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Betty Smith, MBE (born 11 December 1921) is a BAFTA Award-winning English actress, known as Liz Smith, best known for her roles in the sitcoms The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family, and who also appeared in the 2005 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Early life

Liz Smith was born Betty Gleadle^[1] in the Crosby area of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire in 1921. Her mother died in childbirth when Smith was just two years old. Her father walked out of her life shortly afterwards, following his second marriage to a woman who did not want him to have any contact with his previous life or with his young daughter.^[2] She was brought up by her widowed grandmother. During the Second World War, she chose to serve as a WREN in the Royal Navy because she liked the uniform. In 1945, she married Jack Thomas, whom she met while on service in India, and they had two children. However, Smith and Thomas divorced in 1959 and Smith brought up her son and daughter on her own. She has described this as an extremely difficult period in her life, as she struggled against financial difficulties and social disapproval of single mothers.^[3]

Career

Early career

In 1971, at the age of 50, Liz Smith got her big break when she appeared as the downtrodden mother in Mike Leigh's Bleak Moments, part of Play for Today.

"The moment that my life transformed was when I was standing in Hamleys one Christmas, flogging toys, and I got a message from this young director named Mike Leigh. I was nearly 50 at the time, but he wanted a middle-aged woman to do improvisations. I went to an audition and I got the job of the mother in this improvised film – Bleak Moments , his first film – and it changed my life.

A role in another Play for Today, Hard Labour, followed and after that she appeared in programmes such as Emmerdale Farm as Hilda Semple, Last of the Summer Wine as Compo's date, Bootsie and Snudge, Crown Court, I Didn't Know You Cared and The Sweeney. She also appeared as Madame Balls in the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, but her scenes were deleted. However, in the 1983 film Curse of the Pink Panther, Smith did appear as Madame Balls.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Liz Smith appeared in many popular television programmes in the UK, including The Duchess of Duke Street, Within These Walls, In Loving Memory, The Gentle Touch, Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime, One by One as Gran Turner, and The Lenny Henry Show. In 1984, Liz Smith received a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Maggie Smith's mother in the film A Private Function.

Smith appeared in the Anglo-Argentine "Hitchcockian" thriller, Apartment Zero. The film was featured in the 1988 Sundance Film Festival and was directed by Martin Donovan (the Argentine aka: Carlos Enrique Varela y Peralta-Ramos) and starred Hart Bochner and Colin Firth. Smith plays the role of one of two eccentric characters (the other is Dora Bryan) described by the Washington Post as two "... tea-and-crumpet gargogyle-featured spinsters who snoop the corridors."^[4]

Career breakthrough

Liz Smith started the 1990s by appearing in 2point4 children, in which she had regular roles as Aunt Belle and Bette, Bottom, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Lovejoy. In 1994, she played the role of Letitia Cropley for seven episodes in the popular sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. This made her a household name, but in the 1996 Easter Special episode the character died. Two years later, Smith starred in another sitcom which would make her more well known, The Royle Family. This aired until 2000, but came back for a special episode in 2006 when her character, Nana, died. In the meantime, she had appeared in The Queen's Nose, The Bill and Secrets & Lies. In 1999, she featured in A Christmas Carol as Mrs Dilber, having played the same character in the 1984 version, and also appeared in Alice in Wonderland.

She also starred in the much acclaimed but little seen 1975 TV Film "It's A Lovely Day Tomorrow" Written by Bernard Kops, directed by John Goldsmidt, depicting the real-life drama of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster in WW2. See www.stairwaytoheavenmemorial.org for more info.

Recent years

Since 2000, Smith has continued to act and has appeared in TV programmes such as Trial & Retribution V and Doctors. In 2005 she played Grandma Georgina in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and also had small roles in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Oliver Twist and Keeping Mum.

In 2006, Smith published her autobiography Our Betty ^[5] and moved into a retirement home in Hampstead, London. In 2007, she published a series of short stories entitled Jottings: Flights of Fancy and appeared in the Little Man Tate music video "This Must Be Love".^[6] On 5 December 2007, Smith won the "Best Television Comedy Actress" at the British Comedy Awards for her role in The Royle Family.^[7]

In 2008, she starred in the first series of the period drama Lark Rise to Candleford. That same year she was a castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and was in the film City of Ember, which was released in October 2008. In July 2009 she featured in a one-hour BBC Four documentary called Liz Smith's Summer Cruise, where she joined group of like-minded individuals on a cruise from Croatia to Venice. That same month, having suffered a stroke a few months previously, she announced her retirement from acting at the age of 87^[8].

In 2009 Smith received the Member of the Order of the British Empire.^[9][10]

References

External links

• Liz Smith at the Internet Movie Database