“I knew she was extraordinary,” Toby Stephens says of his mother, the actress Maggie Smith, who died last year. Photo / Tom Jamieson, The New York Times
The Royal Shakespeare Company star and former Bond villain on growing up with a great, his mother’s last days - and his new Ruth Ellis TV drama.
Toby Stephens always knew his mother was popular, from the time he saw her playing Peter Pan at the London Palladium when he was four years old to her later success in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films. Even so, when Maggie Smith died aged 89 last year, he wasn’t ready for the flood of tributes that followed.
“Obviously I knew that she was extraordinary,” Stephens, 55, says, “but the response was incredibly moving. And the thing that really got me was: it’s very rare that you have actors that everyone likes. And she had spent her life not thinking of herself like that, which is very winning.”
Sitting in a London hotel, on a lunch break from a theatre rehearsal, he gives the first of several rueful laughs. “If she had thought of herself like that it would have been ghastly. But she wasn’t like that at all. She had self-knowledge, self-belief. Like most actors, though, she was riven with self-doubt.”
Stephens used to avoid the subject of his famous mum. Long before the expression “nepo baby” was in common parlance he knew some of his peers felt his early success was a bit suspect. He was still at drama school when he was cast as the lead in the television drama The Camomile Lawn; he played Coriolanus for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) soon after, aged 25.
“Definitely, within the profession, there was an element of ‘well, this is happening because of who your parents are’.” His father, the actor and director Robert Stephens, died in 1995.
Stephens insists it wasn’t nepotism but understands the suspicion. He has continued to have a busy career on stage, including a Hamlet for the RSC. In 2002, aged 33, he became the youngest actor to be cast as a Bond villain, playing the sword-wielding Gustav Graves opposite Pierce Brosnanin Die Another Day. (Graves was a DNA-altered North Korean soldier: “Would you be able to get away with that now?”)
The tooth-flashing arrogance he excelled at there led to roles such as Mr Rochester in the BBC’s Jane Eyre or, more recently, the billionaire baddie Damian Cray in Amazon’s teenage spy series Alex Rider. He was Nicola Walker’s new love interest in The Split: Barcelona By any measure Stephens is a success.
It took a fair while of notching up those credits, though, before he felt comfortable talking lineage. “It was crippling for a while. It was: how do I walk the line between not just talking about it endlessly, or not seeming like I’m being obtuse by not talking about it at all? I think it caused my mum some embarrassment, even though she knew I had to do my own thing.”
His elder brother Chris, also an actor, changed his name from Stephens to Larkin because Equity already had a Christopher Stephens. For Toby, the name has always been a giveaway. “But then you get to a point where you go, I mean, I’m just so f***ing proud of her. I’d done enough to know that’s not why I’m working.” They never worked together. “We both thought it would be a bit naff. I’d have loved to — but it would have been such a thing.”
Stephens wasn’t in the country when his mother died. He has developed a sideline recently as a star of horror films: The Severed Sun, The Morrigan and New Zealand film, Marama. (Horror films, he points out, unlike most movies these days, “actually get made”.) He was unsure whether to take Marama, though, because it meant several weeks in New Zealand and his mum hadn’t been well: Smith stopped working in 2023.
“She was in hospital. She was supposed to be coming out, but the last two years of her life had been a decline: she would get worse, then she would get better, then she would get worse. So I said, ‘Look I’ve got this film,’ and before I could even ask her, she said, ‘Go do it. God, you don’t want to hang round here, I’m fine.’”
By the time he got to New Zealand, though, the hospital was telling him Smith was not going to get better. “But it could take two months, two weeks, they didn’t know.” Filming had started. He rang his mother, who insisted he stay on. And then she stopped being able to communicate.
Should he fly home and force filming to shut down? He felt sure she’d want him to finish the job. “I’d spent hours and days sitting with her at home and in hospital over the course of two years, and there was nothing I had left unsaid.”
Smith died on September 27, the day before Marama finished filming. Stephens’s wife, the actress Anna-Louise Plowman, and their three children, aged 14, 15 and 17, had all been to see her at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital the day before she died. She was unconscious by that point. Chris was there when she died. “I was so sad not to be with him. I found that very difficult, but she was no longer aware. And it allowed me some space to actually get my head round what had happened.”
He was touched not just by the scale of the response to Smith’s death, but also because many people discovered there was more to her than those two big 21st-century roles.
“A whole generation just knew Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter and the old trout from Downton. And for them to see people talking about this amazing body of work, to see photos of her when she was so young and so beautiful, to see pictures of her from the Sixties when she was at the height of her theatrical career … that was really moving.”
Had Stephens ever been guilty of comparing himself to his mother? “No, no, to try to imitate someone else’s career is a waste of time. And I think I knew that immediately.” What he got from her, he says, was a keen sense of what hard work acting was. He remembers being at the family home in West Sussex and seeing his mother come back from a play and agonise over what she could have done better.
“It was almost like OCD - she would be fussing about things. And I remember going, ‘You’ve got these amazing reviews, most people would go, right, the job’s done, I’m going to do the same thing every night now.’ She was going, ‘I can do better. I’m not good enough yet.’” He smiles proudly. “You know?”
There was a time, in the Nineties, when Stephens thought he might become a full-blown star himself. Hot from his RSC and TV successes, he was flown to Hollywood for screen tests - and kept coming second to Christian Bale or Viggo Mortensen for the big roles. “Looking back, it makes absolute sense. At the time it was devastating.”
Stephens found himself unemployed in Los Angeles, looking at giant billboards for films he wasn’t in, and gladly taking offers of work back home. He has since come to realise he wasn’t the right fit; he wanted to keep disappearing into different roles. “And the opposite of that is a movie star: you want Clint Eastwood to be Clint Eastwood, you want Timothée Chalamet to be Timothée Chalamet. They’re movie stars. And I wasn’t cut out to be that.”
His mother disliked repeating herself too, although she kept returning to Harry Potter and Downton Abbey. “She just loved working with other actors. Actors are the most fun to be around - you laugh a lot. And I know that when she did the last series of Downton, or the last film, that’s not because she necessarily wanted to play that part again. It was because she wanted to be with those people again.”
That extended to her final stage role, in Christopher Hampton’s A German Life in London in 2019. Stephens and his brother were wowed that their mother was doing a 100-minute monologue in her eighties. “And then they said, ‘Let’s do it in New York. Let’s film it.’ And she wouldn’t do either.” She loved the ephemeral nature of theatre, he says, the very thing that keeps actors humble. “You can clutch on to these great triumphs but you have to forget them, because everybody else does.”
So a lifetime of work became “Downton star dies”, but that’s the way of the world. What would Stephens’s obituary be: Bond villain dies? He smiles. “Yeah.” Which is one up from Maggie Smith’s son dies.
Still, her death has woken him up to his own mortality. “Somehow she was always herself. A part of her was perpetually 15 years old, naughty and petulant - that was there till the end. And that was wonderful. It made you think she was always going to be there. Then this happens and you go, ‘Time is not infinite. I’ve got to get some focus.’”
Stephens has finally had time to do this. In addition to Netflix’s One Day and the BBC’s Dodger, he has shot a new spy thriller in China, and this month appears in the ITV drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story. Stephens plays Melford Stevenson, the defence barrister who represented Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. And although at first you think he’s been cast for his ability to convey instant establishment arrogance, he made sure to find his character’s rationale.
“He’s trying to save her from being hanged. He’s trying to get her a prison sentence. And it’s a failure for him, it’s horrific - but you don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s an arrogant prick.’ He’s a human being, so there is depth there.”
His mother was often his sounding board for career quandaries. “I really miss that. I mean, I miss her in so many ways, but I miss that voice. At times, as with all parents, it wasn’t what you wanted to hear, but she was often right.”
Not always, though. When his mother was ill, he says, Stephens’s wife would tell her: “‘You know, Mags, you had the best of times.’ And she said, ‘I know.’ And she did. It was a golden era to be in theatre at the National in the Sixties. It’s more fragmented now, it’s hard to get plays on in the West End - everything is so expensive.
“Sometimes she would go, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I have to work.’ She didn’t always understand … because it was such a wonderful time when she came up.”
And she was exceptional too, of course. One last laugh. “Of course. She was incredible.”
Written by: Dominic Maxwell
© The Times of London
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