The Prime Of Maggie Smith (Observer 6 September 1992)
Maggie Smith is renowned today for the stifled aside, the muttered barb, the slightly malicious crack. You can see why. From an early age she developed two characteristics that are stamped through her professional life like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock: a keen sense of irreverence and a sharp instinct for privacy.
Margaret was unhappy at school in Oxford and at not going to RADA, an institution she had fantasised about after reading some theatrical novels. After she scraped four unimpressive passes in the new GCE O-level in the summer of 1951, her father Nat went to see Isabel van Beers, a drama teacher who had a travelling brief among the Oxfordshire schools with a regular port of call at the High School. Nat had heard she was starting a drama school based at the Playhouse in Beaumont Street.
Margaret - it was not until 1956 that she became known as Maggie - thrived and prospered as a walk-on and stage manager at the Playhouse. But more immediately important than her Playhouse connections was her involvement in student revues. These were bright days for the university theatre, which had been galvanised in the post-war years by the activities of Kenneth Tynan, John Schlesinger, Sandy Wilson, Tony Richardson, William Gaskill and Lindsay Anderson. The early professional success of such people prompted a rush of energetic talent towards the stage and the rapidly expanding new world of television.
Even without professional work, she was in demand. As Ned Sherrin says, if you wanted success with a university show, you tried to get Margaret Smith in the cast. And, on a personal level, there were countless admirers for his waif-like, clownish, chanteuse whose timing and stillness on stage marked her out from the room.
One such was Michael Murray, later in life a professional actor, who became Margaret's favoured 'boyfriend'. Another keen admirer was Andrew Johnston, who wrote much of one university revue material and, on graduating, pursued a notable career in advertising. Both, along with the rest, were kept at arm's length. Margaret was a proper young girl and was in no hurry to yield her mysteries. She soon learned to protect herself from regular exclamations of sexual adoration. The physical side of life was fairly unimportant to her, and her upbringing certainly pre-empted any idea of dalliance, let alone promiscuity.
In December 1953, yet another undergraduate was entranced by the vivacious redhead, and his long-term campaign was to prove ultimately successful. The relationship of Margaret Smith and Beverley Cross is one of the most touching and unusual love stories in the British entertainment business. At first intermittent, then interrupted for about 10 years by Maggie's tempestuous affair with, and marriage to, her National Theatre leading man, Robert Stephens (by whom she bore two sons), the liaison has proved to be the bedrock of Maggie's professional and emotional life.
Maggie was flat-sharing in the late 1950's with a girlfriend, Juliet Duncombe, in Eldon Road, Knightsbridge, and spending a lot of time with Ian Bannen, a Cathlic Scottish actor six years her senior who had been in the Stratford-upon-Avon company with Beverley Cross and who, in 1958, had scored two great personal successes in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into NIght.
Bannen was, and is, a soft-spoken, introspective character whose melancholic disposition ws ideally suited to the dark complexities of O'Neill. Maggie was very taken by him, and also by a close friend of Bannen's, a stage-struck cleric called Adrian Arrowsmith, who began giving Maggie instructions in the Catholic faith. There was even talk at one stage of a great wedding in Westminster cathedral.
Beverley Cross re-emerged from the Oxford maelstrom. His first play, One More River, had opened successfully at the Liverpool Playhouse with a young actor called Michael Caine in the cast, and it was scheduled for an October 1959 presentation by Laurence Olivier's production company at the Duke of York's in London.
He knew very well that this might bring him closer to Maggie once more, and although he was married to another Oxford contemporary, Elizabeth Clunies-Ross, he declared himself 'absent without leave', and reported devotedly to the stage doof of the Old Vic, where Maggie was acting, in order to renew his lifetime's mission of courtship.
The reappearance of Beverley Cross was to have a decisive effect on Maggie's career.
His rock-like imperturbability complemented her anxiety and defensiveness. Everyone who knows them today confirms that they quite simply depend on each other. Beverley's companionship is the essential safety net for the high-wire tension of Maggie's performing style.
The ripening of Maggie coincided with her appearance in Beverley's crucial second play. After the premiere of Strip the Willow in Nottingham, a new pre-London tour was presented in Cambridge, Newcastle and Brighton in September. Maggie was cast as Kathy Dawson, a politcian's mistress sheltering from an imminent nuclear attack in a decaying West Country folly, along with an archaelogist and a private detective.
The leading producer of the day, Binkie Beaumont of H.M. Tennent, who had gone to Golders Green at Beverley's invitation, told him that the West End did not like ironic comedy but that 'the girl is very, very good'. So good, in fact, that he started planning her West End career while putting a stop, for the moment, to Beverley's: Strip the Willow never made it onto Shaftesbury Avenue.
Maggie and Beverley were now living together in a South Kensington flat. Beverley was otherwise based at the White House at Beaumont in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his chow dog, Tuffet. His first marriage had broken down irretrievably, but there was a delay on arranging the divorce. Most friends of Maggie and Beverley regared them as unofficially 'engaged'.
After her West End successes, Maggie received an invitation from Laurence Olivier to join the newly formed National Theatre at the Old Vic. Over dinner in the Ivy, Olivier offered her Silvia in The Recruiting Officer by Farquhar, Desdemona and Hilde Wangel in Ibsen's The Masterbuilder. She ran home in a panic and turned him down flat. Beverely talked her round and dictated a telegram of acceptance the next morning; in so doing, he unwittingly thrust her into the arms of Robert Stephens.
The Farquhar had not been seen in London since 1943, and it was the first real test of how the mixture devised by Olivier and his subalterns would work. Olivier himself appeared as Captain Brazen, alongside Max Adrian as Justice Balance, ex-Royal Courtiers Stephens and Colin Blakeley as Captain Plume and Sergeant Knife, with new names Derek Jacobi and Lynn Redgrave in support. Michael Gambon played a tiny role.
William Gaskill, the director, thought she was not immediately happy in the role, but improved as the production matured in the repertory. Her amorous pursuit of Captain Plume resulted in a fraternal clinch with Robert Stephens, who exclaimed, oddly bemused, 'Sdeath! There's something in this fellow that charms me!'
There was indeed. He and Maggie embarked on a clandestine, whirlwind affair in early 1964 that was initially and inevitable consequence of working proximity. In March 1964, at Lynn Redgave's twenty-first birthday party, only two people - Lynn and her father's dresser, Christopher Downes, who became a close and constant friend to both Maggie and Robert - knew of the liaison.
Robert had met Maggie at a party several years earlier and considered her 'a rather sad looking creature'. During rehearsals of the Farquhar she made him laugh a lot: 'She was very raunchy. She didn't drink like a fish, but she swore like a trooper. I thought it was just going to be one of those theatrical romances which can happen, but she was much more serious about it than I was.'
Her domestic liaison with Beverley was severely tested in the summer of 1966, when Maggie disappeared to Rome for a few weeks to make a film with Rex Harrison called The Honey Pot, an amazingly cumbersome re-write by Frederick Knott, and the director Joe Mankiewicz, of Ben Jonson's Volpone.
Robert followed her there, and Maggie finally wrote to Beverley with the bad news. He had left his first wife and their two daughters for Maggie. Beverley had been aware of the developing romance with Robert since his return from Australia, where he had spent three months directing his own money-spinning version of the French farce Boeing-Boeing.
'I was more than hurt, I was murderous. So in order not to murder anyone, I got married again quickly and went to Greece and France to keep out of their way.' His second wife was Gayden Collins, a model, and Beverley kept travelling, and working on his screen-plays and libretti, for the next six or seven years. He had waited for Maggie before, and he would wait for her again. He knew deep down that his life with her was not over.
Maggie was named in Robert's divorce from Tarn Bassett and the baby in the Middlesex Hospital on 19 June 1967. The Honeypot had overshot its schedule by many weeks, and Maggie hat not seen a gynaecologist in Italy. The baby was upside down and had to be delivered by a Caesarian operation. Maggie said later that this made her feel as though she had just popped out to Harrod's for it.
The boy was named Christopher, after his godfather Christopher Downes. Everyone had expected a girl, including Franco Zeffirelli, who had pre-christened the baby Daisy. Maggie received a telegram from Zeffirelli in Italy which read: 'Congratulations on Christopher. I shall spend all my life trying to turn him into Daisy.'
Ten days later in 1967, Maggie and Robert were married in Greenwich register office. This was arranged by the National Theatre's press officer, Virginia Fairweather, who wanted to keep the wedding private and well clear of the inevitable media glare at Caxton Hall. Fairweather explained to the Greenwich officials that Maggie's brother, Alistair, lived in nearby Blackheath (true) and that Maggie had been staying there for several weeks (less true).
The first the public knew of all this - indeed, the first official announcement of any sort on the subject - was an article written by Barry Norman, then showbiz correspondent of the Daily Mail, on 20 August 1967. The ginger baby was two months old, and Robert said that his arrival had slowed Maggie down - 'she isn't so frantic to be working.' Albert Finney gave the couple a copy of 'Sergeant Pepper'.
In 1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was released, eight years after the publication of Muriel Spark's novel. It remains today the film most readily associated with Maggie Smith. It certainly symbolises the period of her working life in which she first achieved her greatest fame.
It is tempting to see Maggie's creation as a subtle revenge on her Scottish puritanical mother and indeed on the Oxford High School, which had, as Maggie admitted in an interview, more than a touch of Spark's Edinburgh school, Marcia Blaine. In her gingery blonde, glistening Marcel-waved wig and no-nonsense, shoulder-shuffling walk, Maggie was a comic totem of unbending rectitude.
With transatlantic stardom and two new homes came another major award and a second dose of maternity. In March 1969 Maggie received the Variety Club award for film actress of the year in Hot Millions (other recipients included Jill Bennett and John Gielgud for stage performances in plays by John Osborne and Alan Bennett, and a 28-year-old Tom Jones as showbusiness personality of the year).
One month later, on 21 April 1969, Toby was born. Like Christopher, he was delivered by Caesarian operation in the Middlesex Hospital. He had been expexted two days later, but Maggie was impatient to get it over with and remembers more or less pushing Tommy Steele's wife out of a hospital bed so that she could jump into it. Within six weeks, Maggie was rehearsing for a Chichester Festival Theatre revival of Wycherley's The Country Wife.
These months mark the high point of Maggie's stage career at Olivier's National Theatre. The fact that Robert plaed Archer and Tesman to her Mrs Sullen and Hedda, two of her greatest stage performances, indicated that, although the marriage still prospered, Robert's visible, public role in it soon became an exclusively supporting one. And by winning an Oscar, Maggie changed her footing within the profession and upped her market value way beyond that commanded by Robert.
-Their relationship did not survive attempts to make it commercially viable. In 1972, the producer who had presented Maggie as his last major West End star, Binkie Beaumont, bade farewell iwth a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives directed by John Gielgud. It was the last play in which Maggie and Robert appeared as a partnership. In 1973, both Beaumont and Coward died. The theatre changed. The new Lunts were no longer evocative of the old Lunts.
The tragic dilemma of two people who love each other too much to be able to live together was horribly appropriate. In real life, the simulacrum of their onstage liaison, Maggie and Robert just ran out of steam. But 'deep down' there was always a scar left by the sparks of the fusion.
The production opened at Queen's on 21 September 1972, and, according to close friends, was part of a desperate final attempt by Maggie to keep her marriage, and Robert himself, on rails.
Elyot is defined in the play as Amanda's first real love, a man who drinks and knocks her about and to whom only the worst part of her was attracted. Rarely can the pain of a disintegrating relationship have found such a poignant and direct artistic expression. 'Snap, snap, snap, like a little adder,' jeers Elyot; 'Adders don't snap; they sting,' scoffs Amanda. Robert snapped and Maggie stung.
The critical controversy surrounding Private Lives was followed by outright uproar over a 1974 tailor-made West End vehicle for Maggie about syphilis. Snap was originally called Clap and its appeal, unlike its subject matter, was not contagious. This debacle coincided exactly with the final, inevitable break-up with Robert.
What had gone wrong between them? Their relationship, forged in the white heat of the National Theatre's inception, had been sustained by physical attraction and common purpose at work. Maggie had gone to the National as a West End star, Robert as a leading Royal Court representative of the new intellectual theatre. Maggie took artistic respectability from her association with Robert; he assumed that her stardom and glamour would rub off on him.
This happened for a while, but the mistake Robert made was to assume that Hollywood stardom would automatically follow. Admittedly he was unlucky. But he would never attain the eminence on screen of his wife, nor did he win an Oscar, and William Gaskill bluntly declares that, when the balance sheet is totted up, Maggie is the greater and more resilient performer.
Robert's understandable inability to accept this was a major factor in driving the couple apart. Temperamentally, too, they were a mismatch. Maggie's idea of fun is to shut the door against the world, immerse herself in a couple of good books, a hot bath and an early night. Robert likes noise, people, flowing cups and piled-high plates, and as much social brouhaha as can be mustered.
Robert's view of this period is understandably tarnished by the fact that The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the Billy Wilder film in which he played the title role, with Colin Blakely, his old Royal Court sparring partner, as Watson, was a disaster. Seeds of resentment were sown which yielded poisonous fruit. Robert took the failure of this film very badly, and his behaviuor became increasingly erratic.
The relationship became a trial of strength, and Maggie was never unduly bothered, at least on the surface, of showing how strong she could be. She felt deeply that marriage was for life, for children and for loyalty between the protagonists, however much the career took over.
Beverley, deeply wounded but still hopeful, returned to London in 1973 to work on the Tommy Steele musical, Hans Christian Andersen. He sensed that now was the time Maggie needed him most of all. He called backstage at the Vaudeville, where she was playing in Snap, ostensibly to greet his old pal Barrie Ingham, but really to catch up with Maggie. Over a period of several subsequent days, Maggie told him the whole saga of her marriage to Robert, the children and how her silently enraged parents were sitting at home in Oxford muttering 'I told you so' to each other, and to Maggie.
Beverley is far from boring, but in Private Lives terms he has more of Victor's solidity than of Elyot's raffishness, though he certainly shares Elyot's enthusiasm for travel. Private Lives, a crucially symbolic play in Maggie's life and career, was now an almost inverted paradigm of her situation. She had lived through the rough and tumble of life with Elyot (Robert Stephens) but was returning to the calm safety of her sensibly Victor character (Berverley Cross).
Maggie set off on an American tour of Private Lives (John Standing had replaced Robert as Elyot) with her sons. Christopher was now seven, Toby five. Divorce papers were issued all round: between Maggie and Robert, and betweend the secondaary couple of Beverley and Gayden Collins.
In Coward's play, Amanda and Elyot have been married for three years and divorced for five. Maggie and Robert had been married for the same total of eight years, with an almost identical period of seperation within the marriage.
Their divorce went through in April 1975, just after Maggie returned from New York. On 23 August she and Beverley were at last married in Guildford register office. There were no guests apart from Alistair and his wife Shan, their son, Angus, and Christopher and Toby. Maggie wore a beige trouser suit.
Maggie had at last settled down with the person she needed to protect her against the world. Beverley was, and is, a gifted writer for both stage and screen. But his true mission in life is to answer the door and the telephone for Maggie. She suffers, one colleague avers, from phsychological shingles. She has several layers of skin missing. Being an actress is her destiny and her particular torture. Without Beverley, her life would be impossible. And it took her nearly 20 years to wake up to that fact. The marriage to Beverley has proved mercifully perennial.