Maggie Smith: A Biography (30 page)

Maggie pops up again halfway through
Hook
in the flashback sequence of Peter’s marriage into the family. She is too old to fly herself any more. And she glimmers effectively at the end, taking on the semblance of a softer version of Wendy Hiller, as the family is reunited and Peter Banning throws away his telephone with a sign-off rewrite of Pan’s most famous line: ‘To live will be an awfully big adventure.’ By living, we now mean spending time with the kids. The frank emotional vulgarity of the film is one of its greatest strengths, and the class of Maggie’s acting is an important factor. But you could hardly say she was anything like extended. She is far less strenuously made up than she was for Aunt Augusta in
Travels
. She adopts a slight lisp for the older voice, but otherwise understates the whole process of elderly impersonation, leaving her eyes to do the talking.

In
Memento Mori
, although playing an aged character in Muriel Spark’s vigorous and black 1959 mystery comedy of senility and gerontology, Maggie did not have to obliterate herself so much. Mabel Pettigrew is old, but she is less old than most of the other characters dotted around London and tucked up in the Maud Long Medical Ward for female last-gaspers. Mabel has a good figure and good legs still, luxuriant and well-cut hair, a well-dressed and confident manner, and the constitution of a horse. To these attributes Maggie adds a deadly appropriate cutting edge and twinkle as the manipulative blackmailer in a world of ancient and festering liaisons thrown into confusion by the telephone calls of an anonymous agent of mortality. She keeps her own red hair, swept up, and presents Mabel as a woman much nearer her own age, a sexy sixty-year-old, conveying only hints of senescence in the pinching of her mouth, the acquisition of reading spectacles and the sour, grim demeanour of the terminally disappointed. Cut out of a former employer’s will when she expected to inherit the lot, she is told there is £50 in her name: ‘Fifty pounds? I spent about that much on her sodding wreath!’

Renewing her professional liaison with director Jack Clayton (this was Clayton’s last film before he died in 1995), Maggie leads a magnificent cast in a buoyant festival of mortality which the BBC had the unexpected wit to broadcast to the nation on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection. In fact, Clayton and his fellow screenplay writers, Alan Kelley and Jeanie Sims, perpetrate some crucial adjustments to Spark in the name of narrative coherence, and lead to a point of positive conclusion that is their own. Clayton wished to acknowledge what the retired detective inspector Henry Mortimer (John Wood) calls the ‘stubborn gallantry’ of this extraordinary collection of confused Edwardian relics. The community of oldsters is rocked by the calls (‘Remember you must die’) and summons the inspector to investigate. The first, and most spooked, recipient is Dame Lettie Colston (Stephanie Cole) whose brother Godfrey (Michael Hordern) is married to the novelist Charmian (Renée Asherson). Dame Lettie seeks solace and clues from Charmian’s old housekeeper, Jean Taylor (Thora Hird), now serenely domiciled in the Maud Long Medical Ward.

The catalyst of anxiety and exploitation is Mabel, who tightens a tyrannical grip on Godfrey not only because she knows about his past affairs but also because she knows that a glimpse of stocking is, in his case, an effective method of subjugation. Clayton’s film relishes the black humour of senility – the precarious motorcar-driving of Godfrey, the tea-time mayhem caused by Cyril Cusack’s enraged and doddery old poet, the amnesia, narcolepsy and general decrepitude – but also celebrates the poetry of survival, the flickering spark of sensual appetite. By overcoming the interference of Mabel, and of Godfrey’s sponging son, Eric (Peter Eyre), a homosexual and second-rate novelist, and by finally refusing to answer the sinister telephone calls, Charmian and Godfrey are indeed renewed in loving partnership. And the defiance of old age is complete when Jean Taylor comes out of hospital to visit Charmian as a friend, not as a dependent employee.

Memento Mori
is a richly macabre, stunningly well acted and beautifully crafted film (the lighting, costumes and overall pace are evidence of a governing technical perfection) in which Maggie’s Mabel Pettigrew is a captious, lurid villainess, deeply disturbing because her performance goes deliberately against the film’s grain of generosity and humour. She epitomises all those who take advantage of the old and weak, perhaps the most despicable of all sinners. Her vowels are mean and common and her campaign one of undiluted viciousness and spite. Whereas the old poet’s granddaughter (Zoë Wanamaker) shows Godfrey her stocking tops in a spirit of pity and understanding, Maggie’s Mabel traps the old boy like a fly in her web, leading him downstairs with a look of vindictive and petrifying triumph.

It is one of Maggie’s tautest and funniest performances, but it thrives especially because of the company it keeps. At the start of her career, Maggie was a comedienne who surprised people by wandering into the murkier tragic waters of Desdemona, Hilde Wangel and Hedda Gabler. In Canada, she had synthesised her comic and tragic elements in a buoyant and idiosyncratic style of high-tension performance flecked with emotional truth and perception. She had matured into a great all-round actress. And she could now play extravagant boulevard comedy and concentrated tragedy with equal fervour and panache.

One of Ilford’s other performing progeny, Ken Campbell, extrapolated in his monodrama
Pigspurt
the two sides of his acting persona in the Jungian sense of conflicting archetypes: the kindly housewife and the spanking squire. Maggie, too, has a soft side and a brutal side, and throughout her career she has brought the one into play against the other. This tension characterises her performances in tragedy as much as in comedy. William Gaskill admired her lightness and effervescence, John Dexter her steely backbone; the clown of Oxford revue and
Black Comedy
endured the fire of the classical disciplines, as well as the emotional upheavals of her own private life, to find the sad heartbeat of Judith Hearne and the plaintive resilience of Alan Bennett’s alcoholic vicar’s wife. She could blaze in glittering merriment as Congreve’s Millamant, in fierce splendour as Cocteau’s Jocasta, in a cascade of sparkling eccentricity as Shaffer’s Lettice Douffet. John Wood, working with Maggie on
Memento Mori
for the first time since their salad days in the OUDS
Twelfth Night
in an Oxford college garden, said that she had not changed at all. She was recognisably the same talented, funny and attractive girl who broke hearts and burrowed conscientiously into the centre of each role she played. Whatever satisfaction Maggie Smith gains from her acting, the spiritual rewards are transitory and rarely savoured.

The cast and production team of
Memento Mori
gathered at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Piccadilly in March 1992 to see the first screening of their work with Jack Clayton and the producer Louis Marks. There were drinks beforehand, drinks afterwards and a high decibel-level of animated conversation, greeting and reunion. The film, another long-cherished project of Jack Clayton, had been an exceptionally happy one for all concerned. Lady Antonia Fraser, the Oxford aristocrat who rode her bicycle while Margaret swept up and made tea in the Playhouse, sat between Michael Hordern and her husband Harold Pinter. Clayton’s film-maker best friend Karel Reisz was there, so were most of the actors, and an impressive array of leading film bigwigs and technicians.

By not attending the BAFTA screening, Maggie was not preserving her top-billing status but merely being true to form. She could not even contemplate the torture of sitting through the film and her own performance. It was bad enough having to while away the time between dawn and dusk at home. As the country prepared for a General Election and as various leading entertainers ludicrously followed the American example of declaring their allegiances, Maggie sat back and disparagingly contemplated the whole sorry spectacle. Acting, she knew, though she would never say such a thing, was more interesting and mysterious than the self-deluding vanities of politicians. To describe it, discuss it, or use the reputation won by it to promote a cause or a politician, is, to her, the biggest betrayal of all. Her personal style, however, though critical, has never been censorious. Her amusement at the follies of others was ever a trick to compensate for the inflexible standards and recurring sense of disappointment with which she has been afflicted from the start.

Sure enough, she did eventually get round to Lady Bracknell – the role for which she was long destined, despite the looming memory of Edith Evans in the famous film version – in a production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
at the Aldwych in London in March 1993 produced by Robert Fox, directed by Nicholas Hytner and designed by Bob Crowley. She was no haughty old dowager guarding a bank of magisterial put-downs, but a scheming whirlwind, body askance in dove grey silk, flyaway hat and perfect coiffure, a figure of frightening elegance, not to be tampered with. She combined powerhouse presence with a grim but glorious glamour and a blazing eye for the demands of etiquette. And she found a fresh underbelly to the role in conveying a sense of the arriviste, of someone whose right to assume authority on matters of social decorum is deeply suspect and defensively fanatical; in effect, she played Lady Bracknell as someone of whom she was critically disapproving.

She inspected the young people – Richard E. Grant and Alex Jennings as Algernon and Jack, Susannah Harker and Claire Skinner as Gwendolen and Cecily – like a beaky adjutant on parade, running her eyes up and down the hapless Jack Worthing, her nephew Algernon’s co-conspirator in romantic adventurism, with the alacrity of those zip fasteners evoked in her disdain for Archer in
The Beaux’ Stratagem
. But this was not one of Maggie’s frantic, signalling performances; her body language was as tightly corseted as her physical frame. In Act One, she was a silver shark, bustled with fins. In Act Three, she assumed a more dry-land, squirrely appearance, trading grey for brown, a colour more suited to the country.

And the handbag? That Becher’s Brook of a line was no more, for she careered straight through it, staggering slightly on the sofa at the accumulation of news concerning Jack’s foundling status. The portrayal was fired by the assault on her dignity and the energy with which she defended herself. In ticking off her list of maternal requirements, she was outfoxed by unwanted information (‘the line is immaterial’ could have killed at five paces), gathering laughs as she went before exploding at the climactic prospect of her daughter marrying into a cloakroom and forming an alliance with a parcel. ‘Parcel’ was indeed a special delivery, hissed venomously through splayed lips.

Cecily’s ‘profeel’ was applauded in an affected giveaway. For the carapace would crumble, revealing both girlishness and a curious vulnerability beneath, something entirely original in this performance of the role. When the General’s true name was discovered in the military records, this final deflation was answered with a simple, almost weak, admission that she knew what it was all along. This was the most dangerous, and the most delicate, moment in a production that otherwise divided the critics. The amazing designs comprised a louche red and green clubland flat dominated by a stage-high portrait of Algernon; a monumental topiary peacock in the country garden shadowing a tilted model of the Georgian house and a view of five counties; and a creamy morning room, launched on its side like a skew-whiff Heartbreak House. With Maggie on stage, all this witty, emphatic angularity seemed superfluous; at least, this was what she thought. Would she take this production to Broadway? she was asked. She wouldn’t take it to Woking, she replied.

Maggie’s movies around this time were startlingly contrasted, and laid down a pattern for the ensuing two decades. A new look at a children’s classic, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden
, directed by Agnieszka Holland, heads what I would call a category of high-quality historical movies, all quite modestly conceived and budgeted. A BBC television film of Tennessee Williams’s
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the first time Maggie played an American heroine, presaged a trio of remarkable stage performances in the plays of Edward Albee, and also a run of notable, human-scale UK independent movies starting with
Ladies in Lavender
in 2004 right up to the filmed version of another blistering theatrical performance in the title role of Alan Bennett’s
The Lady in the Van
in 2015. Finally, a pair of flat-out funny movies in Hollywood with Whoopi Goldberg,
Sister Act
and
Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
, prefaced just three more Hollywood comedies before Harry Potter took over the world, with Maggie on board, becoming the biggest grossing movie franchise of all time, the eight films netting a global gross box office of US$7.7 billion.

Taking these three loosely defined categories in reverse order,
Sister Act
turned out much better than Maggie had feared; she was none too confident about a hit-and-run comedy in the gambling dens of Nevada, where Whoopi Goldberg as a nightclub singer called Doloris Van Cartier has witnessed her married lover wipe out a hoodlum before taking refuge, and the veil, in a San Francisco convent – where Maggie is the Mother Superior – with the guarantee of police protection so she can help pin down the lover (Harvey Keitel) and his gang. Once in the nun’s habit, Whoopi transforms the holy choir into a hot-gospelling big attraction in the local community, to the initial horror of Maggie’s top nun (‘I am a relic, and I have misplaced my tambourine,’ she irately protests in one of several beautifully played head-on collisions). But Maggie is won round by the impact the choir makes in the parish community, where the Irish Monsignor was played by her old friend from
Night and Day
, Joseph Maher. The crooks eventually capture Doloris, and Maggie leads the salvation assault in the Reno casino, bleakly encouraging her squadron of singing nuns to ‘try and blend in’ as they dash among the blinking fruit machines.