Maggie Smith: A Biography (38 page)

The entire series is a minefield of hierarchical faux pas and pretensions, muted bigotry and thinly veiled tolerance, as much upstairs as downstairs, and that ripple effect expresses something deep and true about our island race. One of the most sinister characters is the Iago-like Thomas Barrow of Robert James-Collier, a repressed homosexual who bends colleagues to his nasty will, creates divisions and unhappiness and is himself susceptible to a disastrous gambling and drug culture; some of this is melodramatic, but some of it tells you a lot about the misery and resentment that Polly Toynbee claims is missing.

And then, of course, there are the visiting Americans or, specifically, Shirley MacLaine and George Clooney. The first, playing Lady Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson, represents the outlook on the future, as opposed to Violet’s attachment to the past. She storms into the third series for the wedding of Matthew to her granddaughter and immediately locks horns with her opposite number, who is quickly aghast: ‘She finds our underbelly every time, like a homing pigeon – dreadful!’ Violet later describes her as a relentless nonentity, like a runaway train. The visit is all to do with money, of which Martha, the widow of a wealthy dry goods merchant in Cincinnati, has a good deal; but, unfortunately for the Downton clan, who are concerned about Matthew not bringing much of his own to the table, none of it is to be set aside for the sake of the future of the house. The wedding of Matthew and Mary still goes off with all the panoply, even in a small village church, of what the television-watching nation treated, in effect, as the next royal wedding. In an interview at the time, Julian Fellowes discussed the character, and fortunes, of Matthew Crawley who, in Dan Stevens’s performance, became Downton’s poster boy: ‘There’s a modern illusion that if you’re rich and privileged you’re on a glissando of good fortune. Of course, that’s nonsense. I do believe that, whoever you are, you must be pro-active, bang the drum a little, make things happen. We must get behind the wheels of our own lives.’ Matthew, alas, gets behind the wheel of his own car, too, and ends up dead in a ditch just as his son is born: ‘We’ve done our duty,’ he tells Mary. ‘Downton is safe.’ Whether it is or not is the major outstanding, unresolved issue of the saga. ‘My world is coming nearer,’ Martha tells Violet, ‘and your world – it’s slipping further and further away.’

George Clooney doesn’t appear in the show proper, but in a ten-minute comedy sketch, broadcast in two snippets on 19 December 2014 during ITV’s three-hour charity fund-raiser,
Text Santa
– a total of over £5.5 million was raised for six major charities. This is
Downton Abbey
sending itself up, in costume, and in Highclere Castle, and it is very funny. The future of Downton is still insecure (of course) and Lady Mary has worked out – we’re still in 1924 – that they would save £40,000 a year if they started dressing themselves. There’s a picture in the newspaper of Maggie’s dowager breaking the ski jump world record. And Jeremy Spiven, popping in from another long-running television series,
Mr Selfridge
, delivers some of his famous store’s lingerie for Penelope Wilton. Meanwhile, below stairs, there’s drinking, gambling and strip poker, and Moseley covered in tattoos.

So, what’s going on? Thanks to the intervention of a Christmas Fairy, played by Joanna Lumley, Lord Grantham is given an out-of-body experience (after he’s taken the car for a spin, always a dangerous Downton occupation at Christmastime) and, subsequently, a chaotic vision of the future in which he’s lost all the money – again – and Lady Cora has married George Clooney. Actually, the new doge of Downton is the Most Honourable George Oceans Gravity, the Marquis of Hollywood, and he is seen embracing and dancing with Lady Cora, big time. Maggie summons Clooney to the chaise longue and enquires if his family has a coat of arms or, indeed, a coat. He declares that he finds her charming and kisses her extended hand. She faints backwards, and falls from the chaise longue to the floor, still holding on to her hat. It’s a comedy fall, straight out of revue; and George goes round the room kissing every lady who’s interested. They all are, and so is the sadly conflicted Thomas Barrow, trying to land a smackeroo on Cooney’s chops himself, while loitering with malicious intent, as usual, in the doorway.

Lord Grantham finds Julian Fellowes sitting at his desk and berates him with the complaint that none of this makes any sense. Nobody cares, says Fellowes. ‘But you go mad if anyone eats a grapefruit with the wrong spoon!’ To which Fellowes sanguinely replies, ‘Ah, yes, but that’s cutlery.’ This was a sly dig at all the people who have pointed out anachronisms in manners, speech and occasionally what’s laid on the tables or served in the kitchens. Downton Abbey, in short, has gone to rack and ruin but, after a group selfie with the marquis, Hugh Bonneville is hit on the head with a silver tray by Joanna Lumley and returns to what he is pleased to think are his senses. All the staff downstairs have clubbed together and saved the day, and the Abbey!

Even with a dream British cast, as in a fantasy football team, certain of success, there was no expectation that John Madden’s delightful
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
, which opened as the second series of
Downton Abbey
went to air, and which featured a disparate group of middle-class British white folk in late middle age coming to rest in a rackety hotel ‘for the elderly and the beautiful’ on the outskirts of Jaipur, would become such a runaway hit. The combined box office take in Britain and Australia was greater than in the US, where it was also a success; that is very unusual, in fact it never happens, says Madden.

The story of people taking a second chance on life, as the first one ebbs away, in challenging and exotic surroundings, clearly hit a nerve with that generation who were staying at home. But there’s a double perspective, too, in the story of the young hotel manager, Sonny – played with irresistible cheek and brio by Dev Patel, the star of Danny Boyle’s
Slumdog Millionaire
– in his entrepreneurial and amorous adventures, all of which are tagged by his overweening mother. This meant that the children of that older generation, now in their thirties and forties, wanted to see it, too; they were on the brink of middle age themselves and were curious about what might happen to them. ‘If one thing was okay about the film,’ says Madden modestly, ‘it was that it treated old people as if they weren’t old people.’

The magnificent seven ex-pats were all clearly defined, not least Maggie’s housekeeper, Muriel Donnelly, first seen in a British hospital demanding to see a British doctor (she needs a new hip) before taking the plunge on the flight, declaring that she can’t hang about for an operation because she can’t plan ahead – ‘I don’t even buy green bananas.’ The others on the plane are Judi Dench’s newly widowed housewife, Evelyn Greenslade (who keeps a blog as a narrative throughout the film); Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a bickering married couple, Douglas and Jean Ainslie, who have lost their savings, he keen to escape the prospect of a beige bungalow fitted with a panic button and hand rails, she a bitterly reluctant accomplice in their change of scene; Celia Imrie as Madge Hardcastle, a much-married, rebellious granny, fed up with baby-sitting; Ronald Pickup as her sort of soulmate, Norman Cousins, an ageing Lothario with hopes of pill-enhanced further activity; and Tom Wilkinson as Graham Dashwood, a retired High Court judge who, having lived in India earlier in his life, is returning to find the Indian youth he was forced to abandon as a lover, and does find him, though he’s now long-married.

Film critic Philip French was quick to point out that this was no
Jewel in the Crown
, any more than it was an updated
Passage to India
, but the movie still has a sense of the tidal wave impact India makes on new arrivals, even those as apparently thick-skinned as Maggie’s Muriel, who declares confidently on the airport bus, when offered a local snack, ‘If I can’t pronounce it, I don’t want to eat it.’ Later in the film, she’s taken to an ordinary family dinner where she shows to what extent her resistance is crumbling, at the same time revealing that her prickliness, even the incipient racism, is a cover for her own fear and loneliness.

Most of the filming was in the state of Rajasthan, in and around Jaipur, some in Udaipur, with an 80 per cent local crew. The film is based on a novel by Deborah Moggach called
These Foolish Things
and the first script, hers, Madden says, was sent to him some years before the movie was actually made. While the film preserves the spirit and the dynamic of the novel, the end result, written by Ol Parker, is quite a long way distant in significant detail – in the novel, Norman is the prime evacuee, dispatched to India by his medical son-in-law whose cousin, Sonny, has the brainwave of sending older people to a country that doesn’t treat its senior citizens like dirt – and more specifically tailored for the actors they knew were going to be in it. Judi Dench was always ‘the target’ for Evelyn, while Maggie had been involved, and had then withdrawn. Matching the availability of actors you want on a film like this is always tricky, Madden says, and Fox Searchlight, the major source of finance, had ‘very strong views’ about who those actors would be. It’s probable that Ronald Pickup as Norman wasn’t one of them, but it’s not the least of the film’s appeal that so skilled and experienced an actor – with a great career in classical theatre but only a sporadic one in movies – should be cast, and so prominently.

Judi Dench’s film career, unlike Maggie’s, is quite low key until she starts making the Bond movies as M in
Goldeneye
in 1995 – she made seven, before being killed off in
Skyfall
– and then, in 1996,
Mrs Brown
directed by John Madden. That won her a first Oscar nomination, and she snared the top prize in
Shakespeare in Love
two years later, again directed by Madden, even though she only appeared for eight minutes as Elizabeth I (perhaps she made up for this by playing the fairy queen Titania as a stately Gloriana in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, in 2010). Despite this, Madden says that ‘Judi is still convinced she doesn’t have the full skill set for movies, doesn’t know where all the knobs are. But this is common when people come to film from theatre, and she was over-mystifying the process.’ Once initial reassurances have been given, everything falls into place after a few days.

Madden recalls a bizarre day – ‘a dame sandwich’ – when he drove from Judi’s house to Maggie’s, pitching the film and, at last, Maggie committed.

At first, for instance, Maggie ‘auditioned herself’ as Muriel for a couple of days in an Irish accent. But it wasn’t working, and she switched to that exaggerated Cockney accent that she hadn’t used since
Black Comedy
, when she assumed the voice of Mrs Punnet, the cleaning woman. Muriel, too, was a housekeeper, but for forty years, not a few seconds when fuming half-naked at Derek Jacobi’s irate ex-mistress in a black-out.

At the end of the movie, Judi rides off into town on the back of Bill Nighy’s moped, while Maggie, having at last got to her feet out of the wheelchair, and having discovered a way of sorting out the chaotic accounts at the hotel, is starting over as the assistant manager. The other stories are mostly resolved, and it certainly feels like the end … unless you’re curious enough to want to know what happens next and how the hotel might fare as a reconstituted business; and that’s what
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
, again written by Ol Parker, sets out to tell. Madden had to fight for the title, which works on three fronts (the second movie, the second hotel, and the hint of hand-me-down shoddiness), but of course the American producers wanted to know why anyone would want to see anything that’s second best. It’s not really a sequel, but a second chapter (it doesn’t have the legs to become a franchise), in which Sonny expands his dream, and the hotel, into taking over the Viceroy Club, a possibility suggested when the first hotel has only one room left and two new separate arrivals – Tamsin Greig and Richard Gere – contesting it. Meanwhile, Dench’s Evelyn and Nighy’s Douglas have joined the Jaipur workforce, Norman is developing his live-in relationship with the impetuous, good-living Carol of Diana Hardcastle, and Imrie’s Madge is weighing up the romantic options, which are further disrupted by her first sight of Richard Gere’s smooth operator Guy Chambers (‘Lord have mercy on my ovaries’). There is a way in which you can look at the first film as Judi’s, the second as Maggie’s: Muriel spots that moving into the new hotel is a good idea and she wants to help, but at great personal cost to herself.

The follow-up is as enjoyable as the set-up, with the added intricacies of the business operation, a Bollywood-style dance sequence at the wedding party after romantic complications, and a big all-round hear-hear to Bill Nighy’s tortuously expressed avowal to Ronald Pickup that the thing about life is that ‘it’s got so much bloody potential’, though he does accompany the sentiment with the start of a frown and a cloudy contemplation of the future. His wife, Penelope Wilton, returns to drive through her divorce; she also wants to revisit the old crumbling ruins – and see how the hotel is doing, as well. It’s been doing fine for eight months, though Sonny does take a morning roll call to make sure no one has died in the night. We see this routine with the various parties shouting back ‘here’ as he calls their names, except for Maggie who, on hearing ‘Muriel Donnelly’, manages a husky ‘what’s left’. It’s revealing, technically, that she gets that laugh by virtue of being on the move, the others all sedentary. There’s a wonderful ‘in joke’ for the dames, too, when Judi – who’s been musing in Muriel’s company that, sometimes, the difference between what we want and what we fear is the width of an eyelash – complains to a distracted, half-listening Maggie: ‘I don’t know why I tell you anything’; ‘Because I’m older and wiser’; ‘Only nineteen days older’; ‘That’s the entire lifespan of a wasp.’ In real life, the age gap is the other way round, Judi older than Maggie, the difference still nineteen days.

The ending is decidedly downbeat and melancholic, the moped of the first movie joining a moped motorcade climbing up the screen like a swarm of flies. Maggie is alone, raw and wrung out, summing up a life in a sentence with no idea of whether or not history is to blame: ‘I spent forty years scrubbing floors and the last months of my life as the co-manager of a hotel halfway round the world.’
Daily Telegraph
critic Robbie Collin said that watching this monologue ‘feels like you are watching a Ferrari reach the end of an average speed-check zone and whistle off into the distance’.

In between the two
Marigold
movies, Maggie completed, apart from three more series of
Downton Abbey
, two other films – Dustin Hoffman’s
Quartet
and, attracted by the prospect of working with Kevin Kline, and filming in Paris, Israel Horovitz’s
My Old Lady
– both of them adapted by the experienced, septuagenarian authors, Ronald Harwood and Horovitz, from their own stage plays, both occupying the limbo, transitional world of old age not so much in decline as in a late flowering.

Maggie had not worked with Harwood since their time in the West End on
Interpreters
, and in the interim he had not only written the play on which
Quartet
is based but also won a best adaptation screenplay Oscar for
The Pianist
(2002) and received a knighthood. He was now, in fact, a grand old man, but he added a commentary in the
Daily Mail
to coincide with the film’s opening to the effect that all of his success had come to him later in life and that we, as a society, were not endowing the elderly with appropriate dignity. Around this time there were many instances of maltreatment of residents in care homes around the country, and the deeper-lying problem was that people in such homes, he felt, had no common cause or passion, no shared experiences or relationships. They were just dumped there.

This downside of the ageing experience was addressed with a kind of solution in
Quartet
– not to be confused with Maggie’s 1981 Jean Rhys film of the same title – which is set in a home for elderly musicians and singers called Beecham House, so named after the celebrated conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham. It doesn’t take Maggie long to note the appropriate irony of a house like this being named after a man whose grandfather made a fortune in laxatives. The film, said Harwood, owed much of its genesis to the composer Verdi and the house in Milan, where he lived and is buried, which he bequeathed as a care home for aged opera singers. Harwood’s home in
Quartet
is under financial pressure and threat of closure, but proceeds from an annual gala offer hope. The crux of the film is whether or not the latest arrival, Maggie’s famous old soprano Jean Horton, will join her colleagues in a recreation of a renowned recording of the great quartet from Verdi’s
Rigoletto
and save the day. The other three old singers – Tom Courtenay’s Reggie, one of her former husbands, Pauline Collins’s quivering, bright-eyed Cissy, and Billy Connolly’s dirty-minded old Wilf – are already there, committed, and raring to go. But she skulks in her room, like Achilles in his tent, becoming angry and upset when the subject is broached over dinner. Her life seems to swim before her as she listens to the old recording, but she’s on the warpath again at breakfast, silencing the whole room with another outburst: ‘It’s not an honour, it’s insanity!’

In his début as a director, Hoffman improves on the play in many ways, not least in scenes like that one. On stage, the home seemed vastly underpopulated; here the place heaves with real musicians, many of them retired orchestral players and singers, one a famous ENO Rigoletto, John Rawnsley, another the great soprano Gwyneth Jones (‘It’s not make-up she needs,’ snipes Maggie as show-time approaches, ‘it’s a paper-hanging job’), though you do still wonder why there are never any visitors at any time before the concert begins. The other great improvement on the stilted, old-fashioned 1999 stage presentation (led by Donald Sinden in typically fruity, roaring form as Wilf, with Alec McCowen as Reggie, Angela Thorne as Jean and Stephanie Cole as Cissy) is the intimacy and heat not just of the music we hear throughout the film but of the quartet’s realignment and emotional card play. There’s a real musicality in the acting: Tom Courtenay is deliciously nervous and tentative, a twinkling Connolly controls Wilf’s vulgarity just this side of oafishness, and Collins’s Cissy – again, the casting of Collins had been suggested to Hoffman by Maggie – is just so beautiful, touching, slightly drifting away on a cloud of dementia; when Maggie assaults Collins in a fury when she’s brought her some peace-token flowers, you can hardly bear to watch the screen. From this moment, Maggie is in retreat from her own awkwardness. She digs deep, finds remorse and kindness at last. When told that Gwyneth Jones will be singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from
Tosca
, Maggie bridles with ‘Over my dead body’. ‘Is that a yes?’ She’s softened!