Sidney's Place: GREER GARSON and MAGGIE SMITH: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (13)

[This is the thirteenth in an occasional series describing British artistes who found fame on stage or in the movies]

The two actresses described here were quite different, though both won Oscars – one an English rose the other a more wide-ranging character altogether. Greer Garson’s career was relatively short but brilliant in the 1940s. Maggie Smith has been a mainstay of the British acting profession for 60 years and is still going strong, aged 79. I am a devoted, if remote, fan of both.

Greer Garson as Mrs Miniver (1942)

Greer Garson (1904 – 1996) was born in London, the daughter of an Ulster father and a Glasgow mother. Her childhood was much spent in Castlewellan, Co Down, where her father was the steward of a large estate. She studied French and 18^th century literature at Kings College, London and then at Grenoble. Planning to be a teacher, she drifted into advertising and then acting at the Birmingham Rep. Spotted by a talent scout, she was signed up by MGM in 1937. Her first screen appearance was a bulls-eye as the suffragette live-wire energising and marrying Robert Donat in the richly sentimental Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939). It was a relatively small part, (she dies in childbirth) but she did get an Oscar nomination.


Greer Garson enchants Mr Chips Robert Donat in the Alps

Great new roles tumbled in. While the Bennett household was quite lavish by Austen standards, Greer was lovely as Miss Elizabeth opposite a rather foppish Laurence Olivier as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1940). Another Oscar nomination came her way.

Garson and Olivier in Pride and Prejudice

My favourite Garson role followed in 1942 as Paula Ridgeway, lover of amnesiac Ronald Colman, in Random Harvest. The final moment, with Greer crying “Smithy” over the cottage garden fence, and Colman’s loving recognition, is a two-Kleenex box superlative.

Greer cries "Smithy" in Random Harvest

The critics were sniffy but the public loved her. Maybe her nose was a little too long, but her radiant smile, her soft voice and that charming incline of her head made every bit of her a star. What a girl!

Her most famous role was as Mrs Miniver in the 1942 film of that name. She was teamed with Walter Pigeon (they were in 8 films together). This saga of a British wartime family, coping with a wounded Luftwaffe pilot, Walter taking his boat to help out at Dunkirk, with son in the RAF dipping his Spitfire in recognition as he flies over their village, everyone displaying the British “stiff upper lip” in the face of tragedy and destruction; the film enjoyed enormous wartime popularity and Greer at last won the Oscar as the Best Actress. It was the summit of her career.

Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon

Greer made more films but by 1953 or so her type was no longer fashionable. She was on Broadway as Mame and played cameo roles for some time. She had married her third husband, millionaire Buddy Fogelson, in 1949 and although she had a late flutter of fame as Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (another Oscar nomination in 1960) she devoted her long retirement to breeding race-horses in Texas. Greer Garson died a venerable 91 in 1996, never to be forgotten.

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Maggie Smith (1934- ) was born in Ilford, near London and was educated at Oxford High School – her father was a public health pathologist at the University medical faculty. Maggie’s debut was at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952, aged 18, as Viola in Twelfth Night.

Young Maggie Smith

We associate Maggie now with spinsterish or sharp-tongued character roles and we forget how bright-eyed and pretty she was in her younger days. She threw herself into a wide variety of roles in stage comedies, in classic Shakespeare, in film thrillers, in TV and her Broadway debut was in the review New Faces of ’56. She has never been especially choosy about the roles she would accept.

She became in the 1960s something of a fixture at the National Theatre - her Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello was particularly memorable. Maggie was by this time a highly respected actress but in 1969 she exploded on the film viewing world in the astonishing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) where she filled the screen and painted an unbeatable picture of life in a superior girls’ school in 1930s Edinburgh.

Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie

The film is adapted from Muriel Spark’s novel and follows wilful teacher Jean Brodie through love affairs with colleagues to her cherished class of 12-year-old girls at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls – she calls them La Crème de la Crème. Maggie Smith adopted a perfect Edinburgh “Morningside” accent (for years I assumed she actually was Scots) and her sharp put-downs of her conservative colleagues in the common-room were a joy. But Miss Brodie’s error was her worship of power as personified by Mussolini and Franco; she thought such worship was modern but her downfall comes when one of her girls goes to join her brother in Spain and is soon killed – later to be revealed the brother was fighting with the Republicans. Maggie Smith’s performance was a tour de force and it was no surprise that she won the Oscar for the Best Actress.

Maggie became a very familiar face on the global screen – The VIPs with Burton and Taylor, A Room with a View with Helena Bonham Carter, Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt and Gosford Park opposite Michael Gambon all enhanced her reputation. Her second Oscar, as best supporting Actress, rewarded her performance in Neil Simon’s California Suite.

With Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View

Her stage career was equally varied – Ibsen, David Hare, Coward, Alan Bennett and Peter Shaffer have all been played by her, not to mention many other very commercial parts. Her spiky, spinsterish roles have now rather given over to what she calls “Old biddies”. Most familiar in Britain is Maggie’s role in the aristocratic soap-opera Downton Abbey as Cousin Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, sharp-tongued and insistent on the highest standards (her standards!). Unclassifiable is the zest she put into her Professor Minerva McGonagall part in the wildly popular Harry Potter movies.