Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Reviews by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Michael Coveney. Maggie Smith: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015. 353pp.
32nd Edition.
Maybe it’s because Great Britain has a long history of kings and queens that its greatest actors are considered theater nobility, especially after the custom of knighting them began in 1895, when Henry Irving became the first actor called “Sir.” In 1918, May Whitty was the first actress called “Dame.” By 1990, when Dame Maggie Smith joined that elevated sisterhood, many other distinguished female stars of stage and screen had received the honor, among them Dame Maggie’s closest rival, Dame Judi Dench, who received her damehood in 1988. In 2014 Smith was placed on an even higher plateau, Companion of Honour, of which there are only 65 at any given time.
Ever since the advent of Thomas Betterton during the Restoration, England has had a tradition of considering its foremost actors, especially those who do the classics, as successors to their great predecessors in a tradition of handing on the scepter of thespian royalty. Today, actors like Ian McKellen are often compared to predecessors like John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. Interestingly, Simon Callow once likened Dames Dench and Smith to those same iconic players, mainly because their styles clashed so similarly. Michael Coveney, whose, Maggie Smith: A Biography, is reviewed below, considers her the successor to Dame Edith Evans, with Dame Judi similarly tied to Dame Gladys Cooper, and, for good measure, Dame Vanessa Redgrave to Dame Sybil Thorndike.
Such a tradition barely exists in the American theater, where, because of the distance separating New York and Los Angeles, the leading actors are known mainly from their Hollywood movie roles, with only sporadic visits to the New York stage. In England, the principal stage and movie activity occurs in the single city of London. When was the last time you heard an American star referred to as the new Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Alfred Lunt, or his wife, Lynn Fontanne? When a popular movie or TV star appears on Broadway, it’s an event (consider Robert Downey, Jr., making his Broadway debut this season at the age of 59). On the West End, appearances by top British stars are generally taken for granted (or, at least, they used to be).
Similarly, while America has had distinguished married acting couples, like Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy, or Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, the couple who—according to Coveney—seemed most likely to be the new Lunts was Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens. Sadly, their marriage lasted only eight years, crumbling when her career began to overshadow his.
Not a single USA-based actor, no matter how admired or successful, can boast anything like the kind of film, TV, and movie resumés for which the top England-based actors are known. Moreover, those British resumés, typically, are bulging with full seasons spent honing their craft at major subsidized institutions, like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. In Maggie Smith’s case, you can add the multiple seasons she spent in the late 1970s at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Nothing close to such nationally renowned institutions exists on American soil. In later years, however, Dame Maggie lamented the transformation of Britain’s national theaters into “impersonal monolithic” institutions that had lost the family spirit of shared adventure present in her heyday.
I dwell on this because the career of the late Maggie Smith (1934-2024), who passed away last month at 89, is such an exemplar of the British tradition, as discussed in Coveney’s book. She was born Margaret Natalie Smith—she changed to Maggie because there already was an actress called Margaret Smith—into a strict, conventional, churchgoing (father Anglican, mother Scottish Presbyterian) family (her dad was a medical lab technician) in Clayhall, part of Ilford, Essex. Margaret grew up in Oxford, her family having moved there in 1939 when the war broke out. She attended the distinguished Oxford High School for Girls, where acting was encouraged, from 1947-1951, and studied at the then new Oxford Playhouse School, her choice of acting a sign of rebellion against her straitlaced upbringing.
This led to her debuting in 1951 with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where, a year later, at 17, she played Viola (for which she’d been rejected in high school) in Twelfth Night in 1952. She followed with her London debut in 1954 at the New Watergate Theatre Club. Two years later, at 21, she was in Leonard Sillman’s Broadway revue, New Faces of 1956. Soon, TV roles and, finally, film, were added, her first movie being 1958’s black and white Nowhere to Go.
Coveney marvels at Dame Maggie’s “incurably obsessive drive to be working.” In her early days, she was as likely to be singing, dancing, and clowning in a revue as acting in a Shakespearean or Restoration comedy. Her gift for comedy, into which she could infuse drama, and drama, into which she could provide comedy, was quickly recognized. Comedian Jack Benny was duly impressed by her perfect timing.
From those days to her death, she barely ever stopped acting, going from role to role, gaining technical polish from repertory work at the Old Vic, followed by becoming a member of Olivier’s new company at the National Theatre in 1963. Often, she’d be shooting a film by day and acting on stage at night. Jobs sometimes overlapped, with her acting in one part while getting ready for the next. She saw nothing odd in this: “Acting is what I do. One is nervous, every single time, to go on stage at all. But it’s the only way I’ve lived. I’ve never been in a position to question it. It is my work.”
Maggie Smith came along at an especially rich moment in postwar British theater, mingling with brilliant critical and directing talents like Kenneth Tynan, John Schlesinger, Tony Richardson, Michael Benthall, Lindsay Anderson, William Gaskill, and so on. Her onstage colleagues included such rising names as Barbara Jefford, Alec McCowen, Judi Dench, and the like. Over the next six or seven decades, she would collaborate with countless great directors, actors, and writers, all of whom revered her.
Coveney, of course, touches on the key incidents in Smith’s private life, including her failed marriage to Stephens, their sons, actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, her successful marriage to playwright Beverley Cross, their homes, and other such things. He tells of her disinterest in interviews, chat shows, doing publicity, or partygoing; her trooper-like swearing; her reclusive, stay-at-home behavior; her tetchily demanding, but always reasonable, nature; and her dislike of viewing rushes or even her finished films.
There are many amusing anecdotes, like when Olivier, co-starring with her in The Master Builder, and who had a somewhat contentious professional rivalry with her, read a review that said she acted him off the stage. That night, he stopped by her dressing room to say, “If I may say so, darling, heart of my life, in the second act you almost bored me off the stage, you were so slow.” The next night she was so speedy he got confused and vowed never to act with her again.
But Coveney’s greatest contributions are his selective accounts of many of Dame Maggie’s greatest stage and screen roles, for which he often describes her performance while also discussing the play or film. A respected critic, his analyses will make you want to search online or on your streaming services for the substantial cache of what’s available from her vast output.
His deep dives into Smith’s acting methods and strengths, from her inflections to her gestures, are extremely valuable, as is his discussion of her comedic genius. She was equally at home in Farquhar, Coward, Chekhov, Simon, Barrie, Stoppard, Wycherly, Congreve, or Albee, and, naturally, won many awards, including garnering six Oscar nominations and two wins (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite).
But Dame Maggie’s distinction in tragedies, like Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, in which her Desdemona was opposite Olivier’s notorious Moor, made up from brow to toe in shining ebony, is not neglected. And her career-crowning performances in all eight Harry Potter films and TV’s “Downton Abbey,” which introduced her to many more millions of fans than had ever seen her before, are examined with insight and wit.
As proof of her late-in-life outreach, I’ll close by relating something that happened while I was reading Coveney’s biography. I was coming home from a play on the A train when I noticed a little girl sitting next to me and staring at the cover, with its headshot of Maggie Smith. Her mother stood before me, also looking. Finally, she asked, “How is it?”, meaning the book. I gladly answered, saying that it was very good, but suggesting, in my stuffed-shirt way, that the average reader might find it had a slightly literary bent.
I turned to the sweet child, who seemed very interested, and whom the mother proudly said was nine, asking, perhaps a tad patronizingly, if she knew who Maggie Smith was. Surprisingly, she said “Yes,” at which point it dawned on me that she was a Harry Potter fan! Her mother beamed, I beamed, and the little girl positively glowed, but they exited the train before I could go any further!
Dame Maggie Smith: RIP.
Coming up: Scotty Bowers. Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
