Maggie Smith: A Biography Read Online Free

she seems to treat them as adults in her acting. She’s also an enthusiastic grandmother to the five children of her now middle-aged actor sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. Their favourite granny highlight is the moment in
Nanny McPhee
when she sits in a cowpat.
    Golden times belong, by definition, to the past. But the past fifty years of Maggie’s continuous career might soon qualify, not least because of her stage work in Alan Bennett, Edward Albee, Restoration comedy and Shakespeare (more of that in Canada than in England, alas), but also because of the way her screen acting has refined itself from comic extravagance to the raw, naked business of emotional exposition and truth-telling. Twenty years ago, it seemed to me that Maggie sustained within herself this battle between an unrivalled technical expertise and stark emotional revelation. But that expertise has been channelled, almost brutally, in the service of the latter function, and her performances, both on screen and stage, have acquired a severity that softens, rather than a flippancy which stiffens, so that even Lady Violet in
Downton Abbey
is someone you don’t mess with before you realise there’s a twinkle and a vaguely malicious humour round the edges.
    Before
Downton
, her last television drama was Stephen Poliakoff’s
Capturing Mary
, in which she gave a remarkable performance of both collapse and reminiscence as a woman stripped of her own talent by a vile intellectual seducer. Half the film, as far as her part in it was concerned, was in voice-over, but it is typical of her forensic methodology that she learned the entire script, off-stage cues and all, and recorded those voice-overs ‘live’ in character, costume, and on the set. This encapsulated her habit of both performing a role and standing outside of it, a unique ability long ago noted by Tom Stoppard, lending an air of spontaneity and critical wisdom to every role she plays.

– 1 –
The Flight from Ilford
    Maggie Smith was born in Clayhall, a residential district in Ilford, Essex, on 28 December 1934. She moved with her family to Oxford in 1939, attended the Oxford High School for Girls from 1947 to 1951, spent two years as a student with the Oxford Playhouse Drama School, took part in countless University productions and made her London début in October 1954 at the New Watergate Theatre Club. In 1956 she went to New York and appeared on Broadway in Leonard Sillman’s
New Faces
revue of 1956 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre where, over thirty years later, she appeared in
Lettice and Lovage
. ‘One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one’s still acting.’ That is how Dame Maggie Smith sums up her life. There’s a little more to it than that.
    Ilford, a bustling, featureless urban sprawl which is part of the great East London overspill, is not a place bursting with show business connotations. Will Kempe, Shakespeare’s clown, is said to have danced through Ilford in 1599 en route from London to Norwich in East Anglia. He stopped only long enough to refresh himself from ‘the Great Spoon’. Not a lot happened after that, give or take the odd murder behind a privet hedge, until Ilford was granted borough status in 1926. The great housing development programmes gathered steam. The process had started before the First World War, with the new professional classes occupying the creeping network of solid Edwardian villas which began slowly to displace the Essex fields and meadows beyond Whitechapel and Shoreditch. The population intensified with the coming of the railway and the access it gave to the City of London.
    Ilford and environs were solidly lower-middle-class. The idea of aspiration was reflected in the naming of some roads as ‘Gardens’, to lend an air of gentrification. As a schoolboy there myself in the 1950s, I have a dim memory of an incongruous nightclub called the Room at the Top, on the top floor of the department store, Harrison Gibson. David