Maggie Smith: A Biography (25 page)

The pig is finally slaughtered while Maggie drowns out its squeals with her piano-playing and the pageantry of England is celebrated in a party in the sitting room. Maggie’s Joyce, succulently overdressed in a blue suit, declares, in a line that mocks generations of suburban gentility: ‘I’m going to throw caution to the winds and have a sweet sherry.’ As the film fades on the post-prandial dance, a smooching Denholm Elliott places his hand on Maggie’s bottom, her features pucker into an expression of distaste that just stops short of a reprimand and Palin salivates over another sweet little piggy.

Michael Palin remained in awe of his co-star: ‘Terrifying is too strong a word. But she’s formidable when crossed. There’s an intensity of animosity sometimes, which comes out in her acting and which can be quite chilling. Maggie in a bad mood is clearly a few degrees worse than most people in a bad mood.’ Palin and his wife, Helen, subsequently drove down to visit Maggie and Beverley in Sussex, taking a vase they had bought for her in the Japanese shop in Covent Garden: ‘The vase had lots of flowers with it, and paper blooms. As I gave it to Maggie, I realised the paper blooms were in fact very small price tags and, as we talked, Maggie idly picked off the tags, one by one, without causing any embarrassment. I remember thinking that this was a great actor at work!’

Alan Bennett says that Maggie was in a consistently good temper throughout the filming of
A Private Function
.

The critical reaction to
A Private Function
was ecstatic on both sides of the Atlantic, though Rex Reed commented on the ‘kinky humour’ and ‘riotous bad taste’ which rendered it virtually a ‘foreign’ film in America. Vincent Canby, however, considered it ‘the most high-hearted, stylish English film comedy since the Boulting Brothers and the golden age of English comedy’ and Maggie ‘ferociously funny’ as Lady Macbeth’s ‘dainty, lower-middle-class spin-off’. In the 1984 British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA), the film split the honours with David Puttnam’s
The Killing Fields
, and Maggie was declared best actress, with the prizes in the supporting categories claimed by Denholm Elliott and Liz Smith.

A second film with Merchant Ivory,
A Room with a View
, enjoyed enormous popularity but had considerably fewer teeth than the Bennett movie. Maggie was cast as Charlotte Bartlett, ‘a terrible pain in the neck’ and yet another chaperone, this time in charge of a somewhat bland Helena Bonham-Carter as Lucy Honeychurch, E. M. Forster’s impressionable virgin who goes to Florence, sees a murder and is sumptuously kissed in a Tuscan cornfield by George Emerson, played by Julian Sands. Both
The Missionary
and
A Private Function
had been relatively low-budget affairs, and so was
A Room with a View
, although, at £2.4 million, with an eight-week shoot and four weeks on location in Tuscany, it cost twice as much to make as
Quartet
. It was co-produced with Goldcrest and Channel Four. A salutary and revealing comparison is with David Lean’s E. M. Forster film,
A Passage to India
, which cost £16 million.

A crack British cast included Maggie’s old friend Judi Dench as Miss Lavish, the ubiquitous novelist; Daniel Day-Lewis as Lucy’s diffident bookworm of a fiancé, Cecil Vyse; and Simon Callow as Mr Beebe, the rumbustious young vicar from Tunbridge Wells. Denholm Elliott chipped in with another craftily understated performance, as George’s father, and summed up the appeal of the project with delightful insouciance: ‘You may not earn much money, and the lunches aren’t exactly the greatest, but it is Forster, it is Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, and it is Florence. It’s good upmarket stuff which I like to be associated with … usually, I play abortionists.’

Chronologically, the film picked up where
The Missionary
left off, in 1907. And the Edwardian distance was maintained by a series of irritating chapter headings, faithful to Forster, but suggesting a lack of ideas about filmic adaptation. Pauline Kael felt that Helena Bonham-Carter was recessive and unradiant, depriving the movie of a centrifugal force; she certainly does not convey with any urgency the dilemma of a young girl torn between expressing her emotions and stifling them. Yet, as Kael says, the actors around her create a whirring atmosphere, a comic hum that makes the film completely watchable. Maggie, whose spinsterish Charlotte ‘sees sins against propriety everywhere’, visits the Honeychurches in deepest leafy Kent and does not have the correct change for the cab-driver. Lucy’s young brother pays the driver, but Maggie, over-emphatically and in order not to seem as impoverished as she is, insists on ‘a settling of accounts’. As Kael exclaims, ‘it’s like a Marx Brothers routine, with the glorious Smith fingers and wrists fumbling and flying in all directions’.

Maggie’s line on the pathos of the character – ‘In my small way I am a woman of the world’ – is absolutely straight and uninflected. She goes for a walk through Florence with Judi Dench’s novelist, the person to whom she finally betrays Lucy with a description of ‘the kiss’, several inches taller than her keen and precise friend, head jutting and corkscrewing around like that of a startled chicken. She makes the expression of the romantic secret an inevitable, gushing release for her own bottled-up feelings and unfulfilled sexuality. Every glance is informed with a signal of despair, an excuse, a cry for help, a diversionary remark.

Even off camera, Maggie could be just as alarming, and just as funny. Simon Callow had hardly met her before they worked on the film. Ismail Merchant renewed their acquaintance in the foyer of the Excelsior Hotel in Florence before shooting started and promptly departed to make arrangements for lunch. Callow recalls that there was an awkward pause before Maggie, looking distractedly into the middle distance, said, ‘I hope he won’t be long. Fabia Drake’s been sitting outside in that car for an hour and if she sits there any longer, she’s going to turn into a monument.’ After Callow had, as he admits, gurgled fatuously at this remark, he became tongue-tied once again before making his biggest mistake of all – blurting out praise for her most recent performance. Maggie suddenly turned on a bowl of flowers which she said she found ‘worrying’ and walked off to see the venerable actress and save her from the accelerating process of monumentalisation.

Once again, Maggie picked up the BAFTA best actress award. Judi Dench was honoured in the supporting category and the film itself was named best film.
A Room with a View
made profits for its six major investors, but not enough to put a brake on the decline of Goldcrest, the once-shining hope of the 1980s film industry, which was now in almost terminal economic trouble. Maggie’s reputation, like that of all the fine actors she worked with, survived intact. She had imperceptibly adjusted to the new mixed-economy realities of film-making and was as much in demand as ever. These first few years of the 1980s were as busy as any in her career. For, as well as making eight or nine films in six years, she had been trying to find her way back on a London theatre scene very different from that which she had abandoned for Canada.

Settling into the Sussex farmhouse was a pleasurable chore for Maggie and Beverley after the upheavals of leaving Tigbourne Court and the nomadic existence spent shuttling between Stratford and Los Angeles. Maggie’s sallies to the film studios were invariably conducted from home base, with the boys reassuringly nearby at Seaford College and Maggie’s father within easy reach in Oxford. The most striking aspect of the new house was its uncluttered, tasteful cosiness, a place to sink into and to hibernate inside. Maggie’s bedroom had an unobstructed view of the surrounding fields, which made a more than welcome change from the busy main road that rushed by the bedroom at Tigbourne. On the landing outside hung her treasured collection of Erté’s original costume designs for the Lillian Gish silent movie version of
La Bohème
(Gish disliked them, so they were never used). In the main sitting room, books everywhere, was an almost complete collection of the distinctive Virago reprints of classic feminist novels, and the latest clutch of literary biographies in hardback. The trophies were strewn discreetly around, serving as decorative props, not displays.

The duck pond was converted into a small swimming pool, and there were three listed barns on the property’s couple of acres, an ancient bake house, an orchard yielding apples, plums, pears, mulberries and walnuts, awash with daffodils in the spring, and a vineyard. Beverley’s plans included converting the old bakery into a summer-house and acquiring a cider press to crush all the apples in the garden and save money at Christmas. His home-produced tipple, a brew he dubbed ‘Old Methuselah’, was a lethal mixture of mildewed garden berries, sugar and vodka, left to ferment for a couple of years.

This new home was a great comfort to Maggie at a time when it was not clear what direction her career would take. The National Theatre was no longer a close-knit caucus of actors and directors working briskly and intimately in ramshackle but friendly circumstances on one repertoire for the Old Vic stage, but a conglomerate of companies entombed in the concrete anonymity of the new building on the South Bank. She was confused. She felt she did not belong anywhere, and that no one wanted her at the RSC (where she had no association) or the National and, as she told Sheridan Morley, although she did not at this point see herself as ‘Dame Maggie’, bravely battling on into her eighties – which, ironically, is precisely what happened – she did need someone like Olivier or Robin Phillips to tell her what to do next. ‘I come back to a theatre which seems to have changed in some odd way during the years I was in Canada. Nobody seems to be in charge; just a lot of little groups all carrying on as best they can.’

One such little group, United British Artists, had received Maggie’s blessing at the end of 1982. The alliance, announced by the entertainments mogul Lord Grade, constituted a peculiar and finally ineffectual bid to imitate the old Hollywood United Artists, which set its agenda according to the whims of a few all-powerful stars. The British theatre at the start of the 1980s was not remotely receptive to an attempt to reproduce the 1919 adventure launched by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith. The board included Maggie, Diana Rigg, Glenda Jackson, John Hurt, Albert Finney and Peter Wood, and decided on more or less nothing. The attempt at least had the value of acknowledging the situation: the two big national theatre companies had become impersonal monoliths; there was no natural home any more for the star leading actors of the day; a most enormous chasm had opened up – notwithstanding the works of Alan Ayckbourn – between the best contemporary playwrights and the most commercially viable actors; the spirit of adventure had been replaced by a struggle for survival; companies, except on the defiant fringe, were a thing of the past. In such an environment, a star like Maggie might look increasingly anomalous.

There was nothing for it but to test the water by taking a familiar plunge. The new house, like Tigbourne, was within easy striking distance of the Chichester Festival Theatre. Just as Maggie had sprung free from disappointment at the National by giving her Margery Pinchwife there in 1969, so she relaunched herself in a home-grown British production of another Restoration classic, albeit one she had ‘tried out’ in Canada. She and William Gaskill took up where they had left off in 1974 (with
Snap
) in a sumptuous revival of
The Way of the World
. The whole family, in fact, tuned in to the Sussex playhouse. Chris had done well at Seaford, but his plans for going to university were scuppered by the attractions of a student assistant stage manager post he gained at Chichester in the early days when, before the Minerva was built, the theatre’s supplementary venue was informally housed in a tent. Beverley’s playwriting career was also revived at Chichester. In the mid-1980s he titivated the old Fred Terry vehicle
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, directed with spectacular success by Nicholas Hytner, with a cast led by Donald Sinden (the production later transferred to Her Majesty’s in London). Less happily, he adapted Goldoni’s
La Locandiera
as
Miranda
, a vehicle for Penelope Keith at her most overweening in a slightly misfired analogue of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. You never really knew what Beverley might produce next. Toby described him affectionately as ‘an incredibly taciturn bugger’, and Chris was always convinced that there were some pretty major surprises in store. There were potential diversions. Almost every year, Beverley received an invitation, addressed to ‘Mrs Beverley Cross’, to mount the podium at the annual ‘Women of the Year’ shindig at the Savoy Hotel.

One of Maggie’s major consolations in this period was her geographical and neighbourly closeness to Lord and Lady Olivier. ‘Larry and Joan’ had been living in nearby Steyning, as well as at Brighton, with their growing family since the middle 1960s. Maggie’s rivalry with Joan Plowright and the edgy hostility with Sir Laurence were finally forgotten in these years of friendship and camaraderie. The truce was sealed by Plowright’s appearance alongside Maggie in
The Way of the World
. The contrast in the type of acting each expertly delivered was summarised for William Gaskill in their backstage preparations: ‘If you went past Joan’s dressing room, you heard her going through every line, from beginning to end. And as you went past Maggie’s, you heard that wonderful record of Nellie Wallace’s laughing song, which she played to put her in the mood.’ Maggie returned to one of her greatest roles, and one with which she had begun her Canadian sojourn, or exile, Millamant. And Joan Plowright played Lady Wishfort, ‘that old peeled wall, that famous antidote to desire’.

The Way of the World
opened at Chichester on 1 August 1984. Maggie’s Millamant was a gloriously emaciated, darting figure, using her wit as a cover to insecurity. She had been admired in
Night and Day
and in
Virginia
, but she had not been seen in her full comic flow on the British stage for ten years. The critical reaction reflected the sense of a starved theatre-going public reconnecting with one of its favourite icons. Jack Tinker said she finally displaced Edith Evans in the role. He was beside himself and ‘once more at her feet’. Less gymnastically, Nicholas de Jongh in the
Guardian
said her ‘stupendous’ performance would surely rank ‘as one of the great high-comedy achievements of the past three decades’, noting how she charted the independent girl’s progress from languid disdain conveyed from a great height, nose tilted skyward, to reach in her wooing scene with Mirabell (Michael Jayston) a tantalising mixture of role-playing and real feeling. The production was London-bound (it opened at the Haymarket in November) and had been given the works by director Gaskill. The design was by two of his former Royal Court associates – sets of oaken doors and evocative emblems by Hayden Griffin, and beautiful costumes of silks and quilts patterned with stripes, butterflies and birds by Deirdre Clancy.

The kinship structure of a complex plot in which, as Anne Barton reminded us in a programme note, ‘everybody is a half-brother, niece, mother, cousin or nephew of somebody else’, was cleanly exposed around the simple motivating mainspring of the chase for Lady Wishfort’s money. One also felt, among all the couplings and liaisons, that this was a play about three widows: Millamant, Lady Wishfort and Mrs Fainall. This latter role was powerfully played by Sheila Allen.

The casting throughout was formidable. Above all, Maggie em-bodied what Hazlitt called ‘that peculiar flavour in the very words’ of Congreve’s comedy and, once again, she convinced us in the great proviso scene that she really did set important store by her dependence on solitude and morning thoughts. This jocund marriage of style and gravity typified the light and adult plangency of Gaskill’s exemplary production. And Maggie’s brilliant and capricious creation, with wit her quick and deadly weapon, made her immune to all invasions. No one in the British theatre – and there have been Millamants from Geraldine McEwan and Judi Dench – can rival her in this vein. She could flourish a remark to create havoc and then retreat quickly behind her fan, as Michael Billington said, like a soldier behind a redoubt. And the repulsion of the rustic Sir Wilfull with a cry of ‘A walk?’ was that of a woman dealing brusquely with an indecent proposal.

Seven years later, the
Sunday Telegraph
ran a series in which actors and other artists recalled ‘A Night to Remember’. Susan Fleetwood, no mean actress herself and one who had played several ‘Maggie’ roles (Silvia, Rosalind, Beatrice, Arkadina), picked this Millamant as the most outstanding performance she had ever seen: ‘I think Maggie Smith is an artist of the high wire; and to be that can cost a lot. She avoids the cosy, she takes the risk of being unsympathetic. And yet, even when she’s spitting venom, one’s heart is broken for her … When I see Maggie act, I always feel tremendously excited that I’m an actor too. She just makes me feel good about the job.’

John Moffatt rekindled the joy of working with Maggie: ‘I’d go on with her for the first entrance in the park and sometimes she’d say, “Moffatty Woffatty, surprise me.” She liked to keep it all as fresh and flexible as possible. So I would say, sotto voce, “There’s an awful lot of midges in St James’s Park today,” and we’d play that scene slapping midges, a great twinkle going on between us. It was subtle and the audience would not really notice. But the scene would be enlivened by this, and her own performance freshened.’ Moffatt also testifies that Maggie’s Oxford enthusiasm for J. D. Salinger had not waned. If a matinée was looming for which neither of them felt at concert pitch, she would gee up Moffatt and her other colleagues by invoking the showbiz motto at the end of Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
, ‘Let’s do it for the Fat Lady.’ The Fat Lady is in every audience, the one person out there who is really waiting for the performance as the highlight of her day and a balm to all woes. Maggie never cheats on a matinée; she always does it for the Fat Lady.

Having given Barker and Bond short shrift when approached about them by Gaskill, Maggie was always liable to feel with especial keenness the dearth of new West End plays for actresses of her age and calibre. But within a year, she was acting with John Moffatt once again, in
Interpreters
, a Cold War comedy designed as a vehicle for her and Edward Fox by Ronald Harwood, whose early experience as an actor in Donald Wolfit’s company had led to his backstage hit,
The Dresser
. Slightly schematic and finally hollow,
Interpreters
nonetheless did have some texture within which Maggie could rehearse her special line in despair and vulnerability as Nadia Ogilvy-Smith, a spinsterish Russian language interpreter known as ‘the old maid of Whitehall’ who, on the eve of a summit conference between the political leaders of Russia and Great Britain, recalls an old affair in New York with her randy Russian opposite number, Viktor (Edward Fox). Moffatt umpired their tryst as a ramrod-backed Foreign Office official.

For these past ten years, Nadia has kept passion at bay, walled up in a Kensington flat with a ninety-three-year-old grandmother who once danced with the Ballets Russes and knew Tolstoy and Chekhov. When Viktor calls to collect a copy of
Heartbreak House
, Nadia mistakenly believes that his ardour indicates a long-term emotional commitment. The comic climax of their renewed encounter occurs at a diplomatic pow-wow where Maggie plays footsy under the table. She manipulates her emboldened leg into the lap of the Soviet president and watches, stunned and alarmed, as Edward Fox calmly gets up and crosses the room. A lesser actress would have milked this moment for coarse laughter. Maggie did indeed win her laugh, but she made of it something more truthful and complex by immediately immersing us in the pain of her embarrassment.

Moffatt reports that Maggie was not very happy with this production and that the direction of Peter Yates, better known for his work in the cinema (he directed Maggie and Michael Caine in
It All Came True
twelve years later), was virtually non-existent. Maggie also hated the set, which was of a predominantly bilious green colour, with a lurid green carpet to match. Invoking the name of one of the outstanding snooker champions of the day, she would complain to anyone within earshot, ‘When I get out on that stage I feel like Hurricane Higgins.’

Just over a year later, Maggie was snared in another Anglo-based Eastern European scenario of misunderstanding and despair,
Coming in to Land
by Stephen Poliakoff at the National Theatre. This was Maggie’s first (and last) role on the South Bank, the occasion of a long overdue reunion with Peter Hall as her director and, considered in retrospect, one of the last significant British plays to examine the false visions East and West entertained of each other before the extraordinary political upheavals at the end of the decade. Poliakoff, who in 1980 had written a wonderful television film along similar culture-clash lines,
Caught on a Train
, for Peggy Ashcroft, sent the play to the National as he had promised his next one to Peter Hall. He had thought of Maggie as Halina Rodziewizowna, an unmarried Polish design student who seeks asylum at British immigration, because of the impression she had made on him in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, especially in the scene where she pleads with the headmistress Celia Johnson ‘and suddenly becomes terribly moving’. When Maggie read it, she accepted the role at once.