Article from “The Catholic Herald” on Patricia Routledge here.
Biography from Carole Jackson:
Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on February 17, 1929 in Birkenhead (Merseyside), the daughter of Catherine (nee Perry) and Isaac Edgar Routledge. Her father was a haberdasher and the family, including brother Graham, lived behind the shop. Patricia says she was a much-loved, “cosseted” child, and every day when she came home from school, she would call to her father, who would come out and see her safely across the road. During the outbreak of War, her father built reinforced bunks in the basement of the shop and Patricia and her brother, Graham, would spend hours down there, doing their homework and playing monopoly. The family slept there for weeks on end. Patricia attended Birkenhead High School, where she admits she was a bit of a show-off, disrupting classes, telling jokes, and imitating people. “I was a plump girl with a loud voice. I used to ride my bike round the country lanes thinking great thoughts and spouting pieces of poetry.” While at school, she sang in the Congregational Church Choir and ran the Sunday School, bringing the numbers of students up from four to ninety-four by “bribing kids with pictures for their attendance books and by telling them vivid Bible stories.”
Although at this early date all the signs would seem to point to a performing career, Patricia read English at Liverpool University, with dreams of being an avant-garde headmistress and spending her summers having affairs in Europe. But her experiences with each end-of-term play began to be very important to her. “I was fully alive and it frightened me. I was in a tremendous turmoil about it.” She finished her course and took a year off to think about her future direction, while working as an unpaid assistant stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse. Soon she was asked to join the company, and made her theatre debut as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1952, at the royal salary of £5 a week, from which she bought her mother a box of Meltis fruits every Saturday. She was still living at home.
Patricia finally moved out of her childhood bedroom at the age of 23 when she went to Bristol to attend the Old Vic Theatre School. She left behind not only her family but her wonderful singing teacher, Elizabeth Sleigh of Birkenhead, of whom Leonard Bernstein would some 20 years later say, “She did a good job!” She made her London debut in 1954 when she played Carlotta in Sheridan’s The Duenna at the Westminster Theatre. She was only 28 and appearing at London’s Saville Theatre in Zuleika when her mother died of a sudden heart attack. Patricia was very close to her family, especially her mother, and speaks with great affection of her parents and with gratitude for her loving and happy childhood. She draws constantly off her memories, saying, “You can cope if you know that as far back as you remember you were cherished.”
In 1966, Patricia made her Broadway debut playing the roles of Violet, Nell, and Rover in How’s the World Treating You, which transferred from the West End. She calls it the play that changed her life. Jule Styne saw her performance and the next year invited her back to star in his musical Darling of the Day, for which she won a Tony Award in 1968 for best actress in a musical. Vincent Price was her co-star. In 1972 she brought the house down with her performance in the revue, Cowardy Custard in London. Following this success, she recorded an album of her favourite songs, Presenting Patricia Routledge.
Patricia has had an impressive career on stage, has appeared on both the large and small screens, and has worked extensively in radio. Her film appearances include Clinty in To Sir with Love with Sydney Poitier; Miss Reese in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine; Mrs Featherstone in If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium; and Miss Beatty in Don’t Raise the Bridge Lower the River with Jerry Lewis. Her radio work includes Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Present Laughter with Paul Scofield; The Cherry Orchard; The Beggar’s Opera; and the much-praised series Beachcomber by the Way. She has recorded several of the classics, with her exquisite readings of Wuthering Heights in its entirety; Alice in Wonderland; and some of the Beatrix Potter tales.
She has worked in television since 1952, in both comedic and dramatic roles, among them Victoria Regina for Granada in 1964; Kitty in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV from 1983-85 (in whom we see the forerunner of Hyacinth Bucket); Barbara Pym in Miss Pym’s Day Out in 1991; and the Omnibus production, Hildegard of Bingen in 1994. She most recently received international acclaim with her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bou-quet) in Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95), which earned her the title of Top Television Comedy Actress for 1991. In the same year the Grand Order of Water Rats pronounced her Personality of the Year and in 1993 she was similarly honoured by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Patricia was awarded the OBE in the 1993 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to the Performing Arts. Her most recent honour was to be voted Britain’s all-time favourite actress in 1996. She is now preparing to do the third series of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates For BBC1.
Patricia is well known for her work in her good friend, Alan Bennett’s plays, A Woman of No Importance (1982) and A Lady of Letters (1988), both of which he wrote especially for her. Her one-woman show Come for the Ride premiered in her hometown of Birkenhead in 1988 and has played in venues throughout the UK. Also in 1988, Patricia played the Old Lady in Jonathan Miller’s production of Bernstein’s Candide, for which she won an Olivier Award. She had first worked with Bernstein in 1976, playing the presidents’ wives in Alan Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway. Bernstein wrote the solos especially for her, the very moving ‘Take Care of This House’ and the tour de force ‘Duet for One’. In 1992, she played Nettie Fowler in Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Carousel at the National Theatre and in 1994 she played the definitive Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals at the Chichester Festival Theatre, transferring to the West End. Her most recent theatrical role was as Beatrix Potter in the one-woman show, Beatrix.
Acting is her whole life as she says, “There is nothing like that audience response when it’s working with you – nothing.” She speaks with awe of Alastair Sim, her idol, with whom she worked in Chichester in Pinero’s The Magistrate and in London in Dandy Dick. “To be on stage with him was an education. When he reached that pitch of obsession with a situation, however absurd, there was nothing he could not do with those staring eyes, that jabbing finger, the swoops and wobbles of his voice. Playing opposite him taught me so much.” Anyone who has seen her perform can see that Sim was indeed an excellent teacher as Patricia plays his style to perfection.
Patricia has never married, admitting her expectation of marriage has been too high to allow her to make that commitment and she couldn’t have borne not to give her children the complete love and attention she’d been given as a child. “People have always pitied spinsters,” she says. “We have been derided, as if we had missed out on life. Well, we need not miss out on anything today!” she says with a sparkle in her eye. She has been in love and speaks of a bittersweet grand passion that broke her heart when she was young, when she fell in love with a married man. Not too many years ago, feeling entirely at peace with her single status, she unexpectedly found love once again. But sadly, the love of her life died suddenly of a heart attack. She’s not revealing any names, but says that a corner of her heart has been taken once again by a very special person.
Patricia leads a quiet private life, living alone in her lovely Kensington home she bought in 1969. She also has a cottage in Surrey. She says she appreciates rather a lot of her own company while still enjoying her many friends. She likes doing practical things, washing clothes, cleaning, and polishing wood. She also likes cooking and having friends to dinner. She admits to being a very emotional person “but I keep the clamps on it – you cannot go round being emotional. It can be channeled.” Most easily into acting. “The life of the imagination becomes a very strong relief. I want the theatre not to give me escape but to take me out on the uplands and make me realize that life in spite of setbacks and pain and evil can go on at its best and most enjoyable; above all (and this embraces the tragi-comical condition of mankind) that the human spirit will triumph.” She says she is both an optimist and a realist. Her religion is important to her and she believes in prayer. “I don’t think you can go it alone. There is a positive force for good outside oneself, call it God if you like, that has the strength to turn darkness into light.” She is a patron of St. Richard’s Hospice in Worcester and president of Claire House, Merseyside.
Patricia’s father died in 1986 and her brother, who was canon residential at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in 1989. She says, “I don’t believe in eliciting spirits of people who have passed on, but there are times when I physically feel one of them taking over. I can be doing some quite ordinary things like ironing or getting hold of a pan of sprouts and something in my head will say, ‘That is exactly how your father or brother would have dealt with that.'” Thinking further on the subject she says, “When I approach the pearly gates, I’d like to hear a champagne cork popping, an orchestra tuning up, and the sound of my mother laughing.”
But Patricia has no plans to leave us for a long time yet – and no plans to retire. “I just want to do good work with good people in good places. And as for retirement, I can hardly spell the word. I’m driven, really. The demons won’t lie down.” Which her fans are very happy to hear. We look forward to seeing Patricia Routledge in many more wonderful roles and to enjoying the pleasure of her company for years to come.
Dermot Walsh was born in Dublin in 1924 and studied and acted at both the Abbey theatre and at the Gate. His first film “Hungry Hill” with Margaret Lockwood was made in Ireland. His other films include “Bedelia” and “The |Mark of Cain”. During the 1950’s he made many B movies and then turned to the stage. He was married at one time to Hazel Court. His daughter is the actress Elizabeth Dermot Walsh. He died in 2002.
“Guardian” obituary:
Filmgoers in the 1950s had to sit through many a dire, low-budget second-feature, made to satisfy the government ruling that a percentage of films shown in British cinemas must be home-grown rather than Hollywood imports. Dermot Walsh, who has died aged 77, starred in more than 20 such movies, and could have laid claim to be king of the quota quickies.
Tall, dark and handsome, he had once seemed set for true stardom. Born in Dublin, where, while studying law, he went to the Abbey theatre school of acting, he spent three years with Lord Longford’s repertory company, and was in productions at the Gate and Croydon repertory theatre, before being spotted by a Rank talent scout.
His first three films were enjoyably risible melodramas starring Margaret Lockwood, then at the peak of her stardom. Little noticed as a chauffeur in Bedelia (1946), Walsh made an impression later that year, in Hungry Hill. In this adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel about an Irish family feud spanning three generations, he played Lockwood’s profligate son, although he was only eight years her junior. In Jassy (1947), he graduated to being her lover, and was well cast as a dispossessed heir whom the half-Gypsy Lockwood steals from sweet Patricia Roc.
Nothing else Walsh did in features was as good. A few feeble films followed, including Third Time Lucky (1949), in which he starred with Glynis Johns. In the same year, he married Hazel Court, with whom he co-starred in My Sister And I (1948), the first of a number of plays and films they would appear in together. Back on the stage, he was in the first production of Shaw’s Buoyant Billions, as well as in Reluctant Heroes and JB Priestley’s Laburnum Grove.
In 1952, Walsh started his cycle of leading roles in shoestring second features, many of them murky crime thrillers, shot in two weeks, and middlingly directed by John Gilling and Lance Comfort. Despite the functional scripts, Walsh actually gave a good account of himself in, among others, The Frightened Man (1952), Ghost Ship (1952) and The Floating Dutchman (1953).
One of the better of these films, directed by Gilling, was The Flesh And The Fiends (1959) aka Mania, The Fiendish Ghouls and Psycho Killers, about the grave robbers Burke and Hare. In it, Walsh played the medical assistant to Peter Cushing’s Dr Knox, who bought the bodies for experiments. He also played straight man to Arthur Askey in Make Mine A Million (1959). The same year, in Crash Drive, he portrayed a racing driver who believes he cannot walk after an accident.
Because the budgets seldom allowed retakes, Walsh explained that, in one scene, “the doctor is supposed to say to the driver’s wife, ‘I have bad news. Your husband has no legs – I don’t mean literally, I mean metaphorically.’ Instead of that, the actor said, ‘Your husband has no legs – I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally,’ and they printed it. Of course, eventually, I get out of the wheelchair and walk.”
When the quota quickies faded, Walsh starred in the 39 episodes of the swashbuckling children’s adventure series Richard The Lionheart (1961-62). His last film appearance was in The Wicked Lady (1983), but he continued to act on stage until fairly recently, in The Rivals at Birmingham Rep, Joe Orton’s Loot in London, and Harold Pinter’s A Kind Of Alaska in Cambridge.
He and Court divorced in 1963; their daughter survives him, as does his son by Diana Scougall and two daughters by his third wife, Elizabeth Knox, who predeceased him.
· Dermot Walsh, actor, born September 10 1924; died June 26 2002 “The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Dubbed the ‘new Grace Kelly’, Irish actress Constance Smith was a big-screen starlet before drink and drug addiction led her to an impoverished death 10 years ago. As a fusion of dark beauty queen, femme fatale and flawed heroine, Smith was a film performer whose own life might have served the plot of a lush fifties melodrama, say one directed by Douglas Sirk.
Constance who?
People might wonder if they’ve either forgotten her name or never even heard of her, but in the 1950s she was a promising Hollywood newcomer to the Fox studio and presented an award at the 1952 Oscars, a responsibility that carries the peer respect of the film industry. She was born impoverished in Limerick city, in 1928 and last month marked 10 years since her death, in London, almost penniless and almost completely forgotten.
Despite this, Smith’s lifetime experiences almost reflected the arc traced by any memorable movie character or story protagonist. Talk about ups and downs. Smith followed a path from poverty to celebrity to notoriety to obscurity. As a young actress she was, for a short period, the special muse of Darryl F. Zanuck, invited and initially welcomed into the rarefied air of Hollywood.
As an older woman she was, for a short period, the special guest of Her Majesty, imprisoned for knifing her husband in a drunken domestic dispute. The husband, maverick documentary maker Paul Rotha, escorted her to the prison gates and met her there on her release. Smith and Rotha then remained a couple, on and off, for decades until his death.
But Smith’s dusky sexual allure always had a bewitching effect on her men. She had three husbands, including one who was the son to an Italian Fascist senator, who regarded his daughter-in-law as a shoeless Irish peasant. More significantly, she married Bryan Forbes, the challenging British film-maker who madeWhistle Down the Wind (1961) and The L-Shaped Room (1962).
Forbes witnessed first-hand how the studio system first supported then crushed Smith in her Hollywood career, and it’s tempting to imagine that some of what he saw influenced his dystopian sci-fi drama The Stepford Wives (1975).
Having been first cosseted by Zanuck and the Fox studio, Smith was summarily dumped. Fox had forced her into an abortion and tried, unsuccessfully, to make her change her name. Forbes later wrote: “When the blow fell… the Hollywood system allowed of no mercy. She was reduced to the status of a Hindu road sweeper.” The difficulty for Smith was making her mark in American cinema when Irish performers were thought suited to mildly-exotic, fiery or fantastical roles, rather than the darker, sultry ones that fitted her looks. Yet with Jack Palance in Man in the Attic (1951) and in Impulse (1957), she showed signature noir-like qualities. Palance once called her the “Dublin Dietrich”
. Elsewhere she was dubbed “an intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor” and she was frequently termed the new Maureen O’Hara or Grace Kelly. Smith originally earned her chance in movies by winning a Hedy Lamarr look-a-like competition and perhaps her acting development was hindered by constant comparisons to established figures. Later, when she fell out of the limelight and into drink and drugs addiction,
15th October 1955: Irish film actress Constance Smith (1928 – 2003) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 69 No 03 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
she worked as a cleaner and workmates remarked that she looked familiar but they couldn’t place her. “It seems regrettable that Constance Smith should have been so completely forgotten given that she was once, if briefly, a Hollywood star,” observes Ruth Barton, film scholar and author of Acting Irish in Hollywood.
It’s to Barton’s credit that she does the proper work of an historian, which is to retrieve from the past those details that make us rethink what we believe we know. How few of us knew there was an Irish film figure of such intrigue? We might nowadays recall Smith’s name with the likes of O’Sullivan, O’Hara and Kelly, had her fortunes not turned so sour. In Emeralds in Tinseltown, Steve Brennan and Bernadette O’Neil’s glossy span of the Irish influence upon Hollywood, the authors relegate Smith to the also-rans section. Barton, meanwhile, rescues her from the dustbin of history.
But while we should remember Constance Smith, we should not pity her. While perhaps we should mourn her as a faded talent, we should not patronise her as a tragic victim. Instead, she was a survivor, even an inspiring one, who found some success in a most demanding field, absorbing the blows as best she could when the sinister side of that success turned upon her.
Perhaps Hollywood was over-subscribed with dark-haired beauties in the forties and fifties, when Dorothy Lamour, Jane Russell, Gene Tierney and Ava Gardner literally dominated the scene.
Certainly we should not see Constance Smith as tragic merely because she lost her fame, a phenomenon that’s often a hollow reed. What’s sad is that she never fully realised her potential as a drama performer, even while her own life was so dramatic.
She was not quite right for those flamboyant, flame-haired roles played by Maureen O’Hara or the pristine, ice-queen personas of Grace Kelly. She was more a Scarlett O’Hara type, who rolled with the punches as her world crumbled around her, and lived by the mantra that “tomorrow is another day.”
For Irish Post article on Constance Smith, please click here.
Limerick Life article in 2016.
Constance Smith was born in 1928 at 46 Wolfe Tone Street, just a short walk from Limerick train station. It was to be an auspicious sign for the little girl who would grow to be a celebrated actor; her extraordinary life would transport her from that small terraced house in Limerick to a convent in Dublin, from a Hollywood mansion to an Italian villa and finally, from Holloway Prison to a sad, troubled end in a London hostel.
While most film fans are familiar with Irish movie stars of the past such as Maureen O’Hara, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris, few people, even in Limerick, are aware of Constance Smith and her short-lived Hollywood career. Ruth Barton is an academic and author of Acting Irish in Hollywood: from Fitzgerald to Farrell in which she dedicates a chapter to Constance Smith, to retrieve her and other lost stars “from historical oblivion”. Much of what you’ll read below emanates from her painstaking research.
Constance Smith was born to Mary Biggane, a Limerick native, and Sylvester Smith, a former British soldier and veteran of World War One. Initially, her father, a Dubliner, worked as a labourer at the Ardnacrusha plant, but when the project was completed in 1929, he moved his family back to the capital. There they settled in a one-room tenement in Mount Pleasant Buildings, Ranelagh, described by the Irish Times as a ghetto, “used by the Corporation as dumping grounds for problem families.”
Life was arduous and often dangerous in the slums of Mount Pleasant. Communal toilets were poorly maintained, overflowing rubbish bins were infested with rats, and cold, lung-choking air seeped through the damp brick walls; it was little wonder that Irish infant mortality rates were among the highest in Europe at the time. Indeed, many of Constance’s ten siblings did not make it to adulthood.
The only respite from the grinding poverty was a sort of ad-hoc community theatre which developed among the residents. Groups gathered together in the evenings, sang songs from penny-sheets, performed skits for one another and, if the owner was feeling generous, listened through open windows to the street’s one wireless radio. It was in this way that Constance likely received her first training in the dramatic arts.
Constance’s father died when she fifteen. Unable to support her surviving children on her own, Mary Biggane sent her daughter to St. Louis Convent School in Rathmines. The headstrong teenager escaped early, however, taking casual jobs as a shop girl and housemaid to support herself.
It was this latter position that set her on the path to stardom. In 1945 she was placed in a ‘big house’ in Rathmines and the family for whom she worked encouraged her to enter a ‘Film Star Doubles’ contest in The Screen, an Irish film-industry publication. She went on to take first place – dressed as Hedy Lamarr in a borrowed dress – at the magazine’s ball, attended by local actors, theatre producers and crucially, international talent scouts.
She was invited to screen-test at Denham Studios in England by Rank Organisation, who saw potential in the beautiful, sultry-eyed young woman. In 1946 she signed a seven year contract with the group and was put through the rigours of their ‘charm school’ at Highbury, in London. This was essentially a factory for starlets, in which young ingénues were taught elocution, breathing exercises and comportment, along with more traditional drama lessons and script rehearsals. Objecting, perhaps, to spending her time balancing books on her head, Constance lasted only a few years in the school. She resisted attempts to change her name (‘Tamara Hickey’ was suggested, straddling the line between thrillingly exotic and reassuringly local) and steadfastly clung to her Irish accent, a refusal which eventually led to her dismissal from Rank Organisation. Her private life was faring better, however, as she became engaged to British film producer John Boulting.
Once again, life was to take a fortuitous turn for Constance. She won a small part playing an Irish maid in the film The Mudlockin 1950, receiving £20 per day for five weeks. In four short years, she had come a long way from a position as a housemaid for £2 a week. She was spotted in this film by Darryl Zanuck, a legendary Hollywood mogul and co-founder of the movie studio 20th Century Fox. He took a close interest in her – whether his intentions were purely professional is unknown – and championed her as an undiscovered star. She was granted a seven year contract with the studio and placed opposite Tyrone Power in The House in the Square, to begin shooting in London in 1950. The movie was a big, all-star production, and the media fanfare began early.
However, the young, untrained actor struggled to perform alongside experienced heavy-weights such as Power. Midway through filming she found herself unceremoniously dumped from the picture, losing all the publicity and career momentum it had brought. The studio cited illness, and replaced her with Ann Blyth, reshooting all her scenes at a rumoured cost of £100,000. Constance was devastated, but found comfort on the shoulder of a successful British actor named Bryan Forbes (best known for directing The Stepford Wives, 1975), whom she married in 1951.
Back in Hollywood, she found herself packaged and presented as a beautiful but feisty Irish ‘colleen’, the new Maureen O’Sullivan (remembered as Jane in the Tarzan movies). Whether acting on her own volition or that of the studio’s, Constance had an abortion just before Christmas of 1951. 20th Century Fox paid the $3,000 fee.
Her marriage failed soon after, but her career was steady. She shot a number of films, receiving praise for her sensuous, noirish performances from fellow actors (Jack Palance referred to her as the ‘Dublin Dietrich’) and the occasional breathless review from critics. One paper, in the parlance of the time, noted that she possessed “a pair of the nicest gams to ever leave the Old Sod.” In 1952 she was invited to present a trophy at the Annual Academy Awards.
Having parted company with 20th Century Fox, she signed with Bob Goldstein in 1954, who promptly put her to work filming the thriller Tiger in the Tail, in London. Frustrated by the lack of first-rate roles, she left for Italy in 1955, casting off her rebel charm to reinvent herself as the descendent of Irish aristocrats. There, she met an Italian photographer named Araldo di Crollolanza and married him a year later, at the age of twenty-eight. His father – a Fascist senator who had served under Mussolini – reportedly disinherited his son upon learning of the union, even going so far as to refer to his new daughter-in-law as a ‘barefoot Irish peasant’. She made four films in Italy, but her career began to falter and she took an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1958. Her husband left her and she returned to England.
In 1959 she met Paul Rotha, a married man of fifty-two and a much-celebrated filmmaker and writer. They couldn’t have made a more different pair; a neat, precise and serious Englishman, who fell in love with a tempestuous, free-spirited and creative Irishwoman. Theirs was a predictably fiery relationship, only made more difficult by their mutual propensity for hard drinking. They shared similar socialist-leaning political beliefs though, both avowedly anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. Constance was no longer acting, but she remained well-known in film-industry circles in London. She was, one contemporary noted, ‘an intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor’.
Together, she and Rotha travelled to Germany to research a documentary on Adolf Hitler’s life. There, they met close aides to the dictator, as well as survivors of the concentration camps. She was said to be greatly affected by this experience.
In 1961, the couple visited Constance’s birthplace, calling to the house on Wolfe Tone Street in Limerick. They were greeted with much fanfare by Constance’s former neighbours, many of whom clamoured for photographs and autographs. The purpose of the visit, Rotha told reporters, was for research – he intended to write a book on his Constance’s life, entitled ‘A Weed in the Ground’, a project which failed to materialise.
Back in London, the couple’s relationship was growing increasingly turbulent. Their fights were frequent and quite often physical; after one altercation Rotha’s face was so badly bruised that he had to postpone an overseas trip. In 1961 a particularly nasty row very nearly turned fatal when Constance stabbed Rotha, leaving him lying on the floor of his flat, bleeding heavily. She also tried to slash her own wrists.
Rotha recovered from his extensive injuries, and supported his lover during her trial in 1962. In court, Constance’s defence team made much of her poverty-stricken childhood, her failed movie career and her traumatic experience in post-war Germany. She was given a three month sentence, and upon her release from Holloway Prison she was met at the gates by Rotha.
They were reunited, but the period was not a happy one. They sold their story to a tabloid newspaper, which salaciously reported their living together out of wedlock. Constance’s mental health deteriorated and she spent time in psychiatric care. In 1968, she stabbed Rotha again, this time sinking a steak knife into his back. The court placed a restraining order against Constance but again, Rotha stood by her. They eventually married in 1974, some fifteen years since they had first met. It was to be her third and final marriage.
Time in prison hadn’t quietened her demons however, and Constance was back in Holloway Prison in 1975, for yet another stabbing offence. While she made a half-hearted attempt to leave Rotha, she quickly returned to him, and together, they descended into a spiral of alcohol abuse, poverty and physical violence. The once highly-respected author and filmmaker took to charging visitors £50 for interviews, along with a bottle of Scotch for himself and Vodka for his wife.
By 1978 they were effectively homeless, and Constance had taken a job as a hospital cleaner. Around this time, after almost twenty years together, the couple broke up. Rotha wrote at the time, “my wild Irish wife has finally left me, gone God knows where.”
Constance Smith’s final act was slow to play out, despite the fiercely harsh circumstances of the latter years of her life. She lived for a while in destitution, losing toes to frostbite and drinking on the streets of Soho. She spent the next two decades on a miserable carousel of psychiatric hospitals, hostels and homelessness, before eventually dying of natural causes in Islington in 2003.
She lived through a fascinating era of modern history; born in the infancy of the Irish Free State, she found herself living in a Blitz-ravaged London a year after VE Day. She went on to work with black-listed artists during the infamous Red Scare in Hollywood and married the son of a Fascist Senator in Italy. She worked with one of Britain’s best-known documentary makers and interviewed survivors of the Holocaust. The life of Constance Smith is more interesting, more dramatic and more poignant than any Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps it was just too much, too soon for the girl from Wolfe Tone Street.
In her book, Ruth Barton writes perhaps the most sympathetic and understanding epitaph for the Irish actor who flew too close to the sun. Constance, she writes, was, like many almost-stars of the period, “overwhelmed by an unforgiving system for which their background left them unprepared.”
Today, Constance Smith is fondly remembered by those neighbours for whom she signed autographs in 1960, and her memory is maintained by Ms Barton and her fellow academics, by interest groups such as the Limerick Film Archive and by artists like Kate Hennessey.
If you happen to pass Ms Hennessey’s mural on Clontarf Place, stop for a moment and cast your eyes upwards. Among the many Limerick women celebrated there, you’ll find the dark-haired, smiling face of Constance Smith, just a stone’s throw from her family home.
Dictionary of Irish biography:
Constance Mary (1928–2003), actor, was born in January or February 1928 in Limerick. Her father, a Dublin native who had served in the British army during the first world war, was working on construction of the Ardnacrusha power station; her mother Mary was from Limerick. On completion of the station in 1929 the family moved to Dublin; her father died soon thereafter. One of seven or eight children, Constance was reared in extreme poverty in a one‐room flat in Mount Pleasant Buildings, Ranelagh, and was educated at St Louis convent primary school, Rathmines. She worked in a local chip shop, an O’Connell Street ice‐cream parlour, and as a domestic servant. A blue‐eyed brunette, strikingly beautiful from a young age, in January 1946 she won a special prize in the Dublin film star doubles contest (as Hedy Lamarr), on foot of which she was screen-tested by the Rank Organisation, and signed to a seven‐year contract. Moving to London, she was groomed in etiquette, poise, and acting technique in the Rank acting school (the so‐called ‘charm school’). She first appeared on screen in an uncredited, but eye‐catching role, as a cabaret singer in the underworld classic Brighton rock (1947); she was engaged for a time to the film’s director, John Boulting. Though never cast in a Rank film, she appeared in several independent productions, including Room to let (1950), as the daughter of a landlady whose mysterious new tenant turns out to be Jack the Ripper. About 1950 she was sacked by Rank, supposedly for objecting to criticism of her Irish accent; she also resisted the studio’s efforts to change her name.
Her vivacious performance as an Irish maid in The mudlark (1950) attracted the attention of Darryl Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, who signed her to a seven‐year contract, and vigorously promoted her as his Emerald Isle discovery. En route to Hollywood, she worked on location in Canada in Otto Preminger’s impressive film noir The 13th letter (1951), as the wife of a hospital doctor (played by Charles Boyer) in a small Québec village, who is suspected, on the basis of poison‐pen letters, of an adulterous involvement with a newly arrived English doctor (played by Michael Rennie). Cast in a coveted role opposite Tyrone Power in The house in the square (1951), she returned to London for filming, but was soon embroiled in studio politics, and uncomfortable in a part too demanding for her experience and skills. After six weeks on set she was abruptly dropped, her role was recast, and her scenes re‐shot.
Despite this setback, for the next few years she was cast by Fox in starring roles opposite some of the studio’s leading male actors. Nonetheless, her own star status seems to have been generated more by intensive studio publicity than by the quality or success of her movies. She appeared on the cover of Picturegoer, the leading British film magazine of the period (March 1951), and was a presenter at the 1952 Academy awards ceremony. Her image was that of a spirited, innately rebellious individualist, unafraid to defy studio manipulation – qualities attributed by the entertainment press to her Irish ethnicity. One industry colleague remembered her as ‘the intelligent man’s Elizabeth Taylor’ (Barton, 117). Her credits included Red skies of Montana(1952), as the wife of the chief of a crew of forest‐fire‐fighters, played by Richard Widmark; Lure of the wilderness (1952), with Jeffrey Hunter; Treasure of the golden condor (1953), opposite Cornel Wilde; and Taxi (1953), as a newly landed Irishwoman assisted by a New York cabdriver in searching for the American husband who abandoned her. She gave a lively and rounded performance in Man in the attic (1953), another take on the Ripper legend, as the showgirl niece of the murderer’s landlord and his wife, a role that highlighted her singing and dancing talents. Her co‐star, Jack Palance, suggested that she be billed ‘the Dublin Dietrich’, and some reviewers detected her potential as a live nightclub performer.
By 1954 she had left Fox; it is possible that the mental instability and problems with alcohol that would later become obvious were already afflicting her career. She appeared with Richard Conte in an intriguing noir, The big tip off (1955), and made two films in London: Tiger by the tail (1955), as the reliable English secretary of an American journalist pursued by gangsters, and Impulse(1955), as a seductive femme fatale. Her star waning, in the latter 1950s she made five films in Italy, where she was promoted as a brunette Grace Kelly. Giovanni dalle bande nere (The violent patriot) (1956), a costume swashbuckler, played the USA drive‐in circuit. Her last film was La congiura dei Borgia (1959).
Smith married firstly, after a whirlwind romance in London (1951), Bryan Forbes , an aspiring British actor, and later a successful screenwriter, director, novelist, and memoirist. Though he followed her to Hollywood, the marriage had broken by the end of the year, but not before Smith had succumbed to studio pressure and terminated a pregnancy by abortion. The couple divorced in 1955. She married secondly, in Italy (1956), Araldo Crollolanza , the photographer son of a former fascist senator (who opposed the match and disinherited him); the marriage failed by 1959. In the latter year Smith began a relationship with Paul Rotha (1907–84), a leading British documentary filmmaker, film historian, and critic, whose portfolio included two films of Irish interest: No resting place (1951), a fiction film about Irish travellers, and Cradle of genius (1958), a short documentary on the history of the Abbey theatre, which received an Oscar nomination. Smith accompanied Rotha to Germany and Holland during research and filming of a documentary on the life of Adolf Hitler (1961) and a fiction film based on the Dutch wartime resistance (1962). The couple shared leftist, anti‐imperialist political convictions, and a passion for jazz music; Smith painted, and cultivated her interest in the fine arts, while Rotha contemplated writing a book about her life and casting her in films. Ominously, they also shared an addiction to heavy drinking; ferocious rows, often physically violent, became a commonplace. In December 1961 Smith knifed Rotha in the groin and slashed her own wrists in their London flat; pleading guilty to unlawful and malicious wounding, she served three‐months’ imprisonment in Holloway. Defence counsel at her trial referred to two previous suicide attempts, and described her as ‘a poor but beautiful girl who was squeezed into a situation of sophistication and fame when emotionally quite unable to cope with it’ (Times, 12 Jan. 1962).
For the next two decades Smith and Rotha continued their turbulent, on‐again, off‐again relationship, marked by mutual alcoholism, unemployment, increasing financial hardship, episodes of domestic violence, and Smith’s repeated suicide attempts, and admissions to psychiatric hospitals and halfway hostels. During intermittent periods of recovery, she worked as a cleaner and (incredibly) in childcare. After stabbing Rotha in the back in 1968 she received three‐years’ probation; another stabbing in 1975 resulted in a second term of imprisonment. The couple, who married in 1974, did not break up permanently till 1979. In the early 1980s Smith was living destitute and homeless in London; former colleagues would see her, virtually unrecognisable, drinking in Soho Square. The few friends who attempted to retain contact lost track of her in the mid 1980s. She is reported to have died of natural causes 30 June 2003 in Islington, London
Anne-Marie Duff was born in London in 1970 to Irish parents. She first became known to the general UK public with her role as Fiona Gallagher in the TV series “Shameless”. She starred as Queen Elizabeth the first in the lavish teleision adaption of “The Virgin Queen”. She played on stage Pegeen Mike to Cillian Murphy’s Christy Mahon in Garry Hyne’s aclaimed production of “The Playboy of the Western World”. Anne-Marie Duff is married to the actor James McAvoy.
TCM overview:
Born in London to Irish immigrant parents, Anne-Marie Duff didn’t consider acting until her mid-teens. She attended London’s Drama Centre, which helped her cultivate a career on the stage, appearing in “King Lear” and “War and Peace” while still a student. Duff’s first big break came when she was cast as eldest child Fiona McBride on somewhat controversial British sitcom “Shameless” (Channel 4 2004-13). She landed an even bigger role portraying Queen Elizabeth I in the lavish television drama “The Virgin Queen” (BBC 2006). Duff made her way to the big screen in the suburban drama “Notes on a Scandal” (2006), the 1980s period piece “Is Anybody There?” opposite Michael Caine (2008), and the John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy” (2009), in which she played the teenage Lennon’s estranged mother Julia. In 2013, Duff made her Broadway debut starring in “Macbeth” as Lady MacBeth opposite Ethan Hawke.
Interview with Anne Marie Duff in “Time Out” can be found online here.
Wendy Hiller who has died aged 90, was stage-struck from the word go. It was the atmosphere, the teamwork – being there was everything.So in 1930 she joined the Manchester Repertory Theatre, Britain’s first such company. As a student, young Wendy was proud to be a dogsbody. Whatever came her way she did with a will: sweeping the stage, making the tea, setting the scenery, prompting, walking on.
What could be better? But one day she was sacked, and went home to Bramhall, Cheshire, to mope.
However, by chance, one of the company had adapted a book. Walter Greenwood’s novel Love On The Dole was set in the Depression; and the heroine needed a good Lancashire accent. Hadn’t the girl they had just fired been good at that sort of thing?
After touring from May to November 1934 in Ronald Gow’s adaptation, she became famous overnight when the play moved to London (in 1935) and New York (in 1936). It was the authenticity of her northern speech that did it: that and her frank, matter-of-fact manner as Sally Hardcastle, the mill girl ready to face a fate worse than death rather than have her family go hungry.
Not that the actor herself came from a poor family. Her father was a prominent cotton manufacturer, who had believed that unless she was rid of her Lancashire accent she stood no chance of marrying; so she had been dispatched to Winceby House school, Bexhill, to lose it.
In the London run, James Agate judged her Sally Hardcastle “magnificent”. The play “moved me terribly and must move anybody who still has about him that old-fashioned thing – a heart”. And the fate worse than death? It was Sally’s acceptance of an offer from a married bookmaker to provide for her and her family if she became his nominal housekeeper. In 1937, the actor in fact married her author, Ronald Gow, and her film triumph as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1938) came after playing both that role and Saint Joan at the Malvern festival for Bernard Shaw in 1936.
Whether it was her voice that made her fortune with its inimitable earthy quality, at once gritty and quavering, tremulous but clear in its deliberative phrasing, or whether the direct, no-nonsense northern personality of a girl to whom success came almost inadvertently, her temperament was to make all her acting seem honest, open, trustworthy and unaffected. This air of emotional integrity was to compel our attention for the next half century. Yet her speech, with its peasant inflections and hesitations, was crucial because its regional range was so hard to pin down – Lancashire for Sally Hardcastle, Bow Bells for Eliza Doolittle and Hardy’s Wessex for Tess Of The D’Urbervilles.
This was her next triumph. Again, the adaptation was by Ronald Gow, and to my mind it was her finest stage performance. In its sensibility, sincerity, passion and tragic power, there was nothing on the London stage to match it. It came for a week to St Martin’s Lane from the Bristol Old Vic in 1946, returning for a West End run in 1947. And though Gow deserved high praise for his handling of the novel, it was his wife who stole all our hearts with her rustic simplicity and emotional truth.
This ability to express transparent honesty astonished everyone. It was so hard, as one critic observed, not to believe in her. An actor may harbour heaps of personal sincerity, but unless she can transmit it to us she might as well be without it.
What continued to impress the student of acting was the way she went on to interpret – without perhaps ever excelling her role as Tess – everything from Shakespeare, lbsen, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, O’Neill and Henry James to Somerset Maughan, Robert Bolt, Royce Ryton and Alfred Uhry. Plain women or pretty, queens or flower girls, princesses or imprisoned spinsters, dominant wives or meek daughters.
Hiller had a particular feeling for supposedly unattractive women like Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (New York, 1947; Haymarket, 1950), perhaps because she knew she was no conventional beauty; taking over, in London, from Peggy Ashcroft as Evelyn Daly, the daughter and maid-of-all-work in NC Hunter’s Waters Of The Moon (Haymarket, 1951); or in the same play at Chichester 27 years later as the supremely fussy Mrs Whyte, of the expressive knitting needles; or as the deferential Miss Tina in Michael Redgrave’s version of The Aspern Papers (New York, 1962); or, 22 years later in the same play at Chichester, as the fierce and ancient Miss Bordereau.
Perhaps two of the most conspicuous surprises of her career came with her icy hauteur as a majestic Queen Mary in Royce Ryton’s version of the abdication crisis, Crown Matrimonial (Haymarket, 1972); and 16 years after that as an august, irascible American widow learning to live with her black chauffeur in Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (Apollo, 1988).
If Hiller never reached the heights as a Shakespearean actor, it was perhaps that the voice seemed too hard and the diction disjointed, though for the Old Vic (1955-56) she had plenty of passion for Portia in Julius Caesar. Watching her deeply moving Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, purists might complain of the poetry being cracked; but then the character itself was on the point of breakdown because the force of her anguish – dignity hanging on a thread – had brought the woman to the verge of physical collapse.
As Emilia to John Neville and Richard Burton alternating the parts of Othello and Iago, Hiller struck, as a critic put it, “fire from the tinder of the woman’s grief, rage and disillusion”; and as Helen in Tyrone Guthrie’s modern-dress Troilus and Cressida, the actor set the house on a roar as a vapid Edwardian beauty playing a waltz at the piano.
If the ventures into lbsen were less remarkable – When We Dead Awaken (Edinburgh Festival, 1968), Mrs Alving in Ghosts (Arts, Cambridge, 1972) and Mrs Borkman for the National Theatre (1975-76) – you could count on the power of her grief; though the irony of her comedy playing was something to savour, perhaps because it was scarcer. Her deliberative delivery as Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest (Watford, 1981) had us hanging on every word without reference to Edith Evans.
Even opposite one of the most ruthlessly accomplished exponents of considered speech, Robert Morley, as the Prince Regent, to her ill-fated, independent Princess Charlotte in Norman Ginsbury’s The First Gentleman (New, 1945) the young actor held her own in a rivetting duel of personalities which to my mind she won on points – as if to illustrate the difference between acting for effect and acting for truth.
Her best films, after Pygmalion, were Shaw’s Major Barbara (1941), I Know Where I’m Going (1945), Separate Tables (1958, for which she won an Oscar as the manager), Sons And Lovers (1960), A Man For All Seasons (1966) and Murder On The Orient Express (1974). She seemed as true on screen as on the stage, and there might have been more; but the stage stole her heart.
Wendy Hiller was appointed OBE in 1971 and created dame in 1975. Her husband died in 1993, and she is survived by a son and a daughter.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
· Wendy Hiller, actor, born August 15 1912; died May 14 2003
Maggie Smith has won two Academy Awards for her performances in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “California Suite”. She has acted on stage in the UK, Canada and the U.S.. She has many film appearances and once she comes onto the screen, she can command all the attention. She is an actress supreme.
“To the British, there is currently no more delectable comedienne in the world than Maggie Smith. She cares little for films, so the bulk of her work has been confined to the stage with occasional forays into TV. As with Vanessa Redgrave (whom she doesn’t resemble one jot) theatre critics do not seem so much to review her work as write her love-letters. Ronald Bryden wrote in the ‘Observer’ in 1969 ‘ Will it be possible in the future to convey the quality which indisputably makes her a great comedienne?’ Her effects are not of the kind that critics can analyse. Yet unlike the fabled stars of the past, she is earthbound, she is innocent and vulnerable and very much afraid of being found out.
She lives on a perpetual knife edge of inadequacy, from which she distracts us hopefully, by prattling on what is normally a series of non sequiturs (or at least sounds like them)., When she is on a winning streak she cannot disguise her glee – though even then she is likely to go pale with self-doubt. She’s too canny not to know she’s pathetic and funny. That sense of humour seems to desert her as she turns increasingly to drama but the touch and the timing remains as sure”. – Davis Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Independent Years”. (1991)
TCM overview:
One of the most revered actresses on both sides of the Atlantic, Maggie Smith created a gallery of indelible characters on stage and screen, which ran the gamut from repressed spinsters to comical eccentrics. Smith quickly became an actress of note with performances in several Shakespeare plays before making an auspicious feature debut in “Nowhere to Go” (1959), before stealing the show in “The VIPs” (1963) and gaining international acclaim for her Oscar-winning performance in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969). While making her name in dramatic roles, Smith proved equally adept at comedy, particularly with a standout turn as a sophisticated sleuth among an all-star cast in “Murder by Death” (1976). She earned another Academy Award for her brilliant portrayal of a crumbling actress in “California Suite” (1978) before transitioning to a repressed spinster in “A Room with a View” (1986).
Though she appeared in a supporting capacity in broad Hollywood movies like “Hook” (1991) and “Sister Act” (1992), Smith found comfort on Broadway and London stages while continuing to earn acclaim for smaller films like “Tea with Mussolini” (1998) and Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001). Smith reached her widest audience with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) and its numerous sequels, and earned critical acclaim as Dowager Countess of Grantham on the wildly popular series “Downton Abbey” (ITV/PBS, 2010- ), allowing her the opportunity to impress a whole new generation as she continued to maintain her reputation as one of the greatest actresses of all time.
Born on Dec. 28, 1934 in Ilford, Essex, England, Smith was raised by her father, Nathaniel, a pathologist at Oxford University, and her mother, Margaret. From the time she was eight years old, Smith was determined to become an actress. At age 17, Smith was playing Viola in a production of “Twelfth Night” (1952) and the Oxford Playhouse School, where she also served as an assistant stage manager while studying her craft. Four years later, Smith was singing and dancing on Broadway in the sketch revue “New Faces of ’56” (1956), while making her uncredited film debut as a party guest in “Child in the House” (1956).
Following her London stage debut in “Save My Lettuce” (1957), Smith made her official film debut in the crime drama, “Nowhere to Go” (1959), which earned her a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Newcomer. Back to the stage once again, she joined The Old Vic Theatre and performed in productions of “As You Like It” (1959) and “Richard II” (1959) before being cast opposite Laurence Olivier for a production of “Rhinoceros.”
By 1962, Smith was earning her first accolades in the Peter Shaffer double bill “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye.” The following year, she earned plaudits for her first major film role, playing a love-starved secretary secretly attracted to her boss in “The VIPs” (1963); her stellar performance led co-star Richard Burton to half-jokingly accuse her of “grand larceny.” Also in 1963, Olivier invited her to become a charter member of the National Theatre and cast her as his Desdemona in “Othello,” which she recreated on screen in the 1965 film version, earning her first Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
Meanwhile, the 1960s were a heady time for Smith. In addition to building her impressive resume with acclaimed roles, she embarked on a torrid love affair with the still-married actor, Robert Stephens, causing a minor scandal when she gave birth to their first child in June 1967. Following their marriage that same year, she and Stephens ironically co-starred as illicit lovers in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969); critics and audiences were captivated by her performance as a neurotic and fascistic Scottish schoolteacher, which was impressive enough to earn her an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Having taken time out to give birth to a second son in 1969, Smith was back at the top of her game in 1972, headlining a London revival of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” and starring as the oddball relative sojourning across Europe in “Travels With My Aunt,” a performance that netted her another Best Actress Oscar nomination. Following the collapse of her union with Stephens due to her success and his alcoholism, she embarked on a second marriage to playwright and old beau Beverley Cross, while turning in quality performances in films like “Murder by Death” (1976), an all-star whodunit spoof in which she played the cultured wife of Dick Charleston (David Niven).
Two years later, she delivered an acclaimed performance in the Agatha Christie adaptation of “Death on the Nile” (1978), before Neil Simon provided her with one of her richest roles in “California Suite” (1978). Smith played Diana Barrie, an insecure British actress coping with a crumbling marriage to her Hollywood husband (Michael Caine) and the spotlight glare brought on by an Academy Award nomination. Although her onscreen character may have lost the coveted statue, Smith took home the Oscar in real life for her nuanced portrayal.
In 1979, Smith returned to Broadway to recreate her London success in Tom Stoppard’s play “Night and Day,” earning herself a deserved Tony Award nomination. After a supporting part in Peter Ustinov’s mildly entertaining “Evil Under the Sun” (1982), Smith proved to be a hilarious foil for Michael Palin in two comedies: “The Missionary” (1982) and “A Private Function” (1984). She excelled as the repressed chaperone who lives vicariously through her young charge (Helena Bonham Carter) in the Merchant Ivory production of “A Room with a View” (1986), in which she displayed her natural ability for delivering witty dialogue with irresistible aplomb and expert timing.
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Her performance earned Smith both a BAFTA Award and Golden Globe, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. As the decade waned, she made a rare, but indelible small screen appearance delivering an Alan Bennett monologue in “Bed Among the Lentils,” which was shown on the U.S. “Masterpiece Theatre” (PBS) series. She also had one of her best dramatic roles as the repressed spinster who blossoms when she finds romance with a con man (Bob Hoskins) in the feature, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” (1987).
Smith was honored by playwright Peter Shaffer when he tailored his stage comedy “Lettice and Lovage” (1988) specifically for the actress; it proved to be a triumph in both London and New York, and added a Tony Award to her growing trophy collection. In 1990, she was dubbed Dame Margaret Natalie Smith Cross – her full name at the time – by Queen Elizabeth II, after having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1970. Meanwhile, Smith was lovely as the aged Wendy Darling in Steven Spielberg’s misfire, “Hook” (1991), although playing a character much older than herself eventually led to typecasting. For much of the rest of the decade, her onscreen personae tended toward the dour elderly types, ranging from the tart Mother Superior in “Sister Act” (1992) and its sequel, to her Emmy-nominated turn as a Southern matriarch in the small screen remake of Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer” (PBS, 1993). After playing Layd Bracknell in a highly praised turn in the London stage revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1993), Smith received a BAFTA Award nomination for her portrayal of the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs. Medlock in “The Secret Garden” (1993).
Although she was enjoying a strong career as a character player in films, Smith kept returning to the stage, appearing in several high-profile, critically acclaimed performances, including in the London production of Edward Albee’s award-winning “Three Tall Women” (1994) and as the Duchess of York in “Richard III” (1995), starring Ian McKellan. Following a London stage reprisal of her television role in “Bed Among the Lentils” (1996), she starred in the Albee-penned “A Delicate Balance” (1997), while earning praise for her turn as the meddlesome aunt in the period romantic drama, “Washington Square” (1997). Heading back to the big screen, Smith was impressive as a grande dame in Italy whose misguided admiration for Benito Mussolini recalled Jean Brodie’s admiration of Franco in “Tea with Mussolini” (1998); the film cast her opposite an equally impressive Dame Judi Dench. She earned another BAFTA Award; this time for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The following year, she was featured as Aunt Betsey in a retelling of “David Copperfield” (BBC, 1999), which netted another Emmy nod after the program aired stateside on PBS.
As the new millennium dawned, Smith brought a poignant sense of loss to her turn as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the elegiac “The Last September” (2000). Her next screen role as the stern, shape-shifting Professor Minerva McGonagle in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001), exposed her to her widest audience to date while earning a legion of new young fans. But it was her turn as the indelible, acid-tongued Constance, Countess of Trentham, in Robert Altman’s clever blend of country house murder mystery and sharp upstairs-downstairs satire, “Gosford Park” (2001), that gave the actress some of her biggest plaudits of her long career. Smith stood out among a massive all-star cast that included everyone from Helen Mirren, Clive Owen and Emily Watson to Kristin Scott Thomas, Michael Gambon and Stephen Fry. For her work, she earned numerous critical accolades, including nods at the BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes and Oscars. Meanwhile, she reprised Professor McGonagle for the sequels, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”(2002) and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004). After gracing the big screen as one of three bickering women (including Shirley Knight and Fionnula Flanagan) in “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (2002), Smith embarked on one of the most anticipated theatrical events of her career – an on-stage teaming with Judi Dench in David Hare’s new play, “The Breath of Life” (2002), which was reprised on Broadway in 2003.
Smith next received an Emmy Award among other accolades for her role in the acclaimed small screen adaptation of William Trevor’s novel, “My House in Umbria” (HBO, 2003), in which she played an English romance novel writer who invites fellow survivors of a terrorist bombing to join her at her Italian villa. Smith next starred in the British-made “Ladies in Lavender” (2004), a period drama in which she played a spinster living with her sister (Judi Dench) in an idyllic coastal town outside Cornwell. Meanwhile, she reprised Professor McGonagle in a more diminished capacity for “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (2005), “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (2007) and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (2009). Smith did shine, however, as Rowan Atkinson’s secretive housekeeper in “Keeping Mum” (2006) and opposite Anne Hathaway in the Jane Austen-inspired romantic drama, “Becoming Jane” (2007).
After co-starring alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal and Emma Thompson in the sequel “Nanny McPhee Returns” (2010), Smith earned an Emmy nomination for “Capturing Mary” (HBO, 2010), in which she played a once brilliant writer and critic whose life was destroyed by an evil social climber (David Williams) from her heady youth. Meanwhile, she earned Emmy Awards in 2011 and 2012 for her performance as the sharp-tongued Violet Crawley, the traditional and protective Dowager Countess of Grantham on the British period drama “Downton Abbey” (ITV, 2011). While trading pointed barbs with family and servants on the show, Smith continued making feature films, bringing imbalance to a foursome of opera singers in “Quartet” (2012) – for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy – and earning critical praise for her performance as a retired housekeeper suspicious of Asians in John Madden’s ensemble comedy “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2012).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Mike McCrann article on LA Frontiers.com:.
The 1969 Academy Awards handed out in April, 1970 reflected great change in American films. There was so much social conflict going on as the War in Vietnam was polarizing the country. It was the era of protest—youth vs. establishment—and the films nominated that year showed that old style musicals and feel good comedies were on their way out. Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture, becoming the first X-rated film to win the award. (After seeing The Wolf of Wall Street, what passed for X in 1969 seems pretty tame today.)
But the old guard still held their ground. John Wayne won his only Academy Award for True Grit. Nobody really thought he gave the year’s best performance. It was more of a career award.
John Wayne had been nominated once before in 1949 for Sands of Iwo Jima, but his greatest performances in the John Ford classics: Fort Apache, The Quiet Man and especially The Searchers had gone unrewarded. Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voighthad given spectacular performances in Midnight Cowboy, but voters obviously thought John Wayne was way overdue.
The Best Actress race was even more amazing. Three of the performances were great, and the other two memorable in their own way.
Today Dame Maggie Smith is a revered legend. We watch her year after year on Downton Abbey. She collects Golden Globes and Emmys without having to show up.
But back in 1969 Maggie Smith was truly in her ascendancy. Previously she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Olivier’s Othello. Her breakthrough performance came in 1963 when she stole The VIP’s from superstars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Playing the lovelorn secretary to sexy Rod Taylor, Maggie Smith was truly moving amid all the melodramatics.
In1967, Maggie Smith committed highway robbery again when she highjacked The Honey Pot from Academy Award winners Rex Harrison and Susan Hayward and French actress Capucine. This late Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) comedy is a true classic. Ignored on its release, the wonderful retelling of Volpone is worth seeking out. (Available on Amazon on demand DVD.)
Four of the five nominees were there. The only one missing was Maggie Smith. She was home in England. She wasn’t going to win anyway. Jean Brodie had opened early in the year and was only a modest hit. But Maggie Smith had appeared at The Ahmanson Theater in LA in January and was the critics’ darling. Still nobody thought she had a chance.
When Cliff Robertson announced Maggie Smith, there were audible gasps in the audience. Jane Fonda probably deserved the Oscar, but she had already started her life as a protester and combined with her open use of marijuana, she alienated enough of the old guard Academy to cost her the award.
Liza Minnelli could easily have won her Oscar, but she would never have repeated for Cabaret three years later.
Maggie Smith and Jean Brodie have become one and the same. Beautiful, funny, dominating and always in control, Maggie Smith gave us the template for all the great Smith performances that would follow.
Hollywood royalty was heavily favored in 1969. Liza Minnelli and Jane Fonda were the new Queens of Tinseltown. But Maggie Smith – one day to be Dame Maggie – took the award and never looked back. Maggie Smith has been dazzling audiences for 50 years and we can only hope that she never retires.
“Daily Mail” interview with Maggie Smith can be found here.
Irish times obituary in 2024.
Not many actors have made their names in revue, given definitive performances in Shakespeare and Ibsen, won two Oscars and countless theatre awards, and remained a certified box-office star for more than 60 years. But then few have been as exceptionally talented as Dame Maggie Smith, who has died aged 89.
She was a performer whose range encompassed the high style of Restoration comedy and the sadder, suburban creations of Alan Bennett. Whatever she played, she did so with an amusing, often corrosive, edge of humour. Her comedy was fuelled by anxiety, and her instinct for the correct gesture was infallible
The first of her Oscars came for an iconic performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). But Smith’s pre-eminence became truly global with two projects towards the end of her career. She was Professor Minerva McGonagall in the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise (she referred to the role as Miss Brodie in a wizard’s hat) between 2001 and 2011. Between 2010 and 2015, in the six series of Downton Abbey on ITV television (sold to 250 territories around the world), she played the formidable and acid-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet, a woman whose heart of seeming stone was mitigated by a moral humanity and an old-fashioned, if sometimes overzealous, sense of social propriety.
Early on, one critic described Smith as having witty elbows. Another, US director and writer Harold Clurman, said that she “thinks funny”. She was more taut and tuned than any other actor of her day, and this reliance on her instinct to create a performance made her reluctant to talk about acting, although she had a forensic attitude to preparation. With no time for the celebrity game, she rarely went on television chatshows – her appearance on Graham Norton’s BBC TV show in 2015 was her first such in 42 years – or gave newspaper interviews.
Edward Judd was born in Shangai in 1932. His career peak was in the mid 1960’s. He starred in one classic science fiction “The Day the Earth Caught Fire”. He went to Hollywood in 1964 but made on ly one film there “Strange Bedfellows” with Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. His career seems to have stalled with the end of the 1970’s and he died in 2009.
Edward Judd “Guardian” obituary:
Edward Judd, who has died aged 76, seemed set for stardom when he gained a leading role in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), the film that foresaw global warming. It led to Judd being seriously considered for the role of James Bond in Dr No (1962), the first of the endless series.
However, the career of the well-built, square-jawed British actor, who had worked consistently in films and television since the age of 16, failed to ignite in the way he expected.
In fact, Judd’s role as an out-of-luck reporter suffering the trauma of divorce, writer’s block and alcoholism, who comes across the scoop of the century in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, was not only his first substantial part but probably his best. However, some years later, Val Guest, the director, recalled Judd’s “difficult” behaviour during the shooting, which he put down to feelings of inferiority in his first big role.
In the film, Judd discovers that because the Soviets and the west detonated nuclear tests simultaneously, the earth has been knocked off its axis and is moving closer to the sun. Judd is particularly effective at delivering some witty lines, and the scene where he and Janet Munro strip down to their underwear because of the rapidly rising temperature is surprisingly sexy.
Judd was born to expatriate English parents in Shanghai. On their return to England during the second world war, he got a small role as a public schoolboy in Roy Boulting’s The Guinea Pig (1948). He continued to get parts, often uncredited, in British films in the 1950s: a boxer in The Good Die Young (1954), a soldier in X: The Unknown (1956), a policeman in The Man Upstairs (1958), a naval officer in Sink The Bismarck! and a warder in The Criminal (both 1960).
After his break in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Judd was given the lead as a rather dour commander of a German submarine manned by a British crew to confuse the enemy in Mystery Submarine (1963). In the same year, he played opposite Susan Hayward in Stolen Hours, a feeble British remake of the Bette Davis melodrama Dark Victory. Poor Hayward is dying of an unspecified disease and Judd is her dashing, racing-driver boyfriend who knows that he could be killed at any time, but says: “I don’t want to be told you’re going to get yours in the 10th lap.”
The following year, Judd was a brawny Viking called Sven in the Anglo-Yugoslav production of The Long Ships, starring Richard Widmark. First Men in the Moon (1964), an enjoyable adaptation of the HG Wells novel, co-starred Judd and Martha Hyer, managing to keep straight faces while being captured by Selenites (men in insect suits) and threatened by a giant caterpillar.
Naturally, he was billed below Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida in Strange Bedfellows (1965), but was visible enough as a London gent who becomes involved with La Lollo. In contrast, playing a scientist, he had to avoid getting caught in the tentacles of slithery creatures that live on bone marrow in Island of Terror (1966). In The Vengeance of She (1968), Judd was a psychiatrist who is bewitched by a girl (Olinka Berova), who thinks she is the reincarnation of a 2,000-year-old queen, Ayesha. He is foolhardy enough to accompany her to an ancient lost city.
Parallel to his film career, Judd appeared regularly on television, from the 1950s series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, and later in Emmerdale Farm, The New Avengers, The Professionals and The Sweeney. He was also in Flambards, a mini-series for Yorkshire TV, as the arrogant and bullying disabled owner of the eponymous mansion.
But his association with Hammer and sub-Hammer horrors continued, with parts in The Vault of Horror (1973); The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983), as the sinister servant Barrymore; and as a police inspector in Jack the Ripper (1988). But there were periods of unemployment, due in part to his heavy drinking.
Judd was married twice, both times to actors. His first wife, Gene Anderson, died in 1965. His second, Norma Ronald, with whom he had two daughters, died in 1993. His daughters survive him.
Edward Judd, actor, born 4 October 1932; died 24 February 2009
Among science fiction fans, McShane is known for playing the character Dr. Robert Bryson in Babylon 5: The River of Souls. In a 2004 interview with The Independent, McShane stated that he wished that he had turned down the role of Bryson as he had struggled with the technical dialogue and found looking at Martin Sheen, who was wearing an eye in the middle of his forehead, to be the most embarrassing experience that he had ever had while acting.
In 1985, he appeared as an MC on Grace Jones‘ Slave to the Rhythm, a concept album which featured his narration interspersed throughout and which sold over a million copies worldwide.
In 2009, McShane appeared in Kings, which was based on the biblical story of David. His portrayal of King Silas Benjamin, an analogue of King Saul, was highly praised with one critic saying: “Whenever Kings seems to falter, McShane appears to put bite marks all over the scenery.”
McShane announced on April 20, 2017 that a script for a two-hour Deadwood movie had been submitted by creator David Milch to HBO and that a film is as close as ever to happening. “[A] two-hour movie script has been delivered to HBO. If they don’t deliver [a finished product], blame them,” McShane said.[34]The film began production in October 2018.[35]
On 30 August 1980, McShane married actress Gwen Humble (born 4 December 1953). They live in Venice, California.
