Maggie Smith: A Biography (39 page)

The ‘performance’ of the quartet in the stage play was deeply em-barrassing. Hoffman’s masterstroke in circumventing the real possibility of the sounds not looking as though they are emanating from the actors’ mouths is to wheel away to an exterior shot of the illuminated house – Hedsor House in Buckinghamshire, yet another handsome Georgian mansion to feature in Maggie’s country house guide – as the music begins and the credits roll. In this way the music becomes a powerful underpinning of the romantic resolution of the film, which is the renewed love affair of Maggie’s Jean and Tom Courtenay’s Reggie. She had confessed to him a brief post-marital affair at La Scala and he’d run away in a self-pitying huff, ‘the biggest mistake of my life,’ he now calls it. And he has now heard her whispering to Cissy about the bust-up, which she has always regretted. Hoffman regards the film as ‘an homage to Maggie’, and for her it was the first time of being directed by a director who was also a movie star – ‘so he knows all the problems!’ Not only that, Michael Gambon, Albus Dumbledore in
Harry Potter
, was also on the set, playing the eccentric director of the musical activities and reminding interviewers off it that he had first worked with Maggie in 1964 and Tom Courtenay in 1965. They probably all felt they should have stayed where they were when the film was over.

But bedpans and carpet slippers are not what these late, autumnal films are about. They’re much more about adapting to new circumstances and renewing possibilities. In that regard, Maggie met a fellow-traveller in Israel Horovitz, an evergreen off-Broadway playwright, partly living in Paris, whose 2002 play
My Old Lady
became the basis of his first film as a director. And just to keep open the possibility of being accused of being too young for the role, Maggie’s character Madame Girard, Mathilde, is ninety-two years old, and in robust health, though she tries to kid Kevin Kline that she’s only ninety. The slightly unenticing title instantly evokes Marie Lloyd’s music hall song ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ (and don’t dilly-dally on the way …). Kline plays Mathias Gold, a twice-divorced, penniless, recovering alcoholic and failed writer who comes to Paris to claim the apartment bequeathed to him by his father. A quick sale will solve his financial problems. But Mathilde is a sitting tenant in what is known in French property law as a
viager
– she stays put until she dies and is paid a monthly fee by the new owner, who takes full possession only when she snuffs it. As she hasn’t, and shows no immediate signs of doing so, Mathias is stuck with debts on top of despair. Mathilde advises him not to jump in the Seine as he’d probably fail at that, too, and end up with a bad cold. Instead, she invites him to stay and then startles him further by introducing her daughter, Chloé, in the shape of a hacked-off, resentful Kristin Scott Thomas, who also lives in the apartment. Chloé teaches English – at a school her mother has owned and sold on – and is having an affair with a married man.

It emerges that Mathias’s father bought the apartment for reasons not unconnected with his previous association with Mathilde, a woman who counts the great jazzman Django Reinhardt among her lovers. The plot not so much thickens as tangles as Mathias uncovers more family history and becomes closer to the slowly melting Chloé; will they be lovers – or are they in fact brother and sister? The film has an old-fashioned charm, though you can’t help feeling that Horovitz has both sacrificed a crucial strand from his own story and missed a trick in deleting the Jewishness from his own play, which included numerous references to the Nazi occupation of Paris and clearly invokes the country’s history of anti-Semitism. Still, the performances are superb, and there’s a strong atmosphere of the city and in particular the Marais district around Notre Dame. Maggie plays the role simply and straightforwardly, inviting Mathias into her spider’s web of routine, memories and mealtimes – dinner is always at 8 p.m., breakfast at 8 a.m.: ‘Precision is the key to a long life; precision, and wine’ – but is hit by a bombshell when Mathias tells her his mother committed suicide.

This issue of property and rights of occupation is raised again in Alan Bennett’s
The Lady in the Van
, Maggie’s latest film in which she returns to the role she played on the stage in 1999, all guns blazing as Mary Shepherd, the Camden Town squatter in the playwright’s front garden. Over the fifteen years she stayed there, Miss Shepherd managed to requisition Bennett’s porch as her bedroom so that the van became her living quarters and study. In his ‘Diary’ of 2014, published in the
London Review of Books
, Bennett says that his house is currently inhabited by a photographer (he has moved out to an address in nearby Primrose Hill) but that the premises are being used for the film, and he’s clearing out all his papers and books which are still there, revisiting more intimately the paintwork and plasterwork, some of which he applied himself when he first moved into 23 Gloucester Crescent in 1968. Filming started in October 2014 and Bennett describes popping round one morning to find them preparing the scene where manure is being delivered and Miss Shepherd (Maggie) comes hurrying over to Alan Bennett (played by an uncannily lookalike Alex Jennings; even Bennett thinks he looks more like him than he himself does) to complain about the stench and to ask him ‘to put a notice up to tell passers-by that the smell was from the manure not her’. Bennett reminds the crew that the manure, if fresh, would probably be steaming. They can’t find a way of doing this, dry ice and kettles of hot water proving too laborious. ‘So in the end we go with it unsteaming,’ says a crestfallen author, ‘the net result of my intervention being that whereas previously everybody was happy with the shot now thanks to me it doesn’t seem quite satisfactory.’

Working again with Bennett and Nicholas Hytner as the director, Maggie is enmeshed in a company with many overlaps of experience: Jim Broadbent and Frances de la Tour were both in the Harry Potter series, and both have theatre ‘form’ with Bennett (the first in
Kafka’s Dick
at the Royal Court, the latter in
The History Boys
,
The Habit of Art
and
People
at the National Theatre); and Bennett is happily reunited with three of his ‘History Boys’ – James Corden (playing a local greengrocer in Inverness Street market, on the brink of his new career as a late-night chat show host on the American network CBS), Dominic Cooper and Samuel Adamson. It’s a crucially significant fact that the film is relatively small-budget, and a co-production between the BBC and TriStar Productions, an offshoot of the much larger Sony Corporation with a track record in off-beat, unusual and ‘high-quality’ projects. Nicholas Hytner says that the film gives Maggie much wider scope to explore Miss Shepherd’s past, to acknowledge her wasted opportunities, to expose her vulnerability – ‘as well as giving full rein to all the nightmarish comedy that comes out of thrusting her into the middle of Gloucester Crescent. And of course the fact that she really
is
on Gloucester Crescent makes for a different experience.’

Given that the role is such a transforming one for an actor, I wondered if Maggie’s somewhat surprising early career participation in Method-style workshops with Anthony Page and Lindsay Anderson had led to a kind of permanent immersion in the role for as long as she was dealing with it. Hytner’s reply gives a final, vivid picture of this great artist at work:

The lady in the van was in the can.

Maggie was referenced in three major public events in 2013 while continuing at full spate with her work on
Downton Abbey
as well as
My Old Lady
and
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
. In the previous autumn, her second son Toby Stephens had appeared at the Chichester Minerva Theatre in a revival of
Private Lives
, the play that both marked and summarised the break-up of his parents’ relationship thirty years previously. Toby, like his father Robert, played Elyot Chase, opposite his off-stage wife. But Anna-Louise Plowman, a very tall and willowy Canadian, and the mother of his children, played not Amanda (Maggie’s role) but Sibyl Chase, Elyot’s new nit-picking wife (‘Don’t quibble, Sibyl!’), while Anna Chancellor steamed around as Elyot’s first wife, and true love.

When the production moved into the Gielgud – the former Globe Theatre, renamed for the director of Maggie’s
Private Lives
– it came to rest on the same block as his parents had occupied, a few yards along from the Queen’s. Toby was reported as saying that Mum had popped along to Chichester to see Jonathan Kent’s production and was mildly approving, which means that it must have been absolutely terrific. And so it was, Toby getting along just fine with both of the Annas – Plowman and Chancellor – he was married to. Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor played their quarrelsome past to perfection, most impressively, in the vivid and immediate present. They were creatures of appalling impulse, driven to displays of irritation and affection on some primal, rhythmic surge of fear and loathing in a Jazz Age junket of manic self-indulgence. More so than his dad, Toby’s haughty Elyot was a slightly ridiculous and hearty poseur in a barathea blazer on his balcony, clearly bored with Plowman’s vacuous Sibyl, while Chancellor’s Amanda, all bony shoulders and beaky bravura, was a jagged and rhapsodic bohemian, far more muscular and free-thinking than Maggie’s hilariously stylised mannequin. She could have stepped down from her own wall in the grand Paris apartment, a riot of gold leaf and paintings in the abstract, cubist and colourful style of Juan Gris, Fernand Léger and Picasso; she retaliated to Elyot’s elision of the Waldstein sonata and ‘Some Day I’ll Find You’ on the piano with a savage dance routine to her vinyl recording of
The Rite of Spring
.

This same year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the National Theatre, and Maggie featured large. The two parts of the BBC’s celebratory television history were called ‘The Dream’ and ‘War and Peace’, the second revisiting the industrial action by backstage staff that added considerably to Peter Hall’s woes as he took charge of the new building on the South Bank in 1976 in succession to Laurence Olivier and compounded his own bad press by moonlighting on a television arts programme and producing at Glyndebourne, which idyllic opera house he also ended up running. There are two theories about Hall’s behaviour in this period. Either, the National could only have survived and thrived, as it did, if run by such an energetic, driven and dedicated obsessive (Olivier, clearly, could not have begun to make the new place work); or, as Olivier’s former associates Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller believed, the entire operation became an exercise in vanity and self-aggrandisement. This accusation is partly true, as it would be of any great artistic director, but as the film made clear – despite opening with Hall’s confession that he always got his own way as an only child as he studied scripts by a swimming pool in his back garden – his vanity was the lever to the wider success, and by the time he left, and was succeeded by Richard Eyre in 1987, the NT was truly up and running.

The brilliant appointment after Hall was not so much that of Eyre as that of Mary Soames, daughter of Winston Churchill, as chairman of the NT board. Appointed by Mrs Thatcher’s government, this was clearly intended as a move to close establishment ranks against the ‘liberal insurgency’ Hall had instigated by putting on plays like Howard Brenton’s
The Romans in Britain
(an allegory of the contemporary Irish troubles in the historical occupation of Britain, with some simulated buggering of Druids) and becoming such a fierce spokesman for subsidy in the arts. Instead, Soames and Eyre sort of fell in love with each other, and she in turn left the programming entirely to him, as was right and proper, while concentrating on the first forays into sponsorship and convincing the ‘pinkos on the South Bank’ she had been appointed to demonstrate that commercial patronage could be as valuable, and innovative, as the state kind.

And so it remains today, with the natural inclination of the National to be radical and subversive where possible, underpinned by city financiers and moguls such as Lloyd Dorfman, sole supplier of the Travelex cheap ticket scheme. This used to be called repressive tolerance in the 1960s, but I think nowadays it’s more like disinterested enthusiasm, though it surprised many that, after an extensive refurbishment of the National costing £80 million, to which Lloyd Dorfman had contributed a cool £10 million, the NT’s third auditorium, the Cottesloe, reopened in 2014 under a new name, the Dorfman. Such a place is not the kind of corporate-style development Maggie recognised as concomitant with the glorious rough and tumble of her own NT days in the Old Vic; her one appearance in the new building – in Stephen Poliakoff’s
Coming in to Land
– never loomed large in her admittedly thin portfolio of undiluted happy memories.

Still, the National under the successive regimes of Hall, Eyre and Hytner has always been in awe of, if not in thrall to, its illustrious early days. The two films, smartly and rather beautifully made by Adam Low, and narrated by Penelope Wilton, contained a mine of treasurable contributions. In ‘The Dream’, Maggie described the nimbus of untouchability that surrounded Olivier on stage (‘I was petrified – I’d come from revue!’); Peter Shaffer claimed, not unreasonably, to have invented total theatre in
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
(in which, said Derek Jacobi, he wore a wig that made him look like Cilla Black); and Jonathan Miller said that literary manager Kenneth Tynan – with his war cry of ‘let’s not be national, let’s be international’ – was a necessary irritant and an essential guide to Olivier through the sort of repertoire with which he was unfamiliar.

In the second film, ‘War and Peace’, Miller poured scorn on the expansionism of the NT – hard to see how that could have been avoided with the new building – and Hall’s claim to be head of a ‘centre of excellence’; once you start using phrases like that, said Miller, you really are just revelling in your own self-importance. Maggie has never entered the lists in these disputes, never been seen as belonging to any particular regime, not even necessarily Olivier’s, on account of her battle of wills with him in performance. One of the side-narratives in the NT story was the ideological split between two old friends (and close neighbours) from
Beyond the Fringe
, Miller and Alan Bennett. While Miller moaned and faded from the London theatre into the international opera whirligig, Bennett moved centre stage, backing into the limelight: he launched Eyre’s regime at the newly dubbed Royal National Theatre with the first ever stage representation of the Queen in
A Question of Attribution
(1987), himself playing the art historian and traitor Anthony Blunt. It was startling to learn that the board – who had wanted the adjectival ‘Royal’ against the wishes of the artistic executive – tried to stop the play and Eyre threatened to resign if they did. And of course Maggie had been one of the key interpretative artists instrumental in Bennett’s rising stock outside the National.

Maggie’s association with the latest NT director, Nicholas Hytner (who was succeeded in 2015 by Rufus Norris), was forged in
The Importance of Being Earnest
and cemented in their second West End collaboration on Bennett’s
The Lady in the Van
. Bennett’s NT work was an inherited thread from Richard Eyre’s time there, but just how vibrantly radical Hytner’s regime has been was underlined by his opening-season statement of linking
Henry V
(with a black monarch in the field in Iraq, shortly after the invasion) – brilliantly contrasted with Olivier’s wartime triumphal oratory in the 1944 film – to Kwame Kwei-Armah’s
Elmina’s Kitchen
, unforgettably set in a drugs-and-violence milieu on Hackney’s Murder Mile. Peter Brook found the experience of visiting Hytner’s National, with its buzzing foyers and street theatre and circus acts on the doorstep outside, akin to going to the rough-house Elizabethan Globe through a market-place.

The overall mood at the National Theatre gala on 2 November 2013 was one of unanimity and mutual recognition. At the end, a phalanx of black-garbed stage management personnel marched to the front of the stage to the biggest cheer of the night, the applause led by Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Simon Russell Beale, Alex Jennings and the whole cast of ninety-nine actors. I know I shouldn’t have been, but I was at first taken aback, and then overwhelmed, by this show of feeling and deep affection for the place and its unlovely concrete manifestation. At the amazing party in the Lyttelton foyers afterwards, well after midnight, I found myself in a remote corner with Maggie, William Gaskill and two remarkable stalwarts from the Olivier and Hall eras – David Ryall (who did a music-hall turn in the second
Quartet
and died on Christmas Day, 2014) and James Hayes. I found it impossible to order my memories or my thoughts, so, like everyone else, simply indulged in a burble of happiness and good will, with random shafts of remembered production details. I felt as if my whole life in the National – queuing for Old Vic standing places and gallery slips along the Waterloo Road in 1964, attending the opening week of South Bank performances with my friend Helen Dawson, John Osborne’s fifth wife, in 1976, and the gala first-night disaster of Goldoni’s
Il campiello
– was flashing before me. And there was Maggie, gracious and glowing, at its absolute centre.

In his introductory remarks, before the live television broadcast began at 9 p.m., Nicholas Hytner name-checked his predecessors, drew applause for the seventy-five employees who had received twenty-five-year service medals and even welcomed ‘the small band of critics and arts correspondents – who have sometimes been right’ (meaning, not often). For one night only, he said, we were comrades. Peter Hall, very ill now, was watching at home on television, but his son Edward (who directed two episodes in the fourth series of
Downton Abbey
) was there, as were several members of the Olivier family led by Joan Plowright, who waved seigneurially from the stalls in dark glasses (her sight now bordering on blindness); her recording of a great speech of Saint Joan was made only a few days previously, a stunning contribution. Ironically, this Shavian Joan said she could do ‘without my war horse’, even if the NT itself couldn’t:
War Horse
has been the biggest money-spinner for the theatre since
Amadeus
, and Joey, the larger than life-size puppet equine manipulated by three handlers, duly cantered to the front of the stage in docile triumph. I was seated between Joan Plowright’s carer and Benedict Nightingale, former critic of
The Times
, who reprised a few heavy sighs for old time’s sake and encored his touching performance of muddled confusion over not knowing who anyone was or what on earth the plays were. Everyone I know who saw the broadcast said how pungently the extract from Peter Nichols’s
The National Health
came across. And there was the original cast member Charles Kay, forty-four years on, still lying in a hospital bed surrounded by flustered and overworked medical staff.

Key NT playwrights loomed – Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn (Roger Allam was absolutely riveting in a speech from
Copenhagen
), David Hare – but only Alan Bennett took to the stage himself, hilarious as Hector in the naughty French lesson scene from
The History Boys
, re-united not only with Clive Merrison as the headmaster and Stephen Campbell Moore as Irwin, but also with James Corden, Jamie Parker, Sacha Dhawan and Dominic Cooper in his underpants. The other comedy highlight was Nicholas le Prevost and Penelope Wilton snuggling up in bed with pilchards on toast in Alan Ayckbourn’s
Bedroom Farce
and channelling the original performances of Michael Gough and Joan Hickson. Turbo-charged turns there were, from Ralph Fiennes, sensational as a predatory, fearsome Lambert Le Roux in Hare and Brenton’s
Pravda
; Judi Dench as Cleopatra and (though I never cared for her performance, or the production, of
A Little Night Music
) sending in Stephen Sondheim’s clowns; Helen Mirren, with Tim Pigott-Smith, vengefully post-coital in Eugene O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
. As a show, overall, the gala was simply breathtaking. The Olivier stage had never looked so good, or changed so smoothly, or been so effectively populated, the linking film and scene changes done to perfection, not a false note, nor any obvious omission. And, all the time, the sense of continuity, passing it on (as Hector says in
The History Boys
), something else coming … I didn’t find my taxi home till well into the small hours, but I’d already resolved to stay alive for the next fifty years. Though I wasn’t expecting ever to hear again a difficult, intriguing Restoration comedy speech delivered so gracefully, wisely and skilfully as did Maggie discharge Mrs Sullen’s serpentine catalogue of celebratory wedlock caveats in
The Beaux’ Stratagem.

Two weeks after the gala, Maggie was back ‘on show’ at the
Evening Standard
awards ceremony, a black-tie dinner event at the Savoy Hotel instead of the traditional lunchtime party and ceremony at the same address in the early days of January, levered into reluctant participation by her own good manners on being invited to accept yet another gong. I think she feels more keenly than most that awards are really about the people giving them rather than about those who say grace and thank God for what they are about to receive. Richard Eyre once said that the right people often receive awards, but usually for the wrong reasons (though he might have retracted that under his breath as he gleefully accepted the best director award for his gloriously symphonic production of Ibsen’s
Ghosts
starring Lesley Manville). Whereas these awards were once a prestigious adjunct of the
Standard
’s arts coverage, they’re now an extension of the proprietor’s curiously do-gooding and highly developed sense of vanity; but the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev’s salvation of the title in a collapsing newspaper market has been as spectacular as his editorial campaigns against poverty, illiteracy and gangland culture. The arts for Lebedev really are an expression of London’s metropolitan identity, hence the award-giving podium speeches of the Mayor, Boris Johnson, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.