The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

“I’ve never considered a facelift,” she said in 2007, “because I earn my living by looking old.”
Liz Smith, The Royle Family actor, has died
aged 95
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Born Betty Gleadle, in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, she had a rough start in life. Her mother died in
childbirth when Betty was two and she was brought up by her widowed grandmother. She
remembered her father, only 20 years her senior and prone to wine, women and song, throwing her up
in the air and catching her, and festooning her with costume jewellery. When she was seven, her father
walked out without explanation – his daughter only discovering, many years later, that he had married
another woman who had insisted that his previous life did not exist. “He was a weak man and did as
he was told, so he just disowned me,” she recalled in the later years of her success.
Liz Smith with Max Wall in We Think the World of You, 1988. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
She discovered acting at her local school but left at 16 and took a job with a dressmaker. During the
second world war she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and in 1945 married a sailor, Jack
Thomas, whom she met on service in India. She contracted hepatitis and returned to London.
In 1947, she managed to get a job with a small repertory company called the Gateway theatre in
Westbourne Grove, using the stage name Liz Smith. But she and her husband and their children, Sarah
and Robert, soon moved out to Buckhurst Hill, near Epping, Essex, which put the repertory theatre out
of range.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1959. Acting was both an emotional release and a way of earning a
living. The American director Charles Marowitz, a devotee of the Method school of acting,
introduced his ideas to London at rooms in Fitzroy Square, London. Smith was auditioned and chosen
to be in the first improvising group. Marowitz did not pay her, and only a series of day jobs, including
one as a postwoman, made it possible for her to attend his school for four nights a week over a period
of five years. Then, one day, Marowitz simply did not turn up and Smith was told he had gone to link
up with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “And that was that. He dropped us – just like Father,” Smith
said. She then joined the Forbes Russell Repertory Company, which played at Butlin’s holiday