Maggie Smith: A Biography (37 page)

Gosford Park
was a flashpoint movie in Maggie’s career in so many ways: she was surrounded by a magnificent cast of old colleagues and new friends – Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Richard E. Grant, Helen Mirren and Eileen Atkins were all below stairs; Tom Hollander, Kristin Scott Thomas and Charles Dance all languidly above – while playing the grand dame among them and responding instinctively to Altman’s casual, improvisatory method. ‘No great things happen in my films,’ he said, ‘except as mistakes—that’s where you hit the truth button; this one’s not a whodunnit, but a why-was-it-done.’ He further, self-deprecatingly, referred to his role as a director at the Oscars ceremony as someone who stands in the same place as the best actors. But he undermined his own low estimation of his role in brilliantly freezing the action, and studying it with a moving camera, as the staff all huddle in corridors, and on the stairs, listening to an Ivor Novello song. The film stops and soars at the same time in a moment of imaginative cinematic statement that you never get, for all its virtues, in
Downton Abbey
. Soon afterwards, we see Maggie putting cucumber slices on her eyes before getting dressed – Michael Gambon’s house party host has been murdered at his desk, pushed down on to his own paper knife – and telling Stephen Fry’s ostentatiously useless detective that ‘we must all pull our weight … but I won’t be any help!’

There’s a sense in which
Gosford Park
does the job of
Downton Abbey
in just two hours plus, and it’s set in 1932, eight years further on from where we’ve got to after five series of the TV drama. And, like
Downton
, it frames the period, expresses a view of it, rather than indulging merely in a high-class nostalgia wallow. It also, incidentally, rediscovers, or revisits critically, not only the music of Ivor Novello as played by Jeremy Northam, but also the lyrics (by Edward Moore) of one of his most beautiful compositions, ‘The Land of Might-Have-Been’, which plays over the final credits: ‘Somewhere there’s another land / different from this world below, / far more mercifully planned than the cruel place we know. / Innocence and peace are there – / all is good that is desired. / Faces there are always fair; / love grows never old nor tired.’ Still, Altman’s take on the period is anything but wistful or even sympathetic.

Alan Bates’s tricky, comically self-important head butler is an entirely different sort of customer to Jim Carter’s cuddly old curmudgeon Carson in
Downton
.
Downton Abbey
is altogether less edgy and unsettling, maybe. It revels in its own historicity. It’s a deliberate exercise in evocation, preservation in aspic, because the franchise dictates an eternity for its characters. It is a chilling fact about
Downton Abbey
that whenever Maggie chooses not to do it any more, the show will not be the same. Producer Gareth Neame, whom I spoke to before the sixth series was announced to be the last, never envisaged more than ten years. Fellowes diplomatically says that he does what he’s told, reminding me that when
Mad Men
wanted to pull the plug, NBC offered each top member of the cast $2 million to continue. Yet while everyone else in the
Downton
cast is out there beating the drum for it – playing the red-carpet game of film premières, race meetings, fashion shows, celebrity junkets – Maggie is nowhere to be seen, reading a book or just staying home.

Whereas the death of Matthew – Dan Stevens decided he wanted out and made a beeline for Broadway and Hollywood – was a blow to the watching millions, it was, says Fellowes, rocket fuel to the writing and helped develop Lady Mary, for a start, into a more interesting and more tortured character:

One of the key clues to Maggie’s personality as an actor is nailed by Fellowes:

Which is just as well, you feel, as she gets stupider with every passing episode; what she hasn’t yet fully mastered is Maggie’s knack of retaining your interest while challenging your patience. She has started to become annoying. ‘The other thing,’ Fellowes says, apropos of her dislike of publicity, ‘is that Maggie doesn’t talk about what she does because she knows there’s always a danger with anything creative that whatever it is you are going to do, you can talk it away; like those people who talk all the time about writing a book you know they never will, because they talked about it too much.’

Gareth Neame concurs, saying that you could not read the first draft of the first
Downton Abbey
script without knowing that Violet was Maggie Smith.

Neame adds that, because she’s never stopped as an actor, those athletic muscles you need – remembering lines, repeating scenes, waiting around for three hours, and then suddenly popping up in front of the camera again – are all very toned; ‘in that respect, her technique for a person of her age is extraordinary.’

Each episode of
Downton Abbey
(usually of about forty-seven minutes’ playing time) is shot in thirteen days, each series over six months starting in February. ‘Maggie’s utter professionalism is exemplary,’ says Fellowes, ‘she always delivers. In television, it’s two scenes in the morning, three in the afternoon. You can’t hang about for hours, weeks even, waiting for the sun to go down or whatever. It’s not a David Lean movie. So actors like Maggie who are always on the bulls-eye are very important to you.’ On the social front, I ask Fellowes – than whom you could not really imagine anyone more different from Maggie – how they get on: ‘Very well professionally, but we never meet to tear a pheasant. Like most people, I’m slightly in awe of her and respect her need to keep a distance.’

One of my favourite dinner scenes is when the socialist schoolteacher Sarah Bunting (Daisy Lewis) – ‘that tin-pot Rosa Luxembourg,’ Lord Grantham calls her – who’s going out with the embedded chauffeur, crassly disrupts a dinner party with a left-wing political rant against the village war memorial. There’s utter silence, broken only by Maggie’s acerbic aside to the effect that principles are like prayers, ‘noble of course, but awkward at a party’. Manners maketh man, and no philosophy or conviction can be more improving. ‘All this thinking,’ she says, brusquely, ‘is so overrated. Before 1914, nobody thought about anything at all!’ The thing about Violet, though, is that she does think, quite a lot, and she’s intensely vulnerable to the soft option, in manners or anything else, when it’s presented in the right way. The meanness is a sort of carapace.

This fragility is further exposed when Lily James as young Lady Rose, Violet’s grand-niece, who is staying at Downton while her parents are in India, throws a tea party for a group of Russian refugees including, it transpires, the handsome Prince Kuragin who once danced with the dowager at a ball in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (when she was travelling through with her husband); the very fan he gave her is among Lady Cora’s proudly displayed relics. As Maggie squirms defiantly, then relaxes into a transfusion of romantic memories, Lady Mary exclaims, delightedly, ‘Granny has a past!’ When Violet and Isobel visit the refugees again, in the crypt of York Cathedral, she confesses that the prince asked her to run away with him. And he presses his case one last time – ‘Our last chance!’ – when he arrives at her house while she’s still breakfasting in bed, which is slightly presumptuous of him. The matter is not resolved until the Christmas Day two-hour special (actually ninety-four minutes of playing time plus loads of adverts) of the fifth series, when the upstairs faction at Downton have removed to Brancaster Castle for a shooting party (the location is Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, one of the exterior locations for
Harry Potter
, but Maggie resists the temptation to whip off her tiara and cast a spell or two). Having flirtatiously reminded Kuragin at a drinks reception that ‘the presence of strangers is our only guarantee of good behaviour’, she defends her girlishness with a piercing afterthought: ‘I will never again receive an immoral proposition from a man – was I wrong to savour it?’

Before that Christmas 2014 edition – what Polly Toynbee in the
Guardian
disapprovingly called ‘a two-hour wallow in heritage visions of our feudal yesteryear, as glimpsed through rose-tinted decanters’ – the fifth series ended with a broadcast of the eighth episode on Remembrance Sunday, 11 November, in the centenary year of the Great War. Pace Polly, the conflict was the tidal wave event behind the whole of the series so far, and cleverly woven in through clear storylines and close observation without any hint of roseate tinting, starting with the earl pronouncing gravely, as news of the Archduke’s assassination arrived at the end of the first series: ‘I’m afraid we haven’t heard the last about that,’ a line that could easily be turned right around in a funny voice but of course wasn’t. The second series took us directly into the muck and bullets of trench warfare (again, cleverly linked to the corresponding upheavals at home) while the earl – forcibly restrained from joining up – has to be satisfied with ceremonial dinners and making speeches. Downton was transformed into a convalescent home for officers only (‘What next,’ wondered Maggie, ‘amputations in the dining room, resuscitation in the pantry?’). It was interesting to see, in the summer of 2014, the Royal Shakespeare Company ‘do a
Downton
’ on an Edwardian-style double-header of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
Much Ado About Nothing
, tragically tinged comedies reinterpreted in pre- and postwar scenarios, with a hospital for soldiers set up in the country house common to both plays.

So, after all the convulsions, and the local fall-out, it was a doubly poignant scene when the business of the cook Mrs Patmore’s nephew not being mentioned on the stone war memorial in the village was finally resolved. Other matters, though, remain spectacularly un-resolved even after the shooting party: Lady Mary has not remarried, and the truth about the murdered valet remains unrevealed as the guilt shifts uneasily between Brendan Coyle’s limping Bates and the demure, lip-trembling confusion of his wife, Anna, whom award-winning Joanne Froggatt has turned into a compelling, long-running whine of looking down in the dumps. Anna’s problem of trying to decode, and then deal with, Bates’s marital and criminal past, is seriously compounded when she’s raped by a visiting valet while the nobs downstairs are being titivated by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa letting rip with ‘O mio babbino caro’. ‘What a relief,’ whispers Violet to Isobel, ‘I thought we were in for some dreadful German lieder. You can always rely on Puccini.’ ‘I prefer Bartók,’ counters Isobel. ‘You would!’ This sequence is one of the best examples of parallel plot writing for dramatic effect. Some of the other ironies are more long range, such as the earl’s sporty and secretive dalliance with a housemaid (in whose son he has taken a benevolent, paternal interest) in the second series, which lodges in the background to Lady Cora’s less furtive friendship with Richard E. Grant’s serpentine art expert in the fifth series; the earl’s weakness is biological, Cora’s the result only of a man’s charm and intellectual flattery.

One of Polly Toynbee’s main objections to the show – apart from its way of controlling history by rewriting the past, in her view, rendering class divisions anodyne and cosy – is that there’s no sense of real drudgery and pain below stairs, no filth or slopping out of chamber pots, no scrubbing of floors or scouring of grease. She’s right to a degree, but this sort of thing would be the province of a completely different project and not one, like this, that is never likely to promote a Marxist view of that history. Within its own compass of interest and expression, there is anyway quite a lot of friction, bad blood and tension between the kitchen and the high table, though most of these problems are mollified by the avuncular Carson before they suppurate into outright hooliganism. No one ever actually pees in the soup, or spits in the blancmange (which must have happened all the time), though there is one very funny scene of menu vengeance, and the targets are the repellent sons of Isobel’s suitor, Lord Merton, who don’t want their father to remarry beneath him. It’s just as easy to see the sense of entitlement that characterises the Grantham clan, and their associates in privilege, as something unfair and nauseating without rubbing our noses in it. The ongoing relationship of adjustment between Tom Branson and the earl is subtly done on both sides of the argument of class background, for instance. And the anti-Semitism experienced by Lord Sinderby is real and unpleasant enough when his son, Rose’s fiancé, Atticus Aldridge (charmingly played by Matt Barber), is ‘entrapped’ in a drunken party on his stag night with some paid whores. It’s one of my favourite plot twists when, as Lord Sinderby’s mistress makes an unscheduled entrance, the resourceful Rose – who’s already been bounced by the family out of an ‘unsuitable’ affair with a black nightclub singer – saves the situation, and the thunderous Sinderby’s bacon (well, his fish balls at least).