Maggie Smith: A Biography (9 page)

The London publisher Hamish Hamilton wrote to Maggie on the very next morning: ‘Your performance is enchanting, and I wish Barrie could have seen you. I’m sure he would have agreed that you are every bit as good as Hilda Trevelyan [the original Maggie Wylie], and much better than anyone else since. I haven’t enjoyed an evening in the theatre so much for ages. My congratulations and thanks.’

One month after
What Every Woman Knows
opened, ‘Binkie-vision’ presented the première on ITV of Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever
. Although Maggie’s loyal champion Philip Purser thought that the 1925 comedy was ‘rather a fraud’ and that the production, directed by Casper Wrede (who had directed Maggie in
The Ortolan
at Oxford), suffered from its curiously haphazard camera work, the event was important in many respects, not least the distinction of its cast list. Maggie played the bashful, giggling flapper, Jackie Coryton, alongside Edith Evans as Judith Bliss, George Devine as David Bliss, Paul Eddington as Sandy Tyrell and Pamela Brown (the actress, not the author) as Myra Arundel. This latter role Maggie was to make her own (‘This haddock is disgusting’) in the famous National Theatre revival four years later, when Edith Evans would repeat her somewhat over-age version of Judith.

Coward had been off the agenda for a few years and had suffered setbacks in the theatre.
The Times
wondered at Edith Evans never having played Judith before and surely anticipated ‘Dad’s revival’ (as Coward himself called it), which began with a 1963 production of
Private Lives
at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in declaring
Hay Fever
to be Coward’s best play ‘and one of the most perfectly engineered comedies of the century’.

The Bliss family entertain four guests for the weekend and subject them to mild humiliation and eccentric diversion between Friday evening and Sunday morning. Jackie is an effectively dumb role which Lynn Redgrave later occupied with considerable flair at the National. Maggie had her eye on Myra (
The Stage
complimented Pamela Brown on her ‘darkly etched vampire’) and, in the long term, Judith, the devastatingly hare-brained and incorrigibly vain actress who is teetering on the brink of middle-aged retirement. Meanwhile,
The Times
found this version ‘a delicately timed, stunningly stylish production’, and noted Maggie Smith’s ‘beautiful study of flaxen inanity’.

Maggie appeared ‘by permission of Associated British Picture Corporation Ltd, and the Old Vic’. She was now definitely in demand. Michael Codron wanted her to appear in another revue with Kenneth Williams, but she was determined to continue her education as an actress. While Maggie made waves at the Old Vic, Codron presented two more shows with Williams,
Pieces of Eight
(1959) and
One Over the Eight
(1961). The Williams/Smith partnership was not over, though. They remained in touch and would team up again before long in the West End.

Maggie was flat-sharing with a girlfriend, Juliet Duncombe, in Eldon Road, Knightsbridge, and spending a lot of time with Ian Bannen, a Scottish actor six years her senior who had been in the Stratford-upon-Avon company with Beverley Cross and who, in 1958, had scored two great personal successes in the plays of Eugene O’Neill,
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
. Bannen was a soft-spoken, introspective character whose melancholic disposition was ideally suited to the dark complexities of O’Neill. And, like the loyally besotted John Beary, he was a Catholic. Maggie was very taken with him, and also with a close friend of Bannen’s, a stage-struck cleric called Adrian Arrowsmith, who began giving Maggie instruction in the Catholic faith. There was even talk at one stage of a great wedding in Westminster Cathedral. Nat and Meg must have been horrified at the thought of their daughter converting from their Presbyterian and Anglican persuasions. In the event, the friendship with Bannen petered out and Maggie never became a Catholic, although it was a close-run thing. Bannen was married only much later in life, after a turbulent career in movies and television.

Beverley Cross reappeared on the horizon. His first play,
One More River
, had opened successfully at the Liverpool Playhouse with a young actor called Michael Caine in the cast, and it was scheduled for an October 1959 presentation by Laurence Olivier’s production company at the Duke of York’s in London. He knew very well that this might bring him closer to Maggie once more, and although he was married to another Oxford contemporary, Elizabeth Clunies-Ross, he declared himself ‘absent without leave’, and reported devotedly to the stage door of the Old Vic in order to renew his lifetime’s mission of courtship.

The reappearance of Beverley Cross was to have a decisive effect on Maggie’s career. His rock-like imperturbability complemented her anxiety and defensiveness. Until his death in 1998, as Maggie made her way through the early and middle ages of her fame and career, Beverley’s companionship was the essential safety net for the high-wire tension of her performing style.

Beverley’s mother, Eileen Dale, was a dancer and actress who claimed to have been pestered at the stage door of the Hippodrome by a ‘frightfully dull’ man called Evelyn Waugh (their brief correspondence is lost). She also appeared in the London premières of
Our Town
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
(she played Eileen Hubbel in Laurence Olivier’s 1949 production headed by Vivien Leigh, Renée Asherson and Bonar Colleano). In 1936, when Beverley was five, Eileen married George Cross, a theatrical manager of such stars as Godfrey Tearle and Jack Buchanan, and later a long-serving house manager of the Ambassadors Theatre.

Beverley attended the naval college at Pangbourne during the war, joined the army and then postponed his arrival in Oxford by taking a berth in the Norwegian merchant navy. After Oxford, he joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, but was discouraged from developing his acting career by a remark of John Gielgud, in whose production of
Much Ado About Nothing
he played Balthazar: ‘You’ll never make an actor; you wear your doublet and hose like a blazer and flannels.’ He stopped acting almost immediately and wrote two novels, some television plays and
One More River
. His varied writing credits include two Tommy Steele musicals, two Richard Rodney Bennett operas and the new version of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
for Donald Sinden, directed by Nicholas Hytner at Chichester and Her Majesty’s in 1985. In the late 1950s, he was one of the first recipients of the new Arts Council playwriting awards, for each of his first two plays,
One More River
at Liverpool and
Strip the Willow
at the Nottingham Playhouse. But the fashion in new playwriting was moving away from Beverley’s style of work towards the rougher, working-class prescriptions for British society delivered by John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and the angry brigade at the Royal Court.

The link between the old West End order to which Beverley aspired and the new Court generation was Laurence Olivier. While his presentation of Beverley’s
One More River
enjoyed a modest run at the Duke of York’s and then the Westminster, Olivier himself was starring in Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros
at the Royal Court, where he had scored one of the greatest successes of his career as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s
The Entertainer
. Olivier, still married to Vivien Leigh, was appearing opposite Joan Plowright, with whom he was in love. When
Rhinoceros
, directed by Orson Welles, transferred to the Strand Theatre, Olivier’s affair was reported in the newspapers and Plowright was compelled to leave the production because of the uproar – and, it was alleged, gastroenteritis. Plowright stayed on at the Court and made the biggest splash of her career as Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s
Roots
. Guess who stepped into the Ionesco?

Maggie Smith took over as Daisy to Olivier’s Berenger on 8 June 1960 for a six-week run. The show was the hottest ticket in town; it was said to be harder to get into than
My Fair Lady
. Other London hits of the moment included Donald Pleasence in Harold Pinter’s
The Caretaker
at the Duchess, Paul Scofield in Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons
(as it happens, the first play I saw on the London stage) at the Globe, Alec Guinness in Terence Rattigan’s
Ross
at the Haymarket and the Lunts in Peter Brook’s production of Dürrenmatt’s
The Visit
at the Royalty. Maggie had instantly signed up to the élite. The
News Chronicle
described her as ‘cool, crisp and wonderfully matter-of-fact as Daisy, the last woman in the world to join the rhinoceros ranks’. Maggie had little rehearsal time with Welles, but remembers being fascinated by the size of his feet. Olivier was suffering from gout at the time and Maggie set the pattern for their warily competitive relationship by sitting on the gouty leg during rehearsal.

Levin in the
Express
admired the way Maggie tamed her ‘natural razor-sharpness … into the simple, consoling girl she should be’ and
The Stage
averred that she was ‘gradually developing into an actress of distinction’. But
The Times
thought that she failed in the final long duet with Berenger: ‘Her coming to look after him in a world beset by rhinoceroses is all too casually presented to us as a matter of comparative unimportance, so that her eventual desertion does not shock us as it should. Miss Smith’s charm and lightness are not quite all that are needed here.’ This idea that Maggie might be out of her depth in serious stage drama was one she never completely shook off, though there is ample evidence from Maggie Wylie onwards – through Desdemona and Hedda Gabler to her blistering performances in Edward Albee in the 1990s – to contradict it.

The force of her comic and indeed sexual presence certainly impressed Olga Franklin in the
Daily Mail
, who reviewed a television adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s three-act comedy
Penelope
. Maggie played a doctor’s wife who wins back an errant spouse by affecting indifference. Franklin said that the production’s one weakness was that ‘the beautiful Maggie, dressed to the nines with more sex appeal in her little finger than Monroe and Bardot in the nude, made it seem hopelessly unconvincing that her doctor husband should prefer another woman’.

The ripening of Maggie coincided with her appearance in Beverley’s crucial second play. After the première of
Strip the Willow
in Nottingham, a new pre-London tour was presented in Cambridge, Newcastle and Brighton in September. Maggie was cast as Kathy Dawson, a politician’s mistress sheltering from an imminent nuclear attack in a decaying West Country folly, along with an archaeologist (played by Barrie Ingham) and a private detective (Michael Bates, who had also been in
Rhinoceros
). Beverley had inverted the Judgement of Paris myth by requiring Kathy to choose the man with whom she would begin procreation after the bombs had fallen in the first interval. For one reason or another, Maggie spent much of the play wearing very few clothes.

Maggie’s decorative qualities were politely referred to on the road, but
The Times
, venturing forth to the Hippodrome at Golders Green, last stop before the West End, ran a review under the unpromising headline ‘Britain Wiped Out in Comedy’s First Act’, while the
Daily Telegraph
killed kindly, but killed nonetheless, with ‘Horror Comedy a Bit Flat’. Beverley wrote his personal tribute to Maggie in the form of a stage direction at Kathy’s entrance: ‘She is about twenty-five and very beautiful. As elegant and sophisticated as a top international model. A great sense of fun. A marvellous girl.’ Binkie Beaumont of H. M. Tennent, who had gone to Golders Green at Beverley’s invitation, told him that the West End did not like ironic comedy but that ‘the girl is very, very good’. So good, in fact, that he started planning her West End career while putting a stop, for the moment, to Beverley’s:
Strip the Willow
never made it onto Shaftesbury Avenue.

Also in the cast was a young Australian actor, Michael Blakemore, who, thirty years later, would direct Maggie in
Lettice and Lovage
. He played an American soldier on security patrol after the fall-out.

Maggie and Beverley were now living together in the Eldon Road flat in South Kensington. Beverley was otherwise based at the White House at Beaumont in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his chow dog, Tuffet. His first marriage had broken down irretrievably, but there was a delay in arranging the divorce. Most friends of Maggie and Beverley regarded them as unofficially engaged. Beverley went off to location in Jordan to do some second-unit script editing on the David Lean film of
Lawrence of Arabia
(‘action stuff with camels’), while Maggie squeezed in another television role before joining a production of Jean Anouilh’s
The Rehearsal
, which Binkie Beaumont was supporting at the Bristol Old Vic and bringing into the Globe. The television play, only the second that survives on tape from her early career, was
The Savages
by Peter Draper, the author of
Sunday out of Season
. This was another ‘Binkie-vision’ project in which Maggie plays Rose, a Cockney prostitute who steals the heart of a young boy starved of affection at home. It is a sentimental and naïve piece, but not without its moments. The best scene is that between Maggie and the boy, who tells her that she is the most beautiful person he has ever seen. Maggie has a tumbled, fresh-faced look about her and the sympathetic listening she lavishes on the boy makes a nice change from all the ‘entertaining’ she has to provide at other times.

Maggie was a more respectable child-minder in
The Rehearsal
. She played the young girl employed to care for the orphans in the west wing of a château where a party, rehearsing the performance of a Marivaux play, unconsciously echoes its own romantic intrigues. The girl, Lucile, is heartlessly seduced by the debauched hero, called Hero, played by Alan Badel. The assistant director was a young working-class son of a Home Counties gardener. He was called Robin Phillips and Maggie later spent a crucial working period of her life with him in Canada, where he was director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario. But in 1961 he was a nobody. And a dogsbody.

The director, John Hale, left him to run through a rehearsal of the seduction scene, which was not going well, on what happened to be Phillips’s nineteenth birthday: ‘Badel was very much the star, sitting centre stage, and Maggie was hugging the walls.’ When they cried out for help, he tentatively suggested that the scene might be more effective if Maggie sat centre stage and Badel encircled her. ‘I don’t think it was a particularly clever suggestion, but they tried it, and of course the scene immediately worked. It was quite nice. I could see Maggie’s eyes twinkling at the suggestion. She didn’t say anything … but they whisked me off for a birthday drink because they were so pleased.’ Phillips was to become one of Maggie’s favourite and most influential directors, but not for another fourteen years.

After the first night at the Globe on 6 April 1961, Robert Muller in the
Daily Mail
declared the scene to be ‘one of the most affecting things to be seen in London at the moment’. Levin in the
Express
commended Maggie’s ‘pretty dash and honesty’; Hobson in the
Sunday Times
found her ‘touching, sincere and sometimes devastating.’ Tynan in the
Observer
applauded everything about the play and production except her contribution: ‘[She] never quite captures the luminous gravity that Anouilh demands; instead of silver she gives us tin,’ hinting at Portia’s casket scene in
The Merchant of Venice
which Maggie played on television ten years later.
The Rehearsal
moved next door to the Queen’s Theatre in May but Maggie was back at the Globe, and reunited with Kenneth Williams and the director Peter Wood, one year later in Peter Shaffer’s double bill
The Private Ear
and
The Public Eye
. Her success here ensured that she was discovered yet again. Binkie Beaumont was clasping her to his scheming and all-powerful bosom, and literati even more distinguished than the critics were sitting up.

Evelyn Waugh visited the Globe with Lady Diana Cooper and wrote to Ann Fleming on 2 July 1962:

In the first ‘little play’,
The Private Ear
, Maggie was Doreen, an office typist on a first date with a nervous music-lover in his Belsize Park flat; in the second,
The Public Eye
, she was Belinda, the young wife of a jealous accountant who sets an eccentric private detective, Julian Christoferou, on her trail. Julian munches macaroons in a mackintosh and becomes the surrogate lover who never existed to start with. The role was taken by Kenneth Williams, but Beaumont considered him too outré for the sensitive musical wooer, and that part was played by a prominent juvenile of the day, Terry Scully, who gave up acting shortly afterwards. According to Peter Wood, the double bill’s director, it had initially been offered to Michael Caine, though Caine himself has no memory of this. A trailblazing young romantic actor who did not sound like a RADA-trained minor public schoolboy, Caine was on the brink of a movie career which would eventually pair him with Maggie in
California Suite
.