career of the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had not been seen in London since 1943. For the first time, Maggie was able to conjure the Celtic side of her background in the character of Maggie Wylie, an allegedly spinsterish ugly duckling whose father and brothers marry her off to a working-class upstart who has breached the family home in order to steal knowledge from their library. The ‘wee wifey’ becomes the inspirational support for the Scottish autodidact’s political success, but she is taken advantage of, and proceeds to redefine her position by renegotiating it with evidence of marital infidelity. Some critics, including Alan Pryce-Jones, thought Maggie was too straightforwardly entrancing: ‘Far from being unmarriageable, she would have had all Kirriemuir at her feet at a turn of the wrist.’

The production was given for only twenty-five performances, but the acclaim was tumultuous. John Moffatt, playing a diplomat, remembers that, on the first night, he came on ‘and she had her back to me; it was the first time I had met her in the play and she was bent over a desk. She turned, and it was one of those extraordinary moments when I didn’t see Maggie Smith there. I saw this other Maggie, Maggie Wylie, and it quite startled me. I hadn’t seen this in rehearsals. I suddenly thought: this is a great actress.’ The impact of Maggie’s Maggie Wylie was considerable. The West End, and in particular the all-powerful Binkie Beaumont, sniffed out a new star. John Moffatt, looking back, is adamant about her right to supremacy.