Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something to knowledge base
Content stats: 0 posts, 0 articles, 0 media, 0 notes
Members stats: 0 subscribers, 0 contributors, 0 moderators, 0 supporters
Subscribers
Supporters
Contributors
Moderators
Dodie Smith
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith (3 May 1896 – 24 November 1990) was an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle (1948) and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956). Other works include Dear Octopus (1938) and The Starlight Barking (1967). The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 animated film and a 1996 live-action film, both produced by Disney. Her novel I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of the BBC's The Big Read (2003), and was adapted into a film released the same year.
Smith was born on 3 May 1896 in a house named Stoneycroft (number 118 - now 167) on Bury New Road, Whitefield, near Bury in Lancashire, England. She was an only child. Her parents were Ernest and Ella Smith (née Furber). Ernest was a bank manager; he died in 1898 when Dodie was two years old. Dodie and her mother moved to Old Trafford to live with her grandparents, William and Margaret Furber. Dodie's childhood home, Kingston House, was at 609 Stretford Road, and faced the Manchester Ship Canal. She lived with her mother, maternal grandparents, two aunts and three uncles.
In Smith's autobiography Look Back with Love (1974), she credits her grandfather William as one of three reasons she became a playwright. He was an avid theatregoer, and they had long talks about Shakespeare and melodrama. The second reason was that her uncle Harold Furber, an amateur actor, read plays with her and introduced her to contemporary drama. Thirdly, her mother had wanted to be an actress, an ambition frustrated except for walk-on parts, once in the company of Sarah Bernhardt. Smith wrote her first play at the age of ten, and she began acting in minor roles during her teens at the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society. There is a blue plaque commemorating the building where Dorothy grew up. The formative years of Dorothy's childhood were spent at this house.
In 1910 Ella remarried and moved to London with her new husband and the 14-year-old Dodie, who attended school both in Manchester and at St Paul's Girls' School, London. In 1914 Dodie entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Her first role came in Arthur Wing Pinero's play Playgoers. Other roles after RADA included a Chinese girl in Mr. Wu, a parlour maid in Ye Gods, and a young mother in Niobe, which was directed by Basil Dean, who would later buy her play Autumn Crocus.
She was also in the Portsmouth Repertory Theatre, travelled with a YMCA company to entertain troops in France during World War I, toured with the French comedy French Leave, and appeared as Anne in Galsworthy's play The Pigeon at the Everyman Theatre and at a festival in Zürich, Switzerland. While Ella was dying of breast cancer, she and Dodie became devotees of Christian Science.
Even though Smith had sold a movie script, Schoolgirl Rebels, using the pseudonym Charles Henry Percy, and written a one-act play, British Talent, that premiered at the Three Arts Club in 1924, she still had a hard time finding steady work. In 1923, she accepted a job in Heal and Son's furniture store in London and became the toy buyer (and mistress of the chairman, Ambrose Heal). She wrote her first staged play, Autumn Crocus, in 1931 using the pseudonym C.L. Anthony. Its success, and the discovery of her identity by journalists, inspired the newspaper headline, "Shopgirl Writes Play". The show starred Fay Compton and Francis Lederer.
Smith's fourth play Call It a Day was acted by the Theatre Guild on 28 January 1936 and ran for 194 performances. It ran in London for 509 performances, the longest run of any of Smith's plays to date. American critic Joseph Wood Krutch compared it favorably to George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's play Dinner at Eight and Edward Knoblock's Grand Hotel. He said the London production "stays pretty consistently on the level of comedy and imposes upon its brittle structure no greater emotional weight than that structure is capable of bearing."
The success of Call It a Day enabled Smith to purchase The Barretts, a cottage near the village of Finchingfield, Essex. Her next play, Bonnet Over the Windmill (1937), was not as successful. It concerns three aspiring young actresses and their landlady, a middle-aged former music-hall performer, and the young women's attempts to attract the attention of a playwright and a theatre producer with hopes of obtaining dramatic roles.
Dodie Smith
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith (3 May 1896 – 24 November 1990) was an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle (1948) and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956). Other works include Dear Octopus (1938) and The Starlight Barking (1967). The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 animated film and a 1996 live-action film, both produced by Disney. Her novel I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of the BBC's The Big Read (2003), and was adapted into a film released the same year.
Smith was born on 3 May 1896 in a house named Stoneycroft (number 118 - now 167) on Bury New Road, Whitefield, near Bury in Lancashire, England. She was an only child. Her parents were Ernest and Ella Smith (née Furber). Ernest was a bank manager; he died in 1898 when Dodie was two years old. Dodie and her mother moved to Old Trafford to live with her grandparents, William and Margaret Furber. Dodie's childhood home, Kingston House, was at 609 Stretford Road, and faced the Manchester Ship Canal. She lived with her mother, maternal grandparents, two aunts and three uncles.
In Smith's autobiography Look Back with Love (1974), she credits her grandfather William as one of three reasons she became a playwright. He was an avid theatregoer, and they had long talks about Shakespeare and melodrama. The second reason was that her uncle Harold Furber, an amateur actor, read plays with her and introduced her to contemporary drama. Thirdly, her mother had wanted to be an actress, an ambition frustrated except for walk-on parts, once in the company of Sarah Bernhardt. Smith wrote her first play at the age of ten, and she began acting in minor roles during her teens at the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society. There is a blue plaque commemorating the building where Dorothy grew up. The formative years of Dorothy's childhood were spent at this house.
In 1910 Ella remarried and moved to London with her new husband and the 14-year-old Dodie, who attended school both in Manchester and at St Paul's Girls' School, London. In 1914 Dodie entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Her first role came in Arthur Wing Pinero's play Playgoers. Other roles after RADA included a Chinese girl in Mr. Wu, a parlour maid in Ye Gods, and a young mother in Niobe, which was directed by Basil Dean, who would later buy her play Autumn Crocus.
She was also in the Portsmouth Repertory Theatre, travelled with a YMCA company to entertain troops in France during World War I, toured with the French comedy French Leave, and appeared as Anne in Galsworthy's play The Pigeon at the Everyman Theatre and at a festival in Zürich, Switzerland. While Ella was dying of breast cancer, she and Dodie became devotees of Christian Science.
Even though Smith had sold a movie script, Schoolgirl Rebels, using the pseudonym Charles Henry Percy, and written a one-act play, British Talent, that premiered at the Three Arts Club in 1924, she still had a hard time finding steady work. In 1923, she accepted a job in Heal and Son's furniture store in London and became the toy buyer (and mistress of the chairman, Ambrose Heal). She wrote her first staged play, Autumn Crocus, in 1931 using the pseudonym C.L. Anthony. Its success, and the discovery of her identity by journalists, inspired the newspaper headline, "Shopgirl Writes Play". The show starred Fay Compton and Francis Lederer.
Smith's fourth play Call It a Day was acted by the Theatre Guild on 28 January 1936 and ran for 194 performances. It ran in London for 509 performances, the longest run of any of Smith's plays to date. American critic Joseph Wood Krutch compared it favorably to George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's play Dinner at Eight and Edward Knoblock's Grand Hotel. He said the London production "stays pretty consistently on the level of comedy and imposes upon its brittle structure no greater emotional weight than that structure is capable of bearing."
The success of Call It a Day enabled Smith to purchase The Barretts, a cottage near the village of Finchingfield, Essex. Her next play, Bonnet Over the Windmill (1937), was not as successful. It concerns three aspiring young actresses and their landlady, a middle-aged former music-hall performer, and the young women's attempts to attract the attention of a playwright and a theatre producer with hopes of obtaining dramatic roles.