The problem for most women in the acting profession is that they suffer a shortage of interesting roles in older age. But the career curve of Liz Smith, who has died aged 95, was uniquely the reverse.
Unable to become a full-time actor until late middle age because she was a single mother bringing up two children, she rapidly became the go-to woman for ageing mothers and grandmothers. From 1983-84, she played characters identified only as Gran in four different TV series.
She later perfected the role as Nana in Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash’s sitcom The Royle Family. The only reason her best movie role – as Mother in Alan Bennett’s 1984 rationing comedy A Private Function – wasn’t also a granny was the elaborate contraceptive apparatus that Maggie Smith, as her daughter, and Michael Palin employ in that film.
Those two works gave Smith her most memorable scenes: drawing tears as she portrayed the final decline and death of the grand-matriarch in her last episode of The Royle Family, and triggering loud laughter in A Private Function, as she sat dourly church-hatted beside Smith while the daughter carried out her wartime duties as a cinema organist.
Being an unknown actor on the verge of her 50th birthday ought to have been an insuperable obstacle to the ambitions for stardom Smith had held since childhood, but the director Mike Leigh liked to cast performers who did not distract the audience with instant recognisability. Leigh also has a painter’s eye for distinctive, expressive faces and so Smith’s lack of fame and pinched but radiant looks led him to cast her in two early TV works: Bleak Moments (1971), as a character’s mother, and Hard Labour (1973), her breakthrough role, in which she played the working-class cleaner for a Salford snob.
Casting directors soon learned to check out the newcomers used by Leigh, and Smith was rapidly offered the major TV role of Mrs Brandon in Peter Tinniswood’s northern domestic sitcom, I Didn’t Know You Cared. This demonstrated her range because, where Leigh’s work demanded hyperrealistic acting (as The Royle Family also later did), Tinniswood’s scripts had a heightened, surrealist streak.
From then on, if a character on television or film ever paid a visit to the oldest female member of their family, there was a strong chance it would be Smith sitting in the armchair. Some actors would have balked at becoming a granny specialist at around 60 but Smith had always had a talent for aging up: she recalled that, even as a nine-year-old in amateur dramatics, she was famed for taking old lady roles.
Smith was born in Lincolnshire, but she proved easily able to adapt her Scunthorpe vowels to become a natural with northern English dialogue from either side of the Pennines. Among the writers who provided her signature roles, Leigh, Aherne (who died earlier this year) and Cash grew up in Manchester, while Tinniswood had lived in Liverpool and worked in Yorkshire, where Bennett was born. All these characters drew on a particular northern tradition of older women who embraced eccentricity and delighted in speaking their mind.
One of her few major southern roles was as Mrs Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley, an ancient parishioner who sat knitting in parish council meetings and forced bizarre home cooking on everyone. Mrs Cropley was also rare among her characters in being happy and serene, albeit in a world of her own. What unites the writing of Leigh, Tinniswood, Bennett, Aherne and Cash is that the comedy has an underlay of darkness, and, although she would have wished it otherwise, Smith had easy access to melancholy.
Her mother had died when she was two, and her father subsequently abandoned the family. Being brought up by a widowed grandmother, Smith acknowledged, shaped her knack for playing grannies. A tough childhood was not evened out in adulthood, when her husband, who she met during the second world war, left her in the 50s to bring up their young son and daughter alone with little money. In a BBC television interview, Smith told me that her late professional success had failed to compensate for what had been, although she loved her children, long private pain. If the choice had been offered, she insisted, she would have been unknown but personally happy.
Yet, although sad about the circumstances that caused it, audiences will remain thankful for the late-starting career that turned the disadvantages of her life to such creative advantage. Most actors, however well known, find themselves competing against a small number of peers for the same prime parts. But, for several decades, Smith had sole ownership of a certain type of role.
In 2005, when the casting directors for Roman Polanski’s movie version of Oliver Twist were trying to fill a part identified only as a Dickensian “Old Woman”, it seems unlikely that they took long to come up with the perfect name.
