Maggie Smith: A Biography (31 page)

In the slightly less enjoyable sequel, Doloris, back in the habit, takes on the lower-risk task of reforming a bad-attitude class in a run-down neighbourhood through her music. In both films, playing opposite Whoopi’s brazen, no-holds-barred celebratory effusiveness, Maggie could exercise the full range of her understated English sense of propriety breaking out in expressions of wincing distaste and sour disapproval. But in Richard Eyre’s BBC film of
Suddenly, Last Summer
she rises magnificently to the renewed task of following one of the two great iconic performers her own career tracks and challenges, Katharine Hepburn (the other is Edith Evans), whose over-the-top Mrs Venable in Gore Vidal’s screenplay of 1959 (directed by Maggie’s adored Joseph Mankiewicz) was a juddering, almost scary, compilation of roars and misgivings. In contrast, Maggie is stern, bewitching but recognisably human as a still beautiful bereaved mother in her pearls and elegant mauve silks. And, as with Lady Bracknell, this portrait is primarily one of self-justifying defensiveness, the source of its tragic power.

Eyre’s film faithfully adheres to the play’s one-act structure and restricts the horror of what befell Mrs Venable’s poet son Sebastian – eaten alive by young boys – to the lines, and to the brilliant performance of Natasha Richardson (so tragically killed in a skiing accident in 2009) as the infatuated cousin who procured for him. The writing, poised on the disputable border of genuine poetry and gothic self-parody, had assumed a new metaphorical resonance in the wake of the first AIDS-blighted age. Eyre and the designer Bob Crowley created a stifling botanical environment in those same Shepperton Studios where Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor made their freer, more hysterical, version. So stifling was the atmosphere, says the producer Simon Curtis, that when Eyre had to re-shoot an entire scene due to an error of over-recording on the tape, he was dreading Maggie’s response to his request to start over. Her response, however, was characteristic: ‘Good. I can do it better.’

The thankless Clift role of the prompting doctor who needs money for his research is very well taken by Rob Lowe. The tension finally erupts as Maggie rises in rage and lays about her with a stick, shouting at Lowe that he should cut the hideous story out of the sick girl’s brain with nothing less than a full frontal lobotomy. Maggie instinctively finds the exact tone of Williams’s idiosyncratic music, revelling in the careful structure of the sentences just as she revelled in the antithetic shape and coloration of Oscar Wilde’s prose and would do soon in the arch exactitude of Edward Albee’s rancorous and meticulously phrased high style. She brought a world of sighs and Southern gentility to bear on the life she knew, and the life as she chose to remember it: ‘I was actually the only one in his life. We were a famous couple. Sebastian and Violet are at the Ritz in Venice … Sebastian and Violet have taken a house for the season at Biarritz … We constructed our days. We would carve out each day of our lives like a piece of sculpture.’

Maggie’s status in her industry was confirmed with two major honours in the early 1990s, a fellowship from the British Film Institute and a lifetime achievement award from BAFTA. Exhausted by the filming of
Suddenly, Last Summer
in a swamp-hot studio, she was unable to attend the first ceremony. But at the BAFTA shindig, a couple of weeks after she had opened in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, she acknowledged her ovation with words – written by Beverley – that touched on a recently reactivated public debate on sex and violence in the movies: ‘If it’s possible to be in films without taking your clothes off or killing people with machine-guns, I seem to have managed to do it.’

There was quite a lot of pent-up sex and emotional violence at least in
The Secret Garden
and its companion piece,
Washington Square
, both directed by Agnieszka Holland, both remakes of 1949 movie classics and each based on a canonical work of literature – the first a 1911 children’s book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the second a novella by Henry James that had been converted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz into a Broadway hit drama called
The Heiress
. Maggie’s roles were major supporting, rather than leads: a beastly Yorkshire housekeeper, Mrs Medlock, in
The Secret Garden
; and a spinsterish, desiccated aunt, Lavinia Penniman, in
Washington Square
(‘I feel one of my headaches coming on’).

The Secret Garden
is a tale of awakening and recovery in a dour and emotionally dilapidated big house, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors – the chief location was Allerton Park, near Harrogate, a fine example of the nineteenth-century gothic revival stately home – where a sickly young crippled boy, Colin, is shut away in a darkened bedroom by his grieving, widowed father, Lord Craven, and one particular garden on the estate shut up since his mother died ten years ago. This garden is studded with overgrown bracken, tangled vegetation and frozen statuary, but there is a leaf-strewn swing, a few green shoots and a lone visiting robin. The catalyst for renewal is the return to the house of Colin’s ten-year-old cousin, Mary Lennox, who has been orphaned after an earthquake in India and collected at the docks off the ship by Maggie’s Mrs Medlock, who wastes no time in reminding Mary that her mother was a real beauty, adding, half under her breath, that she obviously didn’t hand much of that commodity down to her daughter.

The MGM movie starred Margaret O’Brien as Mary and Gladys Cooper as a fearsomely tyrannical Mrs Medlock, and memorably followed the example of
The Wizard of Oz
in going from black-and-white (or sepia) into colour, the garden of course being the corresponding symbol of blooming efflorescence, though it’s infinitely more beautifully shot in Holland’s later version. And whereas Gladys Cooper is grotesquely Grand Guignol, Maggie makes Mrs Medlock’s nastiness more explicable than despicable in the character’s notion of doing what she feels to be right in terms of propriety and discipline. Maggie gives her performance a good dose of Jean Brodie and her own mother, and yet she is still decidedly feminine, still lustrous, her hair up, her blue eyes occasionally sparkling, her brutal shenanigans – as when she dons a mask to ‘treat’ Colin’s palsied legs, or sticks him in an iced bath to encourage his blood to flow (‘You could be clotting’) – borderline hilarious.

The healing process, physical and spiritual, has nothing to do with medicine, Burnett’s story thus reflecting the growth in interest at the time in Christian Science, which eschews all treatments. Colin’s condition is ‘all in the mind’, and made worse by Mrs Medlock’s pandering to it in the form of cossetting overreaction, while John Lynch’s glowering, sorry-for-himself long-haired nobleman is redeemed through Mary’s agency of love, good works and the summoning of an angelic choir on the soundtrack singing a ghastly but effective song by Linda Ronstadt. Maggie’s Mrs Medlock, having broken down inconsolably in tears at Colin’s recovery and the dissolution of her repressive purpose in life, offers to resign on the spot. But she softens, and is last seen, radiant and smiling, at a window overlooking the garden, the green shoots of her own incipient late spring thaw and redemption pushing up.

Ten-year-old Kate Maberly as Mary Lennox made an auspicious début before developing a successful career, playing her scenes with adults and children alike with exceptional poise and authority. It helps that Maggie Smith is never soft or gloopy playing with children (not that she could be, really, as Mrs Medlock), but she allows young Kate to give as good as she gets because that is precisely her own modus operandi.

Maggie’s second collaboration with Holland,
Washington Square
, has many qualities of the first – generous narrative detail, superb cinematography and some fine performances, notably from Jennifer Jason Leigh as the ‘ugly duckling’ heiress, Catherine Sloper, and Ben Chaplin as her calculating (is he genuine or just gold-digging?) suitor, Morris Townsend, roles taken in the superb William Wyler 1949 black-and-white movie (retaining the title of the play it was adapted from and follows closely,
The Heiress
) by the excessively glamorous Olivia de Havilland and the watery-eyed golden boy, Montgomery Clift. Miriam Hopkins (an arch enemy of Bette Davis who had appeared in the film of
Design for Living
with Gary Cooper and Fredric March) was in the Maggie role of the aunt, and Ralph Richardson, giving one of his greatest screen performances, was Catherine’s autocratic father, Dr Sloper; that role was now somewhat curiously taken by Albert Finney, one of Maggie’s oldest friends and favourite co-stars from her earliest days at the National Theatre.

Finney is fine, but doesn’t really seem austere and frightening enough in the role, his outbursts sounding like those of someone in a bad temper after too good a lunch. The dislocation between the modernity of the acting and the period accuracy of the settings is probably deliberate, and there’s a touching modern anxiety about Maggie’s auntie-like advice to Jason Leigh’s susceptible Catherine to be warm, but pure, amorous but chaste, in her response to Townsend’s overtures, which are launched by Ben Chaplin on a crest of bovine lust; the ambiguity surrounding his intentions is artfully maintained almost to the very end, and it’s interesting that Maggie has a similar unravelling to that at the end of
The Secret Garden
, as she tries her best to save the situation. But Catherine has been hurt once too often, and hurt too badly, and Jason Leigh settles tragically into a life of determined, barren spinsterhood, though without the great exit line in the stage play (and first film), ‘Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.’

In between these two page-to-screen classics, Maggie appeared as a furious Duchess of York in an outrageous, highly enjoyable 1930s movie version of Shakespeare’s
Richard III
starring Ian McKellen (whom she had not worked with since the NT
Much Ado About Nothing
in which he played Claudio) and directed by the
Missionary
director, Richard Loncraine, very much based on, but opened out from, the performance directed at the National (and on a subsequent world tour) by Richard Eyre in 1990. McKellen edited and published his own screenplay of the film, a brilliant and scholarly text full of perceptive and juicy insights and annotations. On screen, the play – oddly decked out with Third Reich insignia while checking into such ultra-British locations as St Pancras Station, the Brighton Pavilion and the Senate House of the University of London – rushes by in just 100 minutes, heavily cut, with McKellen as a jack-booted, wheedling, cigarette-smoking fascist dictator dashing about from one microphone to another, screeching for a horse, a horse, his kingdom for a horse when his jeep jams in the mud on the battlefield – which is an encampment at Battersea Power Station – and falling backwards off the top of that evocative industrial ruin into the blazing inferno beneath, grimly accompanied by Al Jolson warbling on the soundtrack that he is sitting on top of the world, just rolling along, just singing a song.

Maggie’s role of the Duchess of York was craftily combined with that of Richard’s mother, the old Queen Margaret, and she grabbed a maternal curse or two from the famous incantatory trio that was now missing. This would be the first of four films she would make with Kristin Scott Thomas – a striking, beautiful, drug-addled Queen Anne who was only too sure to be sick ‘and like to die’ after a few weeks in the sack with the maniac king – and a reunion with Jim Carter (Carson the butler in
Downton Abbey
) from
A Private Function
. A great cast also included Jim Broadbent as Buckingham, Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth, John Wood as the old King Edward IV, Nigel Hawthorne as Clarence (his throat cut in a bathtub, not drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower) and Robert Downey Jr conflating four minor characters into the less minor one of Rivers, and coming to a gruesome demise from a spike thrust through the underside of a mattress (and his guts) while
in flagrante delicto
.

Beverley died in March 1998, following treatment for a series of aneurysms. This was a terrible blow. Maggie lost not only her husband, but her rock, her protector, her best friend. ‘Everybody says it gets better,’ she told me a few years later, ‘but I don’t think it does. It gets different.’ Her eyes filled with tears and reddened. ‘Jane Birkin’s mother, Judy Campbell, once said an extraordinary thing to me when her husband died; that it was strange feeling you were not number one with anybody. I have many good friends. But I tend to keep to myself anyway. It’s odd, doing things and having no one to share them with.’

Maggie simply set to and carried on working as normal. Her elder son, Chris Larkin, reckons the double blow of losing the two men who meant most to her within three years (Robert had died in November 1995) hit her pretty hard, though she hadn’t seen much of Robert, or had anything to do with him, really, until towards the end of his life. She now had to fly solo. She has managed, to this day, with the close-knit support network of her agent, Paul Lyon-Maris (who succeeded Duncan Heath); her secretary, Janet Macklam; her hairdresser, Patricia Millbourn (known as ‘Passion Flower’); and her accountant, Helen, who has lately talked her into buying a new Mercedes even though she still pines for the old one, gathering moss, in a garage at home. And the impetus is always the work, the next job. It was some comfort to her, too, that the first film she worked on after losing Beverley was
Tea with Mussolini
in which she co-starred with her friends Judi Dench and Joan Plowright, under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli, who had directed the joyous
Much Ado About Nothing
.

Within this cluster of period costume drama movies,
Tea with Mussolini
is the first of a European trilogy – the others are
The Last September
and
My House in Umbria –
set in Italy and Ireland, all of some literary pedigree (with screenplays by John Mortimer, John Banville and Hugh Whitemore), all enacted against a backdrop of political upheaval and personal tragedy. It is Maggie, as Lady Hester Random, widow of the former British ambassador to Italy, who really does take tea with Mussolini (seizing the teapot she enquires of the dictator, ‘Shall I be mother?’) in Rome, where she has gone, on behalf of her group of lady ex-pats, the Scorpioni, living in Florence, to protest about his Blackshirts rioting on the streets and disrupting their café afternoons. But, like Jean Brodie, Lady Hester is a big fan of Mussolini, and is convinced she can talk him round. Instead, she and her Florentine friends face disillusion, even though they stay put throughout the subsequent war, right up to their liberation by the allied forces among the Tuscan towers of San Gimignano. One of those liberating Scots officers was played by Chris Larkin (just slightly more than that cough and a spit in his first film appearance as a swaddled baby in
Hot Millions
); another was given very short shrift when encouraging Lady Hester to move right along: ‘Do be quiet, Major, whoever you are …’ By now, the plot has diverged into a thriller of sorts as the grown-up boy (a stand-in for Zeffirelli himself, whose autobiography is the source of Mortimer’s screenplay) is caught up in a side-story of embezzlement, romance and betrayal with one of the other Scorpioni, a wealthy American socialite, Elsa, played by the singer Cher.

The Zeffirelli surrogate, Luca Innocente, the illegitimate son of an Italian businessman and his deceased dressmaker mother, has been virtually adopted by another of the Scorpioni, Joan Plowright’s Mary Wallace, while another of the group, Judi Dench’s Arabella, a dabbling painter and a singer, tells the young lad he should live as an artist and share in the divine plan. The boy is sent away by his father to learn German in Austria, while the storm clouds gather, Italy joins the war against Britain and France, and Lady Hester and Arabella find themselves imprisoned in San Gimignano, where Maggie sets about teaching the guards how to say ‘good night’. The Jews are proscribed, the other ladies – including a surprisingly subdued Lily Tomlin’s lesbian archaeologist – are moved to a hotel, thanks to Elsa’s money. This causes a moment of seismic shock to Maggie’s Lady Hester, as she thought that old Benito himself was footing the bill: ‘We’re creatures from two different worlds,’ she exclaims to Elsa, ‘and we both trusted men who turned out to be bastards.’

Elsa’s been shafted, literally and metaphorically, by her lawyer lover, while the trust fund she started for Luca (she was fond of his mother) has found its way into the pockets of the Italian resistance because of his jealousy – he’s fallen in love with his benefactor – and Elsa’s art collection has been commandeered as a putative pawn in her escape plan to Switzerland which, again, Luca knows about. The film is now piling up far too much story for a structure built on anecdote and reminiscence; then again, you could say that Zeffirelli is telling some sort of truth about himself and detonating the film’s first half into a confusion of destiny and infraction in the second. Still, moment by moment, it’s highly entertaining, especially with that curious
galère
of leading ladies (three Brit dames, two American oddballs). It also marked, poignantly, the last screen appearance of Judi Dench’s late husband, Michael Williams, as the British consul.