Tag: acting

tribute

Remembering Dame Maggie Smith

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I’m not going to lie, I had a different post planned for today, but then the news broke on Friday afternoon that Dame Maggie Smith had died and I changed my plans.

There’s been a lot of talk of her two great late-in-life roles – Professor McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Grantham Abbey – but I’m that little bit older, so for me the first time I saw her was in The Secret Garden and then in the Sister Act Movies. And she was as perfect in those as she was in those later roles, and in fact in everything else she did. You all know my tastes by now – so it’ll be no surprise to you that I’ve seen more of her comedic performances (I’ve got Death on the Nile on the TV as I watch this) on film than I have of the serious stuff, but five years ago I was lucky enough to see her performing in what turned out to be her final stage role in A German Life.

I’ve been really lucky in my theatre-going life to see a lot of the acting greats – and great performances. When A German Life was announced – more than a decade after her last stage role, I bought a membership to The Bridge Theatre just to get the priority booking – and the trip was not just me and Him Indoors, but also my sister and her now-husband and my parents too. And it was so worth it.

In A German Life, she played Brunhilde Pomsel, a German woman who had been a secretary to Goebbels during the Second World War. She spent the whole show alone on stage, sitting a chair telling you about her life – and I think it was the most mesmerising thing I have seen on stage. You couldn’t drag your eyes off her – in fact it was only right at the end, that I realised that her chair had been moving forward and the set receding the whole time. She was that good – and she was in her mid 80s. It was just astonishing.

I should also say that I’ve seen her son Toby Stephens live on stage too – twice in fact because I thought he and Anna Chancellor were so good in Private Lives that I went back for a second visit – with Him Indoors and my parents. So as well as being sad for the loss of one of the greats of British acting, I’m also thinking of him and his brother Chris Larkin and the rest of her family. Their statement announcing the death on Friday was very touching.

I’ll be checking the TV listings to see if any of her film performances pop up over the next week or so as a tribute, but in the meantime as well as Death on the Nile I have both Sister Acts on the TiVo, so I’m sure I’ll find a chance to watch that at some point in the coming days.

tribute

Sir Antony Sher

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It’s been a busy week of posts here on the blog, and I wasn’t planning to post anything today, but then the news came through that Sir Antony Sher had died. This blog is about books and writing, but please bear with me for this crossover with one of my other passions. Some of you probably know that I love going to the theatre. Going to see a show was one of the things I missed the most during the pandemic.

I’ve been lucky enough to see some amazing performances on stage through the years – some of them from names you’ll recognise from films and TV – like Mark Rylance, Judi Dench and Angela Lansbury – some of them more known to the theatre world. Antony Sher is one of the latter. When it was announced that he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness earlier this year, I was surprised that Him Indoors didn’t recognise his name (or his picture), until I checked back through his IMDB page and realised that most of his credits were for filmed versions of plays. I only saw him on stage once – playing Macbeth at the Swan in about 2000 – but it was amazing. I had been studying Macbeth at school and had struggled (as most school children do I think) with the Shakespearean language. But there was Antony Sher (and Harriet Walter) on stage making it all seem understandable and easy in a way that it wasn’t on the page. I hadn’t seen a lot of live Shakespeare at that point, but I had seen enough to know that it didn’t always work like that.

As Sher worked principally for the RSC in recent years – where his husband is artistic director – and a trip to Stratford always seems like a special effort, and the RSC in London can be quite expensive and hard to get (especially when the reviews were good), that’s my only experience of seeing him live on stage. So why am I writing about him on a book blog? Well it’s because that Macbeth really was very, very good but also because of the books he wrote about his acting.

Although I love going to the theatre, I have never wanted to be on stage myself. The closest I have got since primary school plays was playing in the band for the school musical. The process of creating a performance was a bit of a mystery to me. And that’s where Antony Sher’s Year of the Fat Knight came into my life. I liked it so much I bought his other books about creating great Shakespearean roles and they were equally brilliant. It really gave me a sense of the work and the research that goes into building a performance and creating a character – and probably made me a more critical and analytical theatre goer. Wonderful writing, wonderful acting. And an interesting life, well lived. I’m sorry that there will be no more performances to watch or books to read about them.