Our Betty

by Liz Smith

Liz Smith is one of Britain's much loved character actresses. This is her life story - from her cosseted yet lonely childhood with her beloved grandparents, through the war, marriage and children, divorce and poverty, long years working in dead-end jobs to her big break at the age of fifty.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Humor, Film

Hardcover

First published April 3, 2006

About the author

Elizabeth "Liz" Smith was a BAFTA Award-winning English actress 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.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the short sections which read exactly as I imagine they would if you carried a notebook in order to jot down memories. It's not tedious or filled with dull detail.
I usually prefer the 'before I was famous' sections of biographies and this was very satisfying.
It interests me that Liz Smith has written a pretty personal account that manages to avoid referring to any personal relationships after her separation and divorce, including those with her children. A paragragh near the end about her son and daughter-in-law made me wonder if there is some tension between Liz and Sara, or is this me being fanciful?

[Steph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wonderful Liz Smith documenting tales from various periods during her life so far.

The style of her writing is simple and magical - you can hear her actually speaking the words as you read them.

A lovely read.

[Redfox5 · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was all over the place and it took my awhile to get into it. I now know that Liz is the nan in The Royal family, which wasn't a show I was overly keen on. This wasn't a bad book but is random snippets of her life, rather than anything in depth. Nice to know that she didn't get her acting career in order until she was in her fifties. Gives hope to the rest of us!

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it, loved it, loved it! This is how an autobiography should feel. She gently guides you through her life in a series of memories and scenes that feels natural rather than forced. Charming :)

[Plum-crazy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining but rather jumbled read about a woman who I always thought of as a bit quirky (probably due to the parts she played!) & this does nothing to dispel that feeling of eccentricity.

I read this book over a couple of months but the very short chapters, illustrated by Liz herself, are perfect for dipping in & out of. The flow is rather disjointed, flitting about all over the place but rather than becoming irritating it sort of added a little charm to the anecdotes as it seemed in keeping with my idea of her personality.

Liz easily goes off on a tangent & there's one or two very random comments which leave you wondering "Where on earth did that come from?..." These fragmented reminisces are often funny & often tinged with sadness. Some were rather surprising to the extent I wondered whether if they had become embellished over time... or had ever actually happened at all!

Overall an amusing look into the life of a national treasure.

[morag Sarkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading about Betty Smith's life growing up in 1920s to 1940s England.

She describes with both humour and sadness how she was raised by her grandparents in the North of England when he mum dies in childbirth when she was only 2 years old . Then her no-good father walked out the door saying he'd be back and she never saw him again -his loss.

She remembers the hard times when Child benefit was only 20p a week for the second child. Nothing for the first. It was a hard time in London for people without Families.

She writes about how she moved to Ladbroke Grove in the 1950s by sticking a pin in a map of London and saying 'I'll live there '.After she moved to Epping and lived there for 18 years where she became a character actress -in Vicar of Dibley, Pirates, and Royal Family and met Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -she was one of the Grandparents in the Bed.

I love her delight at making pear jelly with pears from trees, eating soup with lovely bread and butter, and finding a cucumber on Brighton Beach when she needed a cucumber.
She was rich in delights and amusements from small pleasures -she reminded me a lot of my Grandmother from Glasgow -who would take delight in the small things.
The book is Pure Gold.

[May Mahmoud McGovern · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am unfortunately in two minds about this particular book, though I practically devoured the first half in which Liz Smith depicts her vivid childhood and unusual family setup the second was far less satisfying, though I do concede that rather than it not being engaging, it had or has more to do with my being a younger reader, and not having the stamina to withhold the steady procession of names that almost instantly took hold of the book and just as instantly made me lose interest - such a shame considering the impact that her performance with these actors both on stage and television had on her life, personally and professionally, a passion I would loved to have shared even if momentarily.
There is something so natural about Liz Smiths writing, the way she favors the recounting of memories as they come to her much like her book 'Jottings' that I find endlessly interesting, what a gift from author to reader to be given such a personal account of life - and such a shame she hadn't the time to write more.

[Lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was like sitting down and listening to your gran tell snippets of her life, all in a jumble, as the thoughts come to her, you can hear the voice speaking so clearly in your head. I’d have liked each story to have more depth, you are left wanting to know something else, but in a way that’s what makes this book. Its little glimpses of a life hard lived, and fought for, with moments of joy and light, and a wonderful lady who doesn’t know how valuable and precious she is. 3 stars because I wanted more, she deserves to tell her whole story not just snippets, but I do love her, and there a moments of joy, sadness, and just warmth coming from every story.

[John Grinstead · Rating 2 out of 5]

This starts out really well with Liz Smith providing a fascinating insight into her childhood, youth and adolescence, National Service and her early entry to the Theatre. Thereafter, it goes off the boil and becomes something of a laboured recollection of someone who at once appears star struck and painfully unaware of the esteem in which she is held as a comic/character actor. It's almost as if the first half was written by a professional ghost-writer and then finished by Liz herself in crayon.

[Nicola Kelsall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely book about incidents throughout her life which she remembers with a mixture of great affection and deep sadness, told in a very matter-of-fact style. Some hilarious moments and some very difficult times - she had a very tough time just surviving mentally and physically, but she never lost her wonderful sense of humour. She is fabulously eccentric and totally unique in character, often playing an exaggerated version of herself in her television and screen roles. In this modest little book she gives her personal account of an amazing and inspiring life.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely little book and a nice easy read.

Made up of various snippets from her life story rather than being a focussed chronological biography it is still a great insight into her unusual childhood and extraordinary Gran who raised the young Liz.

Whilst it feels as if she must have been on our screens forever, in fact it has been a long struggle to achieve her early dreams of becoming an actress and success came at a fairly late age but she has still left her mark in some of the best loved roles in TV.

The sketches are fun too.

[The Bookish Wombat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely memoir by much-missed actress Liz Smith containing scenes from her childhood, her WW2 service in the Wrens, post-war struggles, and her (eventually) successful acting career. She writes in a very conversational way and intersperses the text with her own drawings of people she's met along the way. A very warm book which nevertheless gives the impression of a life-long sadness due to the early death of her mother and abandonment by her father.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely tale of her life- with some 'big' names dropped in that she has worked with along the way. She initially trained in the 'method' acting style- and then the company worked for nothing for the person taking the classes. They had to work during the day to support themselves. She also did summer seasons at Butlins.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a grand lady! I enjoyed every page of this (too short) book. Dame Liz Smith epitomized the ability of a person, a woman in particular, to pull herself up out of poverty and abandonment and just keep plodding along until she comes to a place of recognition and a well-deserved rest eventually and after all.

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Liz Smith as Nana and thought she was a remarkable person, after hearing her life story on Desert Island Discs. She suffered so much loss and hardship, before finding success with Mike Leigh, at the age of 49. Her memoir is filled with humour and resilience and not an ounce of self-pity. What a lovely lady and a wonderful life.

[Trudy Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very easy interesting read. Written in little sections on different topics moving through her life and written like she is telling you stories. Liked that there was no moaning that it took so long to “make it” but suppose that makes for a more interesting career. A very uplifting book all in all. Don’t normally read autobiographies but this was a good read.

[Shugga · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book at a library sale, because i thought it was about Liz Smith, the gossip colommist, from the NY newspapers. But soon discovered it was about Liz Smith the British Character actor. The book was a hoot. I enjoyed it.

[Andrya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vignettes from her life with her brief sketches. Fascinating snippets of life since early part of 20th century up to accounts of her acting career.
Having picked this up in Aldi for charity donation a few of our family are enjoying it.

[Cathy Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get used to Liz Smith’s writing style having just finished a very different book - this is more “scenes from my life” than a continuous narrative.
However I found it very enjoyable and definitely recommend it.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great autobiography capturing snapshots of growing up in England and accidental fame.

[Noreen O'Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an interesting and packed life she has had. Good read.

[Sarah Hopkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little snippets of the life of a lady who excelled in her later years. Interesting anecdotes about her younger years.

[Tolkien InMySleep · Rating 3 out of 5]

Warm, generous, quintessentially English

[Sharnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable, easy read. I loved the switch between past and present day.

[Sam Rae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quirky read, like it's writer but enjoyed it.

[Tom May · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with many memoirs of famous people, this has greatest power in its reflections on childhood, growing up and life before fame. Smith’s fame has been as a skilled character actor, not any sort of star, but nevertheless the latter half of the book is rendered blander by the very human diplomacy and tact she adopts in discussing people she had worked with, and still might work with.

That said, this book is a resounding corrective to any idea of Liz Smith as a cuddly, mild eccentric. While ‘I love playing nutty creatures in eccentric outfits’ (p. 145), Our Betty establishes the reality of her as a perceptive observer and unconventional performer, able to move from sitcoms to social realism to Samuel Beckett absurdism, with these experiences blending into and informing each other.

Smith reflects on her love of cinema growing up in 1920s Scunthorpe, noting films like The Singing Fool, Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway alongside The Variety Theatre and strolling players doing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a boxing ring below the railway lines. Her mother died when she was two, and her father deserted her when she was seven, after several prefiguring instances of his irresponsibility. Adopted by her Grandma, she got fascinated by performance when at school: ‘That was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. Make people laugh, have lots of lights, no gloom and no oil lamps.’ (p. 50)

One of her most vivid childhood memories of playing in the street constitutes one of the most magnificently bleak ripostes imaginable to any ‘good old days’ nostalgic romanticising (pp. 21-2). There are also fascinating tales of her Grandad and the 1926 General Strike and how life working in the steel furnace was ‘pure theatre’ (p. 27). The segment about the Plough Jags reads like a condensed, five-paragraph J.G. Ballard short story rooted in Scunthorpe strangeness (pp. 27-9).

It’s fascinating to read about her time in Portobello from the late 1940s, at art and then drama school, moving in a milieu including Rita Webb, Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and even Diana Dors. She seems to have far preferred this life in a London ‘village’ than in the suburbs near Epping Forest that she subsequently moved to in the 1950s. Smith, who had worked at the impressively open and democratic sounding Gateway Theatre (pp. 82-3), joined the Unity Theatre and then Charles Marowitz’s experimental group which rehearsed at Fitzroy Square. They all needed day jobs to manage this, as Marowitz paid them no money for their evening work. She had some great creative experiences with Marowitz, but the economic side of it seems exploitative and he dropped them abruptly to go to the RSC with Peter Brook.

The creative heart of the book is Smith’s association with Mike Leigh, who cast her in his feature film, Bleak Moments (1971) and then Smith’s first of seven Play for Today roles: in Leigh’s Hard Labour (1973). The section on the latter (pp. 131-7) is riveting. It provides insight concerning Smith’s creative input into her role as Mrs Thornley, ‘a woman who worked for others. Like a slave’ (p. 133). At a time when Chantal Akerman has now supplanted male auteurs in Sight and Sound’s greatest films ever poll, Hard Labour stands as Play for Today’s most prescient and subtle feminist drama of 1973, alongside Nemone Lethbridge’s more baroque Baby Blues. Smith’s enactment of Mrs Thornley’s painful life was meticulously researched but clearly also has some roots in her own experience of dull and exploitative labour (p. 54, 120-1). Smith relished Leigh’s rigorous and challenging ethos; working with Leigh continued her learning process with Marowitz, but was more fairly rewarded and lasting. Hard Labour enjoyed the vast luxury of eight weeks of improvisations followed by a month of shooting, all enabled by a BBC steered in a radical direction by producer Tony Garnett.

The latter section has some fine vignettes on the more unusual side of British TV and film. We hear about Smith working on the likes of Peter Tinniswood’s offbeat I Didn’t Know You Cared (pp. 147-9), with its variety of settings, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), by Viv Stanshall whom she rightly calls ‘wonderful’, Peter Greenaway’s tremendously original The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and a series for children called Pirates. We learn how Smith features in a student film production involving Timothy Spall, Sanscape. While she absolutely adored the experience of being in LA for various projects, film productions often fell through or parts got cut.

Apt given her lifelong love of the cinema medium, Smith also provides a welcome roster of now neglected films of the 1980s-90s: A Private Function (1984), Apartment Zero (1988), High Spirits (1988), We Think the World of You (1988), The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) and La Nona (1991) for BBC2’s erformance play strand, alongside drag artiste extraordinaire Les Dawson.

Smith makes the crucial point that The Royle Family, which she calls a career ‘highlight’, felt deeply naturalistic due to the lack of an audience, which naturally leads to larger, communicative performances, but it was also performed as scripted and totally without improvisation (p. 209-10).

Smith comes across as a perceptive and caring person: a long time vegetarian who loves animals, commits to charitable activities, including Water Aid, and reflects on childhood memories of encountering one Black man locally (pp. 30-1) and her cosmopolitan experiences as a WREN in the Second World War (pp. 58-67). On the final page, she recounts sitting in a favourite armchair and how she listens to Al Bowlly every day and takes joy in her family life, which was clearly far more stable for the younger generations than hers was.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book as it had cartoons and short chapters so I was able to read bits at a time. I didn't know a lot of the shows being mentioned and the ones I did know were only slightly mentioned and would have liked to have known about them and the other people in them. overall it was an enjoyable book.

[Anastasia Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An endearing bibliography of the life of Liz Smith. The book presents a humourous and unapologetic reflection of her life. Highlighting this is her rise to the television screen, despite her age and circumstances.

[Bridget Durell · Rating 5 out of 5]

What it says on the tin

I met Liz in '79 when working on th
e film set of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. Her real life character leaps from these pages and rekindles some very fond memories of this lovely lady...

[Allie Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my booklog: "Charming. Very quick read."