Maggie Smith, 85 today - saluting an awe-inspiring generation
Today, 28 December 2019, marks Maggie Smith’s 85th birthday. She’s amazing. And she belongs to an extraordinary generation. Just before Christmas I celebrated that generation in a piece for the Daily Mail because I feel blessed. I am lucky enough to know six of the most remarkable women of our time. They are all actresses in their mid-eighties and each is a phenomenon in her own way.
Dame Judi Dench turned 85 earlier in the month, on 9 December. I sent her a birthday card. She sent me a beautiful bauble for my Christmas tree. It’s in the shape of an avocado. That’s Dame Judi’s little joke, dating back to the day we had breakfast together when I was on a low-carb diet and, while she tucked into the croissants, I asked for an avocado. Judi Dench loves jokes. I first saw her on stage, at the Old Vic, in 1960, when she starred in Romeo and Juliet. I went with my parents. It turned out that Judi Dench’s parents were there, too. When Judi as Juliet came on and said to the Nurse (played by Peggy Mount), ‘Where are my father and my mother, Nurse?’ a reassuring voice called out from the stalls, ‘Here we are, darling, in Row G.’
I have got to know some of her favourite stories because I have interviewed her a few times for charity fundraisers. (She raises tens of thousands for charity every year.) On 17 March we did one for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Because of the St Patrick’s Day parade taking place at the time the streets around the theatre were closed. Dame Judi, 84, was dropped off outside a strip club in Soho. As she stepped out of her car, a mile from the theatre, the heavens opened and hailstones rained down on her. ‘Isn’t this fun?’ she exclaimed. What’s more remarkable is that she meant it.
Her approach to life is entirely positive. She regards ‘retirement’ as a dirty word. She has at least three films in the pipeline, including Cats opening at Christmas. If she can, she says ‘yes’ to everything. I was with her when a call came through from Sir Kenneth Branagh who wanted to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible film role with her. ‘Oh,’ she said happily, ‘it’s Ken is it? We don’t need a meeting. Tell him I’ll do it whatever it is.’ Her eyesight is failing her. She can longer drive, nor read well enough to learn her lines from the printed page. She has to learn them with a friend who reads them out to her while she repeats them – usually laughing as she does so. She is laughing all the time. And when she isn’t laughing, she is trying to make you laugh. At the last fundraiser we did (where her presence raised £ 60,000 for the cause), we sang a song together and in the performance, without warning me, she changed the words to see if she could make me laugh.
I have interviewed Dame Maggie Smith on stage, too. She is now 85, too. A few weeks ago she won her fifth Evening Standard Best Actress award for her towering solo performance as Goebbels’s secretary in a new play that opened in London earlier this year. I first saw her on stage at the National Theatre in the early 1960s when she played Desdemona in Othello opposite the great Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. In the production Othello had to strike Desdemona and at one performance Sir Laurence got carried away and hit her too hard, knocking her out in the process. She was carried to the wings, where she began to come round, seeing stars as she regained consciousness. She said later, ‘It was the only time I did see stars at the National Theatre.’ She has a caustic wit that she shared with her great friend, the Carry On star Kenneth Williams, and, because of it, some people are a little frightened of her. She does have a wicked sense of humour. On the set of the Downton Abbey film, an assistant director asked her if there was anything he could get her? ‘Yes,’ she replied, in her trademark laconic drawl, ‘a death scene.’ Dame Judi signs every autograph she’s asked to sign and smiles for every selfie. Not so Dame Maggie, not because she is grand or naturally forbidding (those are just the kind of parts she sometimes plays), but simply, I think, because she is shy.
I first saw Sheila Hancock, 86, in The Rag Trade on TV when I was a schoolboy. I got to know her when we were both panelists on Just A Minute on the radio in the 1980s. Over Christmas on TV you can see her in her latest film, Edie. In it, she plays a woman who, when her husband dies, decides to fulfil a lifelong ambition of scaling Suilven, a challenging 731m peak in the Scottish Highlands. To make the film, Sheila, in her eighties, climbed that mountain. She has arthritis-related health issues: she doesn’t hide them. She rides through them with grace, good-humour and extraordinary resilience. At the beginning of this year, to acclaim, she sang and danced her way through a new stage musical at Chichester and then joined me to take part in a TV series, Celebrity Gogglebox, in which, for six weeks, we sat side by side being filmed simply watching TV. The programme-makers deliberately took us out of our comfort zone, inviting us to enjoy such treats as My Gay Dog and other Animals and Naked Attraction, in which, believe it or not, young people who have never met before show one another their private parts and comment on them. Watching Love Island together Sheila and I bonded – and laughed like drains.
Just before Christmas, to universal praise, Glenda Jackson, 83, returned to TV after an absence of twenty-seven years, playing a woman with dementia in a BBC1 drama, Elizabeth. is Missing. This year she has appeared on Broadway in King Lear – playing the title role. She is extraordinary. An Oscar-winning film star in her thirties, she gave it all up to become a Labour MP. She and I arrived at the Commons on the same day in 1992. In parliament she struck me as a slightly lonely figure. At first, other MPs didn’t quite know what to make of her. Some found her seriousness of purpose disconcerting and her intelligence uncomfortable. She is gloriously direct. Recently, for example, she has been saying how unfairly she believes Theresa May was treated, in parliament and by the press, when she was prime minister. Some of Glenda’s former colleagues did not like that. Glenda does not give a damn.
In a completely different way, my friend Eileen Atkins, 85, doesn’t give a damn either. She is the least well-known of the theatrical dames, but that doesn’t bother her. She does a bit of TV (she plays Martin Clunes’ aunt in Doc Martin); she does the odd movie (she popped up in Paddington 2; she is just back from filming an art-house epic in Iceland); but her real love is serious theatre and she knows that those who know about these things think she is incomparable. She has just finished a run in a new play on Broadway and she is now writing a book before opebning in another new play at the Old Vic in the spring. She is fiercely intelligent, incredibly funny, and basically can do anything. She is an ace tap-dancer. She created the TV classic Upstairs Downstairs with her friend Jean Marsh. A few weeks ago I saw her revive her play about the novelist Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, in which she first starred on Broadway with her friend, Vanessa Redgrave.
With Vanessa, you don’t laugh so much, but you have to cheer. Redgrave has a heart as big as the Albert Hall. You may not choose to espouse the many causes she champions, but her passion is irresistible and her energy is formidable. She began this year in the West End. She is beginning next year on Broadway. In between, on screen, she gave the performance of a lifetime, opposite Timothy Spall, in Mrs Lowry & Son, and starred in a new stage play - an unusual piece about her father (the great actor, Sir Michael Redgrave) and European politics in the 1930s. But wait, Vanessa did not just star in the play. She wrote it. She produced it. She directed it. And she will be 83 in January.
These women are incredible.
What do they have in common? They were all born in the 1930s. They knew and remember the Second World War. They have all lived full and often quite complicated lives. Each has known her fair share of sorrow. Four of them are widows who feel the loneliness of widowhood. Vanessa’s daughter, the actress Natasha Richardson, died following a skiing accident ten years ago. None of them complains about any of this. All of them talk about their work because they love what they do. They don’t talk about themselves. They are not introspective. I don’t think they read their reviews. I know Sheila Hancock never watches her own work. Each is a perfectionist, but quite dismissive of her own extraordinary achievements. (They have a large roomful of Oscars, BAFTAS and Oliviers between them.) Vanessa, Glenda and Sheila are political animals, but their discourse is nothing like the sour argy-bargy we’ve been subjected to during the general election. As people, they are instinctively courteous, but, happily, none of them is too keen on the worst excesses of political correctness. They are all good company, amusing and amused by the world around them. From failing eyesight to emphysema, several of them face challenges with their health, and often completely exhausted, but none of them makes a fuss about it.
Their work ethic is awe-inspiring. Their energy is enviable. Their life force is something to be reckoned with. They are still ambitious, still hungry for more. They are passionate about their work. They are determined, resilient, courageous, compassionate, and kind. They are interested in the world around them. They care about it. Each is in her ninth decade, learning her lines, doing her exercises, turning up for the show, still giving her all, still laughing, still living life to the full. What a generation! They can teach the millennials and the snowflakes a thing or two. What wonderful role models they are!