Secrets of an awesome foursome

DIRECTOR Roger Michell had a front-row seat at the most exclusive of theatrical events when Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright assembled at the latter’s weekend retreat in the rolling countryside.

That’s the one she shared with her late husband, Laurence Olivier.

Michell said he was asked initially if he wanted to make an organised documentary about the grand dames (though one of dem dames, Baroness Olivier, is a lady . . . boom boom).

‘I said: these ladies are the Rolling Stones! And I wanted to make a sort of rockumentary. That’s what I think their spirit is. I wanted to eavesdrop. They ask the questions and provoke.’

Over the course of the hilarious but also poignant film called Nothing Like A Dame, Michell does ask one or two questions.

But the women are mostly left to make their own conversation, during a weekend of filming which took Michell an age to whittle down. Laurence Olivier seems to be the fifth, uninvited, guest. The great actor was clearly a genius. But all the ladies — even his widow — agree that he was, at times, impossible.

Maggie recalls how Olivier would belittle her and tell her she was speaking either too slowly, or too quickly.

They discuss growing old. Maggie jokes at one point: ‘Hands up who hasn’t got a hearing aid.’

And the quartet talk movingly about their late husbands.

Judi recalls how her spouse, actor Michael Williams, urged her to play M because he’d always wanted to live ‘with a Bond girl’.

The film, which was made for the BBC Two Arena programme, will go on release in some cinemas on May 2, but will be broadcast on BBC TV in early summer.

For ticket information and screening details, visit nothinglikeadame.film.