Maggie Smith – a force to be reckoned with
Maggie Smith has made art from British camp comedy tradition, writes Roger Lewis
WHERE would Dame Maggie Smith have been without British actor and comedian Kenneth Williams? They met in August 1957 in a West End revue written by Bamber Gascoigne called Share My Lettuce.
“I loved her urchin quality,” said Williams later of his gangling red-haired and poppy-eyed co-star.
“She’s physically adroit and can fold her arms in such a way that they disappear.”
In one party scene together, Williams watched in admiration as Smith sang a number while twirling a rope of beads around her neck and then, amazingly, around her waist.
“Just as they seemed to be heading for her ankles, she deftly altered their course and the beads ended up round her neck again.”
Smith, in her turn, absorbed Williams’s exaggerated vocal mannerisms – what Michael Coveney calls his “nasal twanging” – and, to this day, she has never seen the need to shake them off.
Her flapping wrists, “the quizzical twist of the head”, her air of haughty disapproval, “this glistening surface, rippling with animosity, tension, pain and frustration’ – I sometimes think Smith is a reincarnation of the furious Carry On pixie Williams, particularly in Downton Abbey”.
Launched in 2010, Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs soap-operatic pantomime, which attracts more than 120 million viewers internationally, has placed Smith in a new category of fame, despite the fact that she’d already won two Oscars — for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite.
The Dowager Countess of Grantham, with her “hawkish, slyly confrontational attitude”, is, of course, Oscar Wilde’s indestructible Lady Bracknell as played in drag by Williams.
Her “innate dignity” symbolises aristocratic tradition and splendour – but does so with an unmistakeable camp waspishness. Her duels with Penelope Wilton’s Mrs Crawley are like the exchanges Williams had once upon a time with the sainted Charles Hawtrey: “Just because you’re an old widow, I see no reason to eat off a tray.”
When George Clooney appeared as the Marquis of Hollywood in a charity special, she summoned him to a chaise lounge and asked: “Do you have a coat of arms… or, indeed, a coat?”
It is an arch way with language that carries over into real life. Looking aghast at the prices of brassieres on a shopping trip to Fortnum’s with Williams, Smith was heard to exclaim: “Cheaper to have your t**s off!” Flying for the first time in a helicopter, she observed: “I never thought I’d look down between my legs and see Guildford.” Smith was
born in Essex in 1934 and, when she was four, the family moved to Oxford. Her father was a medical lab technician and her mother a dour Glaswegian incapable of showing her children much affection.
Smith left school with four O-levels and trained to be an actress at the Oxford Playhouse, where thespian and raconteur Ned Sherrin remembered her as “a quiet little thing”. Comedian Ronnie Barker took her aside and advised her to give up the profession – “I didn’t think she had the qualities or the talent necessary”.
Nevertheless, she persevered. “I’m never shy on the stage,” she discovered. “Always shy off it.” There were some decidedly odd jobs coming her way – hostess on a game show, Peter Pan with comedian Dave Allen as Hook – before Smith established herself as a star, first in revue and then in Restoration comedy at the Old Vic theatre in London.
British novelist Evelyn Waugh thought her “a fair treat” and she was suddenly “a walking, talking flame”.
Laurence Olivier invited Smith to join the National Theatre because, he said, he could see immediately how good she was.
Smith played an electrifying Desdemona to his blacked-up, politically incorrect Othello. Because she was in danger of upstaging him, however, Olivier deliberately thumped her so hard during one particular scene that she was knocked out and he said he’d never act with her again.
Always a dangerously jealous
man, Olivier summarily sacked Smith, who moved to Canada. There, relieved of “the demons and pressures”, she played Cleopatra, Rosalind and Titania in Ontario obscurity.
Meanwhile, Smith’s unique mix of comedy and pathos was being recorded in the cinema and for the box. As a demure secretary in The VIPs, she stole scenes from Richard Burton. After playing Miss Brodie – “a chilling portrait of bottled-up sexuality and dazzling irony” – Smith made pictures with Peter Sellers and David Niven and was in several Agatha Christie adaptations when Peter Ustinov was Poirot.
Then came her phenomenal worldwide success in the Harry Potter films as Professor McGonagall, and in Downton
Abbey as the Dowager Countess with all the best lines.
Coveney is on less sure ground when it comes to her private life, as Smith has clearly had no intention of giving a thing away to her biographer. “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one’s still acting” is how she sums herself up.
In marked contrast to, say, the gregarious Dame Judi Dench, Smith is unfashionably private.
By all accounts, she is reclusive and solitary by choice, never gives interviews or participates in the red-carpet publicity circus and lends her name as patron to no good causes.
Throughout her entire distinguished career, she appeared on a British chat show once: Parkinson with Kenneth Williams in 1973.
Even so, Smith’s romantic existence was once incredibly boisterous. An early paramour was Rod Taylor, the Australian hunk who died in January.
Between 1964 and 1974, she was in a professional and personal partnership with Robert Stephens. Audiences flocked to see them sparring: as Beatrice and Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Zeffirelli, the “merry war” between the characters was popularly believed to reflect that of the actor and actress in their private lives.
“Big rows were heard through the dressing room walls” and Stephens, whom Coveney describes as possessing “an immediate volatile likeability”, descended into alcoholism and madness.
Smith won her Oscars, while Stephens’s stab at Sherlock Holmes for Hollywood flopped. He “reacted with a terrible wildness and, for a short time, became socially impossible and virtually unemployable”. He died in 1995, knighted after a late resurgence.
Smith and Stephens had two sons. Toby Stephens is now a distinguished and dashing leading man, currently to be seen in Black Sails on DStv’s History channel. His brother, Chris Larkin, a character actor, is possibly a more interesting and durable performer – his mother in miniature.
After her divorce from Stephens, Smith married Beverley Cross, who died in 1998. – Daily Mail