Grandma Pirate in the 1974 children's
series Pirates |
The many different faces of Liz Smith
With roles in the Royle Family and The Vicar of Dibley 'Our Betty' is one of the great character actresses, writes William Hall
OUR BETTY – SCENES FROM MY LIFE
by Liz Smith
Simon and Schuster, £14.99 order this book
THE photograph on the back jacket of Our Betty gives an indication of what’s in store. A perky young girl in a purple fur-trimmed coat and white socks is astride a bicycle, her face wreathed in smiles. The caption beside it says something rather different.
“The last incident with my bicycle was when I was deflowered outside Woolworth’s,” she writes. “The saddle had fallen backwards, point upwards, though I hadn’t noticed as by now I was tall enough to ride standing up. But when the lights turned quickly I braked abruptly, and even more abruptly sat heavily on the upturned saddle. Wow!”
Wow, indeed! Thus we are introduced to Liz Smith, she of The Royle Family TV fame, and get a taste of what we are in for in the 224 (repeat 224) chapters inside.
Probe closer, and you find a quirky life story from a woman who is the first to admit she was never a love goddess – indeed on her cover picture the indefatigable Liz, with that beak of a nose and hooded eyes, resembles a startled hen who has just laid a square egg.
But, clever girl, she followed the beckoning finger of “character actress” through numerous roles that would lead her to be dubbed “the nation’s favourite fictional grandmother”, and in 1984 won a BAFTA for the film A Private Function.
We have seen Liz in such TV series as the Vicar of Dibley and I didn’t Know You Cared, and in the films Secrets and Lies and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
In fact she got her big screen chance from director Mike Leigh as something of a late starter. At the age of 50, working in Hamley’s toy store during the 1970 Christmas rush as the day job, she received a phone call inviting her to audition for the role of a bedridden old woman who spends all her time “knitting and mumbling”.
The catch was that everything was to be total improvisation. The film was Bleak Moments, and would win numerous awards for a maverick young director named Mike Leigh.
He would employ Liz again, in his 1973 TV drama Hard Labour. More improvisation, more soul-searching. And now she writes: “Thanks, Mike. If it were not for that first film I would still be leaning on my Zimmer frame, serving in some shop.”
From an early age Liz showed all the precociousness, resilience, sharp observation and natural humour that would carry her through life to make her mark somewhere, somehow.
Liz was only two when her mother died in childbirth at the age of 23, and her father “just disappeared”. Brought up in Scunthorpe by loving grandparents, – they called her Our Betty – she was drawn to the theatre from an early age.
They would take her each week to the Palace Variety Theatre, and every Saturday Liz would join the other youngsters at the children’s morning cinema matinees to watch silent movies and later usher in the first talkies.
While in India during World War II serving with the Wrens, she was part of the camp’s concert party. So there was show-business flowing in her veins, even if it took some time to spill out on to the carpet.
After the war, she enrolled in drama school at the Gateway Theatre in Notting Hill.
The theatre encouraged new playwrights. “The plays we performed were by milkmen, dustmen, diplomats, housewives, anybody,” she recalls. “You can imagine the dialogue we had to grapple with, as well as making the costumes!”
But Liz learned from the veteran actors she mixed with. “They had performed all over the British Isles, always on a train going somewhere else, working for a pittance. Their voices throbbed. Gestures came from the heart.”
They inspired her to learn breathing exercises from a voice coach. “I tried hard for a long time: formation, tone, articulation, modulation, inflection, word-painting.
“Nothing seemed to happen. However, later in my life, in big theatres I found my voice shot right to the back row of the gallery. So it works!”
After long years working in dead-end jobs and trudging around agents’ offices looking for work, the light at the end of the tunnel finally shone full into her face, courtesy of Mike Leigh.
Another turning point came with A Private Function, Alan Bennett’s black 1984 comedy about a Yorkshire doctor illegally fattening up a pig for the dinner table. Liz was sent the script.
“It was one of those magic reads where you could just feel the words dripping off your lips. I knew I just had to do it.” She put a postcard through Alan Bennett’s front door in Camden Town “begging and begging for the role of Maggie Smith’s dumb old mum”. And got it.
Both stage and TV were beckoning, and Liz recounts her adventures in both. At the Old Vic she featured as “the mother in the dustbin” in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. “I just couldn’t spend the evening in a dustbin,” she recalls. “Me and my claustrophobia!
“But they cut a hole in the stage where I could pop up and then pop back when I’d finished my lines.
On the big screen Liz featured in Peter Greenaway’s art house hit The Cook, the Thief, His wife and Her Lover – “doing little more than sitting around the table, but it was a joy to watch it all happening”.
Anyone doubting her range may recall Liz in two of the Pink Panther comedies – playing Madam Balls, no less, who kept a disguises shop in Paris.
At last came the lure of the small screen. And in 2002 Liz appeared in Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution series and would go on to play Lettita Cropley, “the lady who makes the cakes,” in the comic saga The Vicar of Dibley.
“Lettita was a truly great innovation, and has welded itself into the minds of viewers,” Liz says.
She recalls he shock at being killed off. “Poor Mrs Cropley died of a heart attack, and people in the street still mourn her passing. ‘It’s not the same without the terrible cakes,’ they say.”
Shortly after Mrs Cropley’s demise, a script came through – “Unannounced, no one had said a word about it.”
It was called The Royle Family, “and it turned comedy watching on its head. To sit there, on that sofa, squashed like sardines was simply heaven, and felt just like being in a real family. I was a selfish old bag, and loved every minute of it. It was a highlight in my career, and my heart glows as I write about it.”
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