Maggie Smith: A Biography (11 page)

She had kissed the Canadian George Nader in
Nowhere to Go
. Her second screen kiss with a hunky colonial leading man (Rod Taylor was Australian) was gratifyingly received and she delicately touched her lips with the tips of her long fingers. Off screen, Rod Taylor had fallen very heavily for Maggie and was even said by Robert Stephens to have proposed marriage to her in the first week of shooting. She did not entirely reject his advances, although he was a married man, and the romance blossomed in their second film together,
Young Cassidy
.

While Maggie continued to draw the town in
Mary, Mary
, Kenneth Williams came out of the Shaffer plays and persuaded Beverley to accompany him on a holiday cruise to the Greek Islands. Williams was quite happy sipping his eau de vie on deck, but Beverley ploughed ashore to visit the hallowed sites on Delos, Lemnos and Skiathos, though he did manage to drag Williams up to the Parthenon when they dropped anchor at Athens. As these two stalwarts of the commercial theatre were trudging through the ruins, Laurence Olivier was gathering around him a hand-picked caucus of personnel for the new National Theatre he had launched at Chichester in 1962. As fellow directors, he enlisted William Gaskill and John Dexter, both from the Royal Court, where he knew, through Joan Plowright and from first-hand experience, that the most exciting new theatrical energy was being unleashed by George Devine.

Each director had a say in the recruitment of actors. Dexter and Gaskill insisted on three Royal Court actors, in addition to Plowright: Robert Stephens, Colin Blakely and Frank Finlay. In carving up the repertoire, Gaskill agreed to do a Restoration comedy, Farquhar’s
The Recruiting Officer
. He told Olivier that the only actress he knew who could play Silvia was Maggie Smith, whom he rated ‘the new Edith Evans’, though he later qualified that to say she didn’t really resemble her at all (there was nothing of the clown in Evans, he said): but he had seen her as Lady Plyant in
The Double Dealer
at the Old Vic and said that ‘she spoke the brilliant, difficult text as if it were the most natural expression of the character’. Joan Plowright, now married to Olivier, obviously had his ear on account of its proximity to hers on the pillow. She had also been aware of Maggie for some time. She remembers rehearsing
The Entertainer
and reading Jean Rhys and, not surprisingly, feeling a bit low. Two friends took her to see
Share My Lettuce
and she thought Maggie was ‘divine’: ‘Way before the National Theatre started, Larry was drawing up a list of people to be considered, and I persuaded him to go to see Maggie in
The Double Dealer
. Larry came back and said that an actress who can play comedy as well as that can also play tragedy, if she really wants to.’

As a result, Olivier, who of course now knew Maggie at first hand from
Rhinoceros
, invited her to lunch at the Ivy, the theatrical restaurant opposite the Ambassadors Theatre. She was a percentage star in the West End, earning 7.5 per cent of the gross box-office take, with a more than promising film career taking shape. The offer had to be good. Olivier was unable to put a great salary on the table, but in addition to Silvia, he unexpectedly threw in Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s
The Master Builder
, and Desdemona in
Othello.
Maggie was so surprised she nearly choked on her food. Binkie Beaumont, she knew, had more plans for her. And, in spite of the Old Vic season, she felt she was inexperienced in the highbrow classical repertory. She gave Olivier a definite ‘No’ and rushed home in a blind panic to Eldon Road. Beverley was horrified at her decision. He talked her down, and round. First thing next morning, Maggie sent Olivier a telegram reversing her decision and accepting his invitation to join the National Theatre.

She was one of twelve actors placed on a three-year contract. Robert Stephens was another and, as Beverley jovially admitted in later life, in persuading her to join the National at the Old Vic, he pushed her into the whirlwind of a relationship with Stephens, followed by marriage and two children with him. For a time in the 1960s, it seemed as though the English-speaking theatre had found, in Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, its new ideal star couple, fit successors to the Lunts and the Oliviers.

In November 1963,
Time
magazine picked out Maggie Smith and summarised her career as she prepared to test her mettle with Olivier. Earlier in the year she had given a rare and most revealing interview to Nancy Banks-Smith in the
Observer
. Nothing she has said since summarised so well the life she had found as an actress in flight from both the pressures of the real world and the deficiencies, as she saw them, in her own personality:

Maggie has always had a habit of stepping from one job to another with scarcely a break and often a too busy period of overlap. She joined Olivier’s National as a West End star, and extended her night shift on Shaftesbury Avenue in
Mary, Mary
during the opening rehearsal period. She left
Mary, Mary
on the last night of November 1963 and ten days later opened as Silvia in
The Recruiting Officer
at the Old Vic. The curtain had gone up on the new National on 22 October with a fair-to-middling production of
Hamlet
guest-starring Peter O’Toole.
Saint Joan
and
Uncle Vanya
, both great successes, joined the repertoire from the Chichester Festival Theatre, where Olivier had been preparing and half-launching the operation for two summers.

The Recruiting Officer
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 Blakely as Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite, with new names Derek Jacobi and Lynn Redgrave in support. An unknown Michael Gambon played a tiny role. William Gaskill, who had been flatteringly wooed away from the Royal Court by Olivier, recalls the flurry of excitement which attended these early days:

The production is renowned in retrospect as signalling the restoration of Restoration comedy. It was light and clear, with a beautiful outdoor Shrewsbury townscape based by the designer René Allio on the redbrick Queen Anne buildings of the main street in Amersham. It had architectural airiness without pastel-coloured cuteness. Bamber Gascoigne, who had succeeded Kenneth Tynan on the
Observer
, said that ‘every scene on this stage acquired an air of sharpened reality, like life on a winter’s day with frost and sun’. The old ‘gadzooks’ fan-flapping Restoration frills and frippery were out. The playing was tough, quick, ebullient, and Felix Barker in the
Evening News
confidently proclaimed that ‘a new tradition was born in the English theatre … [with] no straining after effects, no twiddly bits’ in Gaskill’s quietly orchestrated production. Olivier’s entrance, after a big build-up in the early scenes, was at first subliminal, as he flashed hilariously across the back of the stage without a word. Maggie spent most of the evening in travesty, with a cork-black moustache and knee-high black boots which, as B. A. Young said in
Punch
, gave her ‘a curious gait with a suggestion of the goose-step about it; just to see her walk across the stage is a comic treat in itself’. Gaskill 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, ‘S’death! There’s something in this fellow that charms me!’

There was indeed. He and Maggie embarked on a clandestine affair in early 1964 that was initially an inevitable consequence of working proximity. In March, at Lynn Redgrave’s twenty-first birthday party, only two people – Lynn and her father’s dresser, Christopher Downes, who became a close friend (and dresser) to both Maggie and Robert – knew of the liaison. Robert was married, for the second time, to the actress Tarn Bassett. They had a daughter, Lucy, born in 1963, who became an international lawyer. 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.’ Robert was three years older than Maggie. The son of a West Country master builder, he left home in Bristol to train in Bradford with Esmé Church and arrived in London via a stint with the Caryl Jenner touring company and repertory in Morecambe. Tony Richardson, George Devine’s assistant at the Royal Court, brought him down to join the English Stage Company as a founder member in 1956. It was there, in 1958, that he played the title role of
Epitaph for George Dillon
by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. The production transferred to Broadway.

The future looked good. And so, for a considerable time, and mostly with Maggie Smith, it was. But Robert, who died in 1995, was a complex, troubled character whose immensely likeable volatility became too much part of his stage persona. William Gaskill, who had also been introduced to the Court by his fellow Yorkshireman Tony Richardson, was the director of
George Dillon
. He once pinpointed Robert’s special quality as an actor: the ability to understand the nature of failure. In the last act of
George Dillon
, after the hero has enjoyed some success as a hack writer, he is given a present by his family. Gaskill recalls that, as he unwrapped it to discover a typewriter, Robert registered layers of reaction that convinced you this man would never write anything worthwhile in his life. There was a similar moment of volcanic poignancy at the end of
The Recruiting Officer
, when Plume renounces his job: ‘… the recruiting trade with all its train of lasting plague, fatigue and endless pain, I gladly quit …’ Stephens invested the lines with what Gaskill calls ‘a shadow quality’, bringing to the conclusion something over and above what the play actually says.

Robert had returned to the Court after New York and joined Olivier’s new venture at Chichester in 1963. He had already played the Dauphin in
Saint Joan
and Horatio in the O’Toole
Hamlet
before Maggie came spinning into his life as Silvia. The relationship, artistic and personal, gathered speed throughout 1964, with Maggie playing Desdemona and Hilde Wangel opposite first Michael Redgrave and then Olivier, and Robert scoring his greatest National Theatre triumph as Atahuallpa, the Peruvian sun god in Peter Shaffer’s historical epic
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
. Within the same twelve months, Maggie’s second major film,
The Pumpkin Eater
, was released, and she answered a call from Rod Taylor to play opposite him in the Dublin shooting of a film about the early life of Sean O’Casey,
Young Cassidy
. This hectic year ended with the all-star National production of Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever
and preparations for Franco Zeffirelli’s riotously Italianate
Much Ado About Nothing
, in which Maggie and Robert sealed their pact with the public as Beatrice and Benedick.

The cast of
Othello
assembled to read the play on 3 February 1964. As recounted in a famous rehearsal log book kept by Kenneth Tynan, Olivier, who had been talked reluctantly by his dramaturg into playing the last great tragic role available to him, ‘delivered the works – a fantastic full-volume display that scorched one’s ears, serving final notice on everyone present that the hero, storm-centre and focal point of the tragedy was the man named in the title. Seated, bespectacled and lounge-suited, he fell on the text like a tiger.’ Olivier had enrolled at a gymnasium and worked hard at unravelling a new baritonal lower octave to mix in with his steel and whiplash tenor. His make-up was incredibly elaborate. He aimed at a blue-black Nubian colour and, at every single performance, covered himself from top to toe in three layers, allowing each one to dry. This process took three hours. His dresser then polished him with a piece of chiffon until he shone. His hair was cut short so that his wig could be glued to the back of his neck, deleting the possibility of a recalcitrant hedge effect when his neck muscles bulged. Finally, he was sprayed in a very fine mineral oil. He was literally, and metaphorically, untouchable. Maggie felt that in the scene when she welcomed him back from Cyprus, there should be physical contact. Olivier refused, and she exclaimed in one rehearsal, ‘I’ve come all the way from Venice to see you, you’ve won the war, I’m pleased to see you, what do you want me to do, back away in fuckin’ ’orror?’ Olivier took Robert, who was not in the production, to one side and said, ‘Please tell her to stay away from me on the stage. I don’t mind if she looks like a cunt, but I’m buggered if I’m going to look like one.’

The production opened on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April. There was a brittle wariness and rivalry between Olivier and Maggie. She was possibly the only member of the company of whom he was secretly afraid, simply because he knew how good she was. She could give as good as he gave, and was probably twice as fast. One night Olivier took her to task for the diphthongs she would form on her vowel sounds. As the daughter of an important senator, he felt she would speak impeccably and not sound quite so common. She took the point and poked her head round his dressing room as he sat there in all his black and naked glory: ‘How Now Brown Cow!’ she mockingly and immaculately intoned. Olivier either didn’t get the joke or refused to be riled: ‘That’s much better, Maggie darling,’ he said. Christopher Downes remembers, too, that Maggie sent the boss a postcard of Cassius Clay, then at the height of his boxing fame, on which his boastful tag-line – ‘I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest’ – was prominently displayed: ‘He didn’t get it at all. He had very little sense of humour about himself.’

John Dexter was the director of
Othello
, and he encouraged Maggie to be stronger, stiller and more serene than are most Desdemonas. According to Riggs O’Hara, the American actor who lived and worked with Dexter for thirty years, the director saw the steel and iron in Maggie and disliked the more girlish, vulnerable side of her acting. In his diary notes, Dexter wrote after the early casting sessions: ‘Nobody wants her [Maggie]. I do. A strong-willed mature woman who’s been around and knows what she wants. She wants that big black man. Isn’t everyone tired of pretty blonde ingenue Desdemonas?’

Maggie surprised everyone in the role. As O’Hara says, ‘She sailed down from the back of the stage through that copper arch in a blue paisley dress with that wonderful brown chiffon over-sash Jocelyn Herbert had designed for her, the air billowing out under it; it was quite spectacular. I’d never seen her be that magisterial.’ John Gielgud thought she was ‘extraordinary casting’ but that she pulled it off splendidly. Tynan thought that she revealed something new – ‘an ability to play serious characters whose approach to sex was affirmative and aimed at total erotic fulfilment’.

In spite of Olivier’s ‘hands-off’ instruction, the couple kissed when Othello arrived in Cyprus, with a hint of dreamy sexuality on both sides. In pleading for Cassio, Maggie played sweetly but strongly right down the middle of the argument. And when Othello struck her round the face with the proclamation he had received from Lodovico her reaction was not, as Tynan noted, the usual collapse into sobs, but ‘one of deep shame and embarrassment, for Othello’s sake as well as her own. She is outraged, but tries out of loyalty not to show it. After the blow, she holds herself rigidly upright and expressionless, fighting back tears. “I have not deserved this” is not an appeal for sympathy, but a protest quietly and firmly lodged by an extremely spunky girl.’

This scene spawned another anecdote often recounted by Maggie, corroborated by Robert and by Derek Jacobi, who played Cassio. Some months into the run, Olivier was trying to persuade Maggie that she should appear in Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth
, but Maggie was resisting the idea, and one or two other suggestions. Olivier was so incensed that he slapped her with particular force across the face with his hand rather than with the proclamation. She was knocked cold and Edward Petherbridge, playing an attendant supernumerary at the start of his distinguished National career, emitted an audible gasp of ‘Oh, Mags!’ Frank Finlay had to improvise a new piece of business for Iago: carrying an unconscious Desdemona from the Senate House. And when she came round in the wings, she woozily exclaimed: ‘Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen any fucking stars at the National!’ Diana Boddington, Olivier’s loyal and devoted stage manager, disputed this story. She said it was Orson Welles who nearly killed his Desdemona, Gudrun Ure, and she stage-managed that production, too. According to Boddington:

Most of the reviewers moved into sonorous top gear to try and do justice to Olivier’s performance. The production itself was competent enough, but Frank Finlay’s Iago was clinically devious and efficient rather than crawling with theatrical malice. Olivier had no intention of being upstaged by his lieutenant. But some dissenters, notably Alan Brien and Jonathan Miller, took exception to Olivier’s adoption of what they described as ‘nigger minstrel’ characteristics. The languorous, rolling gait, the swaying from the hips, the full-throated imprecations and the open-palmed, eye-rolling, tongue-lolling insouciance all conjured a white man’s vision of an exotic, alien paramour, very probably with enormous sexual apparatus, who had transgressed the decorum of polite society. Which is exactly Shakespeare’s point about Othello. It was Olivier’s unapologetic sensuality which raised hackles. Looking back, the performance was poised at the very last moment at which the liberal theatre-going audience would accept the impersonation of a demonic black character by a white actor. Subsequent made-up Othellos have dodged the problem by playing martial dignitaries (Brewster Mason and Donald Sinden) or Moorish outcasts (Paul Scofield and Ben Kingsley). And when Michael Gambon hinted that he might approximate to Olivier’s tidal waves in an intimate and heavily cut Scarborough revival directed by Alan Ayckbourn, the show never saw the light in London. Today, the role is the preserve of black actors only.