drawing-room comedy and Peter Ustinov’s
The Love of Four Colonels
. But I had this long and very delicious scene with Maggie, which she played in a bathing suit. We tended to giggle a lot, but playing with her was thrilling, because of her sense of stage reality. Like all remarkable actors, she can live in the moment. She organises a part so that every single moment is accounted for, but she still has the flexibility within that framework to do something marginally different each night. She is also incredibly generous. The prerequisite of the very best acting is the ability to listen; and there’s no actor I know who’s a better listener than Maggie. She was on her way to becoming a star in those days, but she wasn’t there yet. She was just an extremely brilliant actress that everyone had their eye on and had great hopes for.
Maggie and Beverley were now living together in the Eldon Road flat in South Kensington. Beverley was otherwise based at the White House at Beaumont in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his chow dog, Tuffet. His first marriage had broken down irretrievably, but there was a delay in arranging the divorce. Most friends of Maggie and Beverley regarded them as unofficially engaged. Beverley went off to location in Jordan to do some second-unit script editing on the David Lean film of
Lawrence of Arabia
(‘action stuff with camels’), while Maggie squeezed in another television role before joining a production of Jean Anouilh’s
The Rehearsal
, which Binkie Beaumont was supporting at the Bristol Old Vic and bringing into the Globe. The television play, only the second that survives on tape from her early career, was
The Savages
by Peter Draper, the author of
Sunday out of Season
. This was another ‘Binkie-vision’ project in which Maggie plays Rose, a Cockney prostitute who steals the heart of a young boy starved of affection at home. It is a sentimental and naïve piece, but not without its moments. The best scene is that between Maggie and the boy, who tells her that she is the most beautiful person he has ever seen. Maggie has a tumbled, fresh-faced look about her and the sympathetic listening she lavishes on the boy makes a nice change from all the ‘entertaining’ she has to provide at other times.
Maggie was a more respectable child-minder in
The Rehearsal
. She played the young girl employed to care for the orphans in the west wing of a château where a party, rehearsing the performance of a Marivaux play, unconsciously echoes its own romantic intrigues. The girl, Lucile, is heartlessly seduced by the debauched hero, called Hero, played by Alan Badel. The assistant director was a young working-class son of a Home Counties gardener. He was called Robin Phillips and Maggie later spent a crucial working period of her life with him in Canada, where he was director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario. But in 1961 he was a nobody. And a dogsbody.
The director, John Hale, left him to run through a rehearsal of the seduction scene, which was not going well, on what happened to be Phillips’s nineteenth birthday: ‘Badel was very much the star, sitting centre stage, and Maggie was hugging the walls.’ When they cried out for help, he tentatively suggested that the scene might be more effective if Maggie sat centre stage and Badel encircled her. ‘I don’t think it was a particularly clever suggestion, but they tried it, and of course the scene immediately worked. It was quite nice. I could see Maggie’s eyes twinkling at the suggestion. She didn’t say anything … but they whisked me off for a birthday drink because they were so pleased.’ Phillips was to become one of Maggie’s favourite and most influential directors, but not for another fourteen years.
After the first night at the Globe on 6 April 1961, Robert Muller in the
Daily Mail
declared the scene to be ‘one of the most affecting things to be seen in London at the moment’. Levin in the
Express
commended
The Love of Four Colonels
. But I had this long and very delicious scene with Maggie, which she played in a bathing suit. We tended to giggle a lot, but playing with her was thrilling, because of her sense of stage reality. Like all remarkable actors, she can live in the moment. She organises a part so that every single moment is accounted for, but she still has the flexibility within that framework to do something marginally different each night. She is also incredibly generous. The prerequisite of the very best acting is the ability to listen; and there’s no actor I know who’s a better listener than Maggie. She was on her way to becoming a star in those days, but she wasn’t there yet. She was just an extremely brilliant actress that everyone had their eye on and had great hopes for.
Maggie and Beverley were now living together in the Eldon Road flat in South Kensington. Beverley was otherwise based at the White House at Beaumont in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his chow dog, Tuffet. His first marriage had broken down irretrievably, but there was a delay in arranging the divorce. Most friends of Maggie and Beverley regarded them as unofficially engaged. Beverley went off to location in Jordan to do some second-unit script editing on the David Lean film of
Lawrence of Arabia
(‘action stuff with camels’), while Maggie squeezed in another television role before joining a production of Jean Anouilh’s
The Rehearsal
, which Binkie Beaumont was supporting at the Bristol Old Vic and bringing into the Globe. The television play, only the second that survives on tape from her early career, was
The Savages
by Peter Draper, the author of
Sunday out of Season
. This was another ‘Binkie-vision’ project in which Maggie plays Rose, a Cockney prostitute who steals the heart of a young boy starved of affection at home. It is a sentimental and naïve piece, but not without its moments. The best scene is that between Maggie and the boy, who tells her that she is the most beautiful person he has ever seen. Maggie has a tumbled, fresh-faced look about her and the sympathetic listening she lavishes on the boy makes a nice change from all the ‘entertaining’ she has to provide at other times.
Maggie was a more respectable child-minder in
The Rehearsal
. She played the young girl employed to care for the orphans in the west wing of a château where a party, rehearsing the performance of a Marivaux play, unconsciously echoes its own romantic intrigues. The girl, Lucile, is heartlessly seduced by the debauched hero, called Hero, played by Alan Badel. The assistant director was a young working-class son of a Home Counties gardener. He was called Robin Phillips and Maggie later spent a crucial working period of her life with him in Canada, where he was director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario. But in 1961 he was a nobody. And a dogsbody.
The director, John Hale, left him to run through a rehearsal of the seduction scene, which was not going well, on what happened to be Phillips’s nineteenth birthday: ‘Badel was very much the star, sitting centre stage, and Maggie was hugging the walls.’ When they cried out for help, he tentatively suggested that the scene might be more effective if Maggie sat centre stage and Badel encircled her. ‘I don’t think it was a particularly clever suggestion, but they tried it, and of course the scene immediately worked. It was quite nice. I could see Maggie’s eyes twinkling at the suggestion. She didn’t say anything … but they whisked me off for a birthday drink because they were so pleased.’ Phillips was to become one of Maggie’s favourite and most influential directors, but not for another fourteen years.
After the first night at the Globe on 6 April 1961, Robert Muller in the
Daily Mail
declared the scene to be ‘one of the most affecting things to be seen in London at the moment’. Levin in the
Express
commended
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