Maggie Smith: A Biography Read Online Free Page A

Frost, Tommy Cooper, Barry Humphries and many other big, but mostly smaller, names appeared there quite regularly during the 1960s.
    You could hardly imagine a less likely cradle for a stylish actress. But Ilford did not produce only Maggie Smith. Ian Holm, the incisive film and Shakespearean actor, and the late Ken Campbell, a remarkable stage raconteur and dabbler in alternative culture, are two of the best-known sons of Ilford. Dudley Moore, the composer and film star who made his name in the revue
Beyond the Fringe
, was born in Dagenham. And, skipping backwards, an actress whose transatlantic theatre fame equalled, and in some ways anticipated, Maggie Smith’s, Lynn Fontanne, later Mrs Alfred Lunt, was born in 1887 in Woodford Bridge, an altogether leafier and more exclusive district than Clayhall, but hardly a bus stop or two away.
    Margaret Natalie Smith, the third child of Nathaniel, or Nat, Smith, and his wife, Meg, was born in 68 Northwood Gardens. Margaret – she became ‘Maggie’ only in 1956 before going to America – was a pretty and mischievous little girl who was not particularly welcomed by her two elder brothers. Alistair and Ian, identical twins, had been born six years earlier on 8 December 1928, and were quite content with each other’s company. The curious product of this Nat/Meg tree was a bundle of genealogical roots of ordinary working-class provenance but unusual vivacity. By the age of ten, Alistair and Ian had decided to become architects. Margaret cannot remember not wanting to be an actress. All three children did as they chose. But there was very little in their background to encourage them.
    That background is essential to any attempt to understand Maggie Smith’s personality. Her father, a medical laboratory technician, was a Geordie, from Newcastle. Her mother was a cold and dour Glaswegian. Both parents, like many working-class people, harboured ambitions for their children. They were strict, they were thrifty, they were sticklers for good manners and proper conduct, and they were church-goers. Nat was a devout Anglican, mainstream Church of England, Meg a Scottish Presbyterian.
    In Ilford, and later in Oxford, Maggie lived in comfortable, but cramped, surroundings. She is renowned today for the stifled aside, the muttered barb, the malicious crack. You can see why. From an early age she developed two characteristics that are stamped through her professional life like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock: a keen sense of irreverence and a sharp instinct for privacy. She was a lonely child, at odds with her parents, with her school, with her brothers and even with herself. But her instinct was not to rebel; it was to mock tartly from the sidelines and to retain, by stealth, her own spirit and independence. A quiet life in a semi-detached house in Cowley, the Oxford suburb to which the family moved in 1939, was not for her. Cowley, like Ilford, was sleepy, respectable and slightly dull. The front box-bedroom she was obliged to inhabit through her teenage years and early adulthood measured scarcely twenty square feet.
    Maggie’s parents, too, had made telling adjustments to family expectations. Her father, born in 1902, was the seventh of nine children. Of just about average height and slim build, he was a delicate, chirpy fellow, rather bird-like, with surprisingly elegant wrists and fingers. Maggie’s wrist work and elegantly tapering digits are two of her hallmarks. Nat had bright orange hair as a youngster and was nicknamed ‘Carrot-head’. His father, a keen gambler and a hardened drinker, was a minor Post Office official who travelled for years on business between Newcastle and Birmingham. Ian, Maggie’s surviving brother, still going strong and living with his wife in retirement in France (Alistair died suddenly of a heart attack in 1981), remembers the occasional family holiday in Scotland; but neither Nat nor his young family ever went back to Newcastle. Nat had been