Liz Smith: 'I'm a little off-centre'

Liz Smith is best loved for her role as Nana in 'The Royle Family'. Tonight, she goes against type by appearing as an evil old woman in Lynda La Plante's thriller 'Trial and Retribution'. But then, she tells Brian Viner, her entire life has been rather odd

In Trial and Retribution, this week's two-part ITV 1 thriller by Lynda La Plante – in which a corpse is unearthed from beneath a patio, evoking the unspeakable horrors of 10 Rillington Place, 25 Cromwell Street and 10 Brookside Close – the veteran actress Liz Smith plays a decidedly unpleasant old bat called Dorothy Norton. We know, of course, that as dippy Nana in The Royle Family and as the barmy flower-arranger Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley, Smith was only acting. All the same, it is mildly disconcerting to find such wonderful comic talent in so grisly a tale.

Given the opportunity, though, she would do unpleasantness more often. "If I have one regret," says Smith – who endearingly identifies her age as "late seventies... very, very late seventies" – "it is that not enough people have given me chances to do this sort of thing. She's sinister and very unfunny. I loved that."

Smith gives a kind of cackle, strongly reminiscent of Jim Royle's sofa-bound nemesis, Norma (Nana to the rest of the family). We are taking elevenses, not Royle behaviour at all, at a branch of Café Rouge in Highgate, north London, close to where she lives with her cats. She walks slowly but otherwise seems hale and hearty. In a way, she has lived life in reverse, thriving in old age after suffering devastating blows in childhood, youth and early motherhood.

Her mother died in childbirth when Smith was two; her baby sister died soon afterward. "My mother dying set the tone for the rest of my life," she says. "That's why I'm a little off-centre. Her death started me off on the odd person I became." I ask what she knows about her mother. "That she was beautiful, with bright blue eyes and long golden hair. She was a great horse-rider and played the piano very well, everything I would have loved to grow up with."

Smith says this matter-of-factly, not ruefully or self-pityingly. She is, however, entitled to some self-pity. She was seven – and her surviving parent was 27 – when he scarpered.

"My father was from a Lincolnshire farming family, and an impossible, impetuous man, but he showered me with gifts and I adored him. Then, one day, he said, 'Goodbye, kid; I'll write', and that was the last I saw of him. We had a double-fronted house in Scunthorpe, with an aspidistra in one window and a great big wind-up gramophone in the other. Every day for five years, when I came back from school, I stood in the window by the gramophone, waiting for his letter. But it never came..."

Her mother's parents took charge of her upbringing, but her beloved grandfather, a manager at the local steelworks, died two years later in a flu epidemic. "My home was already a very gloomy, shadowy place, and then there was this great sadness, because my grandmother had lost her husband and only daughter. She very wisely sent me to be with other children, and I toured the village halls with my elocution class, putting on shows. Coming from that gloomy house, the warmth and lights and laughter was magic, just magic."

Her grandmother made it plain that she had only one reason for living: to see her granddaughter safely to adulthood. "She used to say to me, 'I'll die when you're 20.' She considered 20 to be the age when I could stand on my own, and, funnily enough, aloneness has crept right through my life.

"When the war came, I joined the Navy, and one day I was sitting on a lavatory in a Fleet Air Arm station somewhere in Scotland when someone shoved a telegram under the door – a yellow telegram, it was – telling me that my grandmother had died. I was 20."

In 1945, Smith got married. She had met her husband in wartime India, and they had two children. Then, her husband abruptly left her. Abandonment, I venture, seems to have been a recurring theme in her life. She nods vigorously. Happily, almost. "Yes, rejection, rejection, rejection," she cries.

She is self-confessedly odd, but there is nevertheless something hugely likeable about Smith. Perhaps it is her emotional candour. "I remember the first time I felt wanted, needed, appreciated, other than by my children," she says. "It was the first night of a play I was in called Why Me? and I had my name up in lights outside the Strand Theatre. A taxi picked me up from there and took me to the Grosvenor House hotel where I won a Bafta [for her supporting role in the 1984 film A Private Function]. That was wonderful. But by then I had a bus pass." Another merry cackle. I mention something I have read about her before, and she apologises. "I'm afraid I only have one story," she says. Yes, but it's a heck of a story.

Desperate to act, but unable to get an agent, Smith enrolled in a workshop that was being run by the American Method-acting guru Charles Marowitz. It was the mid-Fifties. "I did five years with Marowitz, working in shops by day and doing improvisations with him at night, and loved it, loved it. But then he left, very suddenly, to work with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Another one, you see, disappearing overnight."

She promptly bought The Stage, and saw that Butlin's was advertising for actors to join its summer shows. "So for years after that we went every summer to Clacton, Skegness, Barry Island, Minehead, where I had all day with the children and appeared in shows at night. That was the only acting job I could get. I used to watch people on television and say, 'I could do that, I could do better than that.' I'm a jealous person, you see, very jealous."

Her professional turning-point came in 1971, when she heard that an unknown young director, Mike Leigh, was looking for a middle-aged woman who was capable of improvisation.

"I went to an audition in a church hall. We were told that we were waiting for an ambulance, and we all had to wait in our own way. And these big, black eyes and intense looks came around chairs, under tables... Mike Leigh turned out to be my knight in shining armour; there weren't many people of my age group who had done improvisation, you see. So I got the job."

The job was Bleak Moments, Leigh's debut feature, and it launched Smith's career, too. "I got an agent, and I didn't have to work in a shop any more. I hated working in shops. And soon afterwards I got [the BBC sitcom] I Didn't Know You Cared, written by Peter Tinniswood, which was wonderful, before its time."

Needless to say, however, the course of success did not run entirely smooth. She loved playing Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley, and was aghast when Letitia was killed off. "I was sitting with my cat one Friday night, and a man on a motorbike arrived with the script, which had a note with it, saying, 'Dear Liz, here is the script for the next episode, which contains your death.' It was a terrible shock. I begged Richard Curtis [the writer] to let me come back as her sister, and he said, 'Good idea', but he didn't do it."

There is a silence, which Smith then fills with another curiously cheerful tale of woe. "I've since had a much worse blow than that, though," she says. "I was sent a script from America, a wonderful comedy. I did a screen test and got the job, playing an Irishwoman. I spent five weeks in LA, got my wig, outfit, an Irish voice coach, everything, but then they sacked the director. And the new director didn't want me." She bends down and hisses extravagantly into my tape recorder. "Danny De Vito, he's the one who didn't want me."

But just think, I say, if she had not been chosen to join The Royle Family. "Ooh yes. I loved that. Caroline [Aherne] and Craig [Cash] were wonderful to work with. I've been with creative people on sets, and not many of them are as giving and unselfish as Craig and Caroline. But that ended abruptly, too. I got a phone call one night and Caroline said, 'I've got to go away.' But you see, I had been to an awards ceremony with her and it was overwhelming, all those photographers, just waiting to see her fall. I dream that it might come back, though, even for a special."

Elevenses are up. It's gone midday. As she slowly rises to leave, Smith, finally, counts her blessings. "I have four grandchildren, aged from 12 to 27, and next year I'll have had 30 years without working in a shop. Not everyone has a nice slice of life like that."

'Trial and Retribution' starts tonight at 9pm on ITV 1