Maggie Smith: A Biography (34 page)

For what may prove to be her last major stage performance, she came full circle to Edward Albee, in the 2007 Haymarket première of
The Lady from Dubuque
, a play that had closed on Broadway in 1980 with Irene Worth in the lead after eighteen previews and only twelve performances. And, despite Maggie’s presence in the cast as the mysterious Elizabeth, the lady from Dubuque who appears like an angel of death right at the end of the first act, it was not all that more successful in the West End. Why did the play not take off? All sorts of reasons have been submitted. The star doesn’t appear until too late, somebody’s actually dying of cancer on the stage, the writing is too severe and minimal – the script lacked ‘tangible flesh and blood’, said Walter Kerr of the first New York production – and has always been ahead of its time. Producer Robert Fox says he was in two minds about the play’s commercial prospects and was surprised when Maggie told him she wanted to do it. He suggested a smaller West End venue, but she insisted on the Haymarket. He also thinks it might have been received differently, by critics and public alike, if it had been put on in the Donmar Warehouse or the National’s third and smallest auditorium. ‘Maggie’s always very clear about what she doesn’t want to do,’ says Fox, ‘very straightforward in her choices. Once her mind is made up, that’s it.’

Anthony Page thinks of the play as a Greek tragedy and likens the sinister appearance of the Lady and her black chauffeur, Oscar, to that of the two strangers who turn up from nowhere in Harold Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
. They arrive in the middle of a neighbourly alcoholic shindig in the Albee land of Connecticut Yankees which, at the Haymarket, was an all-white, split-level modernist suburban palazzo, magnificently designed by Hildegard Bechtler. The four guests were, à la
Virginia Woolf
, deep into drink, badinage and insults while the dying hostess, Jo, and her fraught husband, Sam, ramp up the hostility quotient. The meekest guest, played by Chris Larkin, Maggie’s son, is grateful, as he leaves, for yet another average, desperate sort of evening. When he returns because his wife, Lucinda, Jo’s old college friend, is suffering a crisis on the lawn, he is asked what has he forgotten: his youth, or his dignity? No one but Albee would write such a line, and there immediately follows a macabre dialogue between Sam and Jo about his life after her death from cancer. As Sam carries her upstairs in throes of agony, Jo remarks that it had been a lot easier to get her into bed before this happened.

You could feel a chill descend on the theatre. This was going to be the very opposite of a feel-good entertainment. But then Albee’s always been like this. In the introduction to his first volume of collected plays he summed up his attitude: ‘I do not plan out my plays to fit in with either critical bias or commercial safety: nor do I worry that my themes may be difficult or dangerous and my techniques unconventional. I go with what my mind tells me and I take my chances.’ And fifty years later, he was still an ageing enfant terrible. ‘Every play I write,’ he told me, ‘is the first play I’ve written. And yes, I’d like to think I’m still one or two steps ahead of the game. When I first showed
The Goat
[the play in which a married, middle-aged architect falls in love with a goat] to two close friends, they said, “Oh, Edward, don’t let this be done – it will destroy your career.” “Really?” I said. “Wow, then I’d better go straight ahead!” And of course I did. And I always shall.’

So what did Maggie do? With a delayed entrance that, had it not been totally unannounced and unexpected, might have been similar to Agamemnon returning from the Trojan War to face the music at Thebes, or Dolly Levi sashaying defiantly down the steps of the Harmonia Gardens feted by a dancing chorus of waiters (‘Well, hello, Dolly!’), Maggie went to the opposite extreme of making a big hoo-ha. She simply stepped on the stage in a navy Jean Muir three-piece suit and double row of pearls, speaking naturalistically and restrainedly, insisting that she is Jo’s mother (she’s not) and resisting all temptation to play the lines, as she might easily have done, with a Coral Browne-like grandeur, humanising the dialogue to the point of naturalistic comedy. Jo accepts her offer of a comforting embrace, and her great speech about dying on a beach is suddenly moving; you realise that if this lady is indeed an angel of death, she is also the figure of comfort and succour we should all hope to find once the physical terrors and psychological fears have been endured.

But who was she, really, this bizarre uninvited guest? Easier to say who she’s not. Albee had taken a prompt from the
New Yorker
magazine whose founding editor Harold Ross was asked who might be the average reader of his new publication: ‘One thing I know, the magazine is not going to be written for the little old lady from Dubuque.’ Dubuque is a town in Iowa, so named after one of the first European settlers, Julien Dubuque, a lead miner. Albee’s view was that, as nothing else the character in the play says is true, she might as well say that she’s the Lady from Dubuque who, as she exists in the popular imagination, is much more like the New Jersey woman (Jo’s mother) described in the play as overweight and homely, balding with pink straggles of hair.

Albee had begun thinking about a play called
The Substitute Speaker
as far back as 1960, but the success of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, which opened soon after the Cuban missile crisis of 1961, and touched a national nerve during the Kennedy years, had led him elsewhere. By the time he returned to the play in the mid-1970s, he was starting to write in a much more compressed and daring manner. He had been much taken by a book published in 1969,
On Death and Dying
, by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Widely credited with inspiring the hospice movement, Kübler-Ross expounded in her book her ‘five stages of dying’, in which a person diagnosed with terminal illness goes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In
The Substitute Speaker
, Jo dies early in the play and Sam dresses up in her clothes and assumes her identity; that is, he becomes the substitute voice of his lost and loved one.

In 2007, Albee lost his partner of over thirty-five years, the Canadian artist and sculptor Jonathan Thomas, who died of cancer. Had this compelled him to reconsider the retitled play as first performed in 1980? ‘I wrote the play before I experienced personal tragedy or loss,’ he says. ‘I was astonished, after going through my lifetime partner’s death, how on target I was, having intuited what the re-sponse would be. I think with this play, as with all my plays, the idea had been floating around for years.’ Not only was the subject unsettling, so was the format, in which characters regularly broke down the fourth wall and addressed the audience as if they were in a theatre, performing a play. Elizabeth, though, did not, declaring to the other characters, not the audience, at the start of the second act (invariably following an interval full of muttering and speculation), ‘I have come home for my daughter’s dying.’ It’s just not the sort of thing a Haymarket audience wanted to hear from their favourite star. But that didn’t bother Maggie, her son confirms; she retained, he says, complete faith in both Albee and the director Anthony Page.

And she taught Chris a lesson or two, as well. He’d never been on a stage with her before (except as a walk-on in
Interpreters
), not that they ever really interacted in this play. ‘We had no eye contact on the stage,’ says Chris,

Was the comparative failure of
The Lady from Dubuque
the reason why Maggie has not been on the stage since?

Maggie has grown closer to her sons as they have grown older. Toby says that she retains a good deal of unnecessary guilt about their childhood, but both he and Chris agree that she set standards in the house. These are the legacy of her own childhood regimens in Ilford and Oxford. Chris would not describe her in any way as a disciplinarian. ‘But she certainly wasn’t a freethinker. And she was very hot on articulation. We were not allowed to slur our words. And every Canadian colloquialism was drilled out of us within three months of coming back here. Above all, I remember this very piercing voice from my childhood: “It’s pardon, not what!” And she was fairly rigorous about table manners.’

Chris and his wife Suki, a drama teacher, live in Kemp Town, Brighton, and inhabit the very opposite of a
Downton Abbey
existence, so it amuses him no end to recount a couple of stories related to the executive directors, Neame and Fellowes. He was at school with Gareth Neame, and good friends, though they were very different types:

Unlike Maggie and, to a lesser extent, his brother Toby, Chris has had to make progress the hard way. Ten years after catching the chandelier every night in
Phantom
, he found himself playing a small role in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 film of
Jane Eyre
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, and William Hurt as Rochester, alongside another small-part player, Julian Fellowes.

No wonder he was beginning to concentrate on the writing with a view to creating a country-house working environment rather more congenial to his taste, social status and personal wardrobe.

There was a pattern early in her career of Maggie flying the coop to Broadway, Hollywood and Canada before returning ‘home’ to the London stage and the Shepperton or Ealing film studios, but this internationalism has been revoked as she grows older, and you feel it would take something very special now to lure her back to work in New York or Los Angeles. The last phase, or late flowering, of ‘Maggie-panthus Smithsoniensis’ begins ten years ago with the low-key, charming British movie
Ladies in Lavender
in which she starred with Judi Dench (‘the lavender bags’, Maggie dubbed the pair of them) and marks the start of a more wistful, melancholic and perhaps surprising investigation into the attributes, and occasional disadvantages, of growing older and wiser with a modicum of grace and good will.

This caught something in the zeitgeist about old age as, waking up to the fact that the ageing population was growing, and that the grey pound was at least as potent as the pink one, all the media over the past ten years have pandered more consistently to this new target audience, with over-age choirs, pensioner rewrites of
Romeo and Juliet
and
Much Ado About Nothing
(Siân Phillips played Juliet aged seventy-nine at the Bristol Old Vic, and Vanessa Redgrave played Beatrice aged seventy-six at the Old Vic), property-porn television programmes about where to go and live when you retire, and senior citizen sitcoms. This all reflected a much deeper understanding of, and sympathy for, the ageing process. As Alan Bennett said in his annual ‘Diary’ published in the
London Review of Books
at the start of 2015, there was a time when one saw an old couple walking along holding hands and the thought was of Darby and Joan; nowadays, one just wonders which of them has Alzheimer’s.

And for Maggie and Judi Dench, this was a bonus development in their film careers, taking them from elderly spinster sisters in
Ladies in Lavender
through to the two wildly successful
Best Exotic Marigold
movies without any suggestion that being old was a side effect of being wilfully eccentric or tragically over the hill. Put more brutally by the cynical alcoholic actress played by Goldie Hawn in the first of Maggie’s last batch of Hollywood movies,
The First Wives Club
, while Shakespeare may have said there were seven ages of man, there are only three ages for women in Tinsel Town: babe, district attorney and
Driving Miss Daisy
. The point she didn’t make was that these three phases now carry an equal weight. Still, after the two
Sister Act
movies, Maggie bade a not too sorry farewell to Hollywood, signing off with three fairly hard-boiled romantic comedies, none of which stretched or challenged her. Two were hits, while the middle one,
It All Came True
(1998), first released with the title
Curtain Call
, went, in most markets, straight to TV or home video, even though it was distinguished director Peter Yates’s last movie for cinema and reunited Maggie with her
Californian Suite
co-star Michael Caine.

It was as though, having discovered a favourite star and blessed her with a pair of Oscars, Hollywood had now just about run out of ideas on how best to keep her grazing on those Beverly Hills. The roles simply didn’t present themselves as fruitfully as they did back home. Well, they did for a short while, but in the exuberant feminist comedy
The First Wives Club
(1996), produced by Scott Rudin and directed by Hugh (
Police Academy
) Wilson, Maggie has only three scenes as Gunilla Garson Goldberg, ‘queen of New York society’, and does little more than dispense advice and encouragement to the disgruntled ex-wives, a wonderful trio of Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler. The ex-wives’ campaign of revenge – one of hitting the guys where it hurts most, in the pocket – is kick-started by their college friend (Stockard Channing) jumping off her penthouse roof in a fur coat, drink in hand, on learning that her ex-husband has married his mistress the day before. The film struck a chord and became a box-office smash, but Maggie’s there for the ride as the bolshie trio vie with each other in one-liner paradise. As Goldie Hawn’s ageing alcoholic film starlet pouts into view at the funeral, someone says to the brassed-off, bimbo-bamboozled Midler, ‘She looks fabulous; do you think she’s had any work done?’ ‘Honey, she’s a quilt.’ Hawn’s cosmetic surgeon is more worried: ‘If I give you one more facelift, you’re going to be able to blink your lips.’ The satirical honesty behind these exchanges makes the film enjoyable. It’s both witty and funny, and the triumphant (of course) trio dance down the street at the end, all in white, singing Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit ‘You Don’t Own Me’. No accident, then, that this comes after a cocktail party attended, in real-life person, by Ivana Trump (‘Don’t get mad, get everything!’ is her advice to the girls), feminist icon Gloria Steinem and the Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, no doubt delighted that the film’s sixty tourist-baiting city locations included the Chrysler Building, Central Park, Christie’s auction house and a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.

It All Came True
pandered more obviously to what people had come to expect from Maggie Smith, referencing her performance in
Private Lives
in the quarrelsome, glamorous ghost of Lily Marlowe, an actress of the 1930s who haunts an empty townhouse along with Max Gale, her husband and onstage sparring partner, her Elyot Chase, laconically played by Michael Caine. It was followed by
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
, another tribal feminist comedy with the dark underside of an historic abusive childhood for Sandra Bullock as Siddalee Walker, a Broadway playwright, at the hands of Ellen Burstyn as her mother Viviane, who it turns out was mentally unstable and suffering the consequences of haywire medication. The sisterhood, formed with a blood oath of undying loyalty in the woods of Louisiana in 1937, is led by Viviane, and includes Maggie as Eliza, Shirley Knight as Denise and Fionnula Flanagan as Aimee. Now middle-aged Southern belles, they rally to the rescue of Siddalee’s relationship with her mother and her marriage to a solid fiancé. Callie Khouri’s direction (and screenplay) doesn’t break the bonds of the time slips in the novel by Rebecca Wells and seems both over-mawkish and over-shoehorned into just under two hours, though there are some notable performances by James Garner as Siddalee’s father and Ashley Judd as the younger, troubled Viviane. Maggie is afflicted with a cough (and an oxygen mask) for much of the action, which doesn’t make much sense in either the movie itself or in her character, who clings to the odd piercing line – ‘the only disease that could survive in our bloodstream is alcoholism’ – like a shipwreck victim clinging to a raft.

The First Wives Club
at least has an innate vivacity and perky contemporary application, whereas these last two films seem contrived and effortful. So it must have been with some relief that Maggie seized on an invitation from actor Charles Dance to stay at home – in Britain, at least – and headline his first movie as a director,
Ladies in Lavender
, with Judi Dench. She followed through with Niall Johnson’s
Keeping Mum
(2005), with Rowan Atkinson and Kristin Scott Thomas – ‘the first time I’ve been required to kill people,’ Maggie chuckled, delightedly, of her role as an Ealing Comedy-style gruesome granny – and Emma Thompson’s second
Nanny McPhee
film in 2010, the one where she (Maggie) sits in a cow pat and wisely informs the children, ‘You want her [Nanny McPhee] when you don’t need her, and need her when you don’t want her.’ These three British movies, all shot in beautiful locations – the first two in Cornwall, coincidentally, and within a few miles of each other, the third in the picture-book Buckinghamshire village of Hambleden, also used in the filming of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
– took her back to her own culture and background. When filming
Keeping Mum
, she said that she caught sight of herself in a mirror and saw that she looked just like her own mother … ‘an odd feeling’.

Charles Dance, a former lead actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company and later one of the stars of the hit television series
Game of Thrones
, had tried his hand at script writing without success until, reading a book of short stories by the Edwardian writer William J. Locke, he thought that one of them would make a good film and that the two spinster sisters, Ursula and Janet Widdington, whose lives are turned upside down by the unexplained arrival of a castaway Polish musician on the beach at the bottom of their cliff garden, would make an ideal movie for Judi Dench and Maggie. He visited them in their dressing rooms at the Haymarket during the run of
The Breath of Life
, and they agreed in principle on the spot. By now, Maggie was embroiled in the Harry Potter series, but she managed a holiday in Venice before joining the shoot in various Cornish coves and beauty spots (including Helston and St Ives) in September 2003. Raising the finance proved a problem, even with the stars committed, but a crisis was averted when the UK Film Council decided at the last minute to double their investment and facilitate an acceptable financial structure.

The story was updated from 1908 to 1936, which gave it a sense of pre-war idyll in which the washed-up Polish survivor, Andrea, is perhaps a doomy premonition of the persecution and migration to come. The sisters nurse the violinist – played by the fine young German actor, Daniel Brühl – back to rude health, Ursula (Dench) developing quite a crush on him while a beautiful Russian artist, Olga Danilof (Natascha McElhone), on holiday in the vicinity, becomes romantically and professionally involved, too. Olga happens to be the sister of a famous musician, and she kick-starts Andrea’s career. Maggie watches beadily from the sidelines (‘I know it’s not very Christian of me, but I dislike that woman intensely’), as indeed does the village doctor, played with a suppressed carnal yearning for Olga by David Warner, the definitive RSC Hamlet of the mid-1960s. There’s a barn dance in the village hall where Andrea gets recklessly drunk, playing wild gypsy music, and a more sedate concert in London where he makes a professional début, playing an extravagant, lyrical romance, proudly attended by his two devoted nurses. Some of the plot points are frankly implausible, but the acting is wonderful, not just from Dench and Smith – one dewy-eyed, deluded and tragically romantic, the other stoical and practical (she’s had nearly two decades to recover from losing her loved one in the Great War) – but also from a gallery of British character actors: Warner, turning up like Uncle Vanya with a bunch of flowers, only to see Olga waltzing off with Andrea; the great Freddie Jones as a robust, rubicund fisherman; his son Toby (who ‘voiced’ Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter films) as the village postman; Finty Williams (Judi’s daughter) as a buxom village girl; and Miriam Margolyes (also doffing her
Harry Potter
wizard’s hat) as the sisters’ fussing housekeeper.

After the sedate propriety of
Ladies in Lavender
– one American critic, not unreasonably, described it as ‘innocuous as a nosegay’ while another, Stephen Holden of the
New York Times
, heralded the return of the ‘Comfy Movie’, ‘the cinematic equivalent of a visit from a cherished but increasingly dithery maiden aunt’ – Maggie went on the front foot in
Keeping Mum
, described as a ‘black comedy’ but nothing like as black, or as barbed, as Joe Orton. Again, it’s an English idyll of a kind, but there’s poison round the edging. For the second time in a film with Maggie, Emilia Fox is pregnant in the opening scenes, travelling on a train with a large trunk which seeps blood; the bodies inside are those of her husband and his mistress, and before long she’s packed off to a secure unit for the criminally insane. That’s in 1962. Cut to Maggie as Grace Hawkins, forty-three years later, taking a job as the housekeeper of a country vicar, Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson), and his wife Gloria (Kristin Scott Thomas) in the village of Little Wallop. She clocks in with that same trunk which contains, she says, a lifetime of memories and a few clothes. Little Wallop soon echoes to the sound of some quite big wallops as Grace, hilariously impervious to the immorality of her actions, disposes of a neighbour’s troublesome dog, then the neighbour himself, and bashes Patrick Swayze over the head with an iron when she catches him spying on Gloria’s naked daughter.

For while she’s obviously a lunatic, Grace is a good-hearted catalyst of change for the better: Gloria’s marriage is on the rocks, and she’s on the brink of an affair with her golf instructor (a self-regarding Swayze, launching a seduction scene in a ludicrous thong), Walter’s bound up with God and his parishioners (like the unseen Geoffrey in
Bed Among the Lentils)
, and the nymphomaniac daughter’s taken up with a spikey-haired Goth (‘Oh, is it Halloween?’ is Grace’s reaction). Gloria’s son is a ‘good’ boy so naturally he’s targeted by a gang of bullies, but Grace does for them by cutting the brakes on their bikes before they head off to hunt down their prey. She also reanimates Gloria’s marriage by pointing out to Walter that God is best taken with a pinch of salt and a dollop of humour, and that the Book of Solomon is all about sex, liberating his hormonal instincts and undermining, by proxy, his tedious funny-vicar sermon (an Atkinson speciality) at a convention of Anglican clergy.

Niall Johnson rewrote the American author Richard Russo’s story to accommodate these (literally) parochial deviations, and Maggie sustains a level of outrageous gusto right to the end. There’s no chance of this subsiding into a simple ‘mother and daughter’ scenario when, after Grace has gone, a pair of drainage men surprise Gloria by turning up to investigate the pond full of algae. That’s where the bodies are buried, and the credits roll over an underwater shot of the drainage men down there, too.

Another, far less dangerously mad, character, the village shopkeeper Mrs Doherty, presented itself to Maggie in Emma Thompson’s
Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang
(released in the US and Canada as
Nanny McPhee Returns
). It’s a wartime family film, with Maggie Gyllenhaal trying to keep the family, and their initially loathsome wealthy young cousins, in order while guarding the farm from the clutches of a wastrel uncle (Rhys Ifans) who’s in effect gambled it away in a casino and is being hunted down for his debts by two wildly eccentric women who resemble refugees from an alternative circus. Everyone’s eccentric to a degree, Maggie’s oddness established in a scene in the shop where she’s forgotten everything (amnesia) and can’t find anything (stupidity) because she’s filled all her cupboard drawers with loose treacle. The farm’s in chaos – kids falling into grunge and poo all the time, wicked uncle trying to get rid of the pigs, an unexploded bomb in the fields – because dad’s away at the war, reported missing in action, even though one of the children knows ‘in his bones’ that he’s not dead.