Early life
Dorothy was born on 3 May 1896 in Whitefield, near Bury in Lancashire. An only child, her parents were Ernest and Ella Smith (née Furber). Ernest was a bank manager; he died in 1898, when Dorothy was two years old. Dodie and her mother moved to Old Trafford to live with her grandparents, William and Margaret Furber. Dorothy's childhood home, known as Kingston House, was at 609 Stretford Road. It faced the Manchester Ship Canal, and she lived with her mother, maternal grandparents, two aunts, and three uncles. In her autobiography Look Back with Love (1974), she credits her grandfather William as one of three reasons she became a playwright. He was an avid theatergoer, and they had long talks about Shakespeare and melodrama. The second reason, 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, one in the company of Sarah Bernhardt. She wrote her first play at the age of ten, and she began acting in bit roles in her teens at the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society. Today there is a blue plaque on the building, commemorating where Dorothy grew up. The formative years of Dorothy's childhood were spent at this house.
Move to London
But in 1910 Ella remarried and relocated with her new husband and the 14 year old Dodie to London. She attended school in both Manchester and at St Paul's Girls' School. In 1914, Dodie entered the Academy (later Royal Academy) of Dramatic Art. Her first role came in Arthur Wing Pinero's Playgoers. and Ella died of breast cancer. During Ella's illness, mother and daughter became followers of Christian Science. Other roles after leaving RADA include a Chinese girl in Mr. Wu, a parlor maid in Ye Gods, and a young mother in Niobe, which was directed by Basil Dean, who would go on to buy her play Autumn Crocus. She was also in the Portsmouth Repertory Theatre, traveled with a YMCA company to entertain the troops in France during World War I, toured with the French comedy French Leave, and appeared as Anne in Galsworthy's The Pigeon at the Everyman Theatre and at a festival in Zürich, Switzerland.
Career after acting
Even though she had sold a film script, Schoolgirl Rebels under the pseudonym Charles Henry Percy, and wrote an 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 took a job in Heal and Son furniture store in London and became the toy buyer (and a mistress of the chairman, Ambrose Heal). She authored her first play, Autumn Crocus, in 1931 under 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.
Her fourth play, Call It A Day, was put on by the Theatre Guild on January 28, 1936, and ran for 194 performances. It ran in London for 509 performances, the longest run of any of Smith's play to date. It was compared favorably to George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's Dinner at Eight and Edward Knoblock's Grand Hotel by Joseph Wood Krutch. He also said of the production, that it "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."
After the success of Call It A Day, Smith was able to purchase the The Barretts, a cottage near the village of Finchingfield, Essex. Her next play, Bonnet over the Windmill (1937), was not as successful. If follows three aspiring young actresses and their landlady, a middle-aged former music-hall performer, and follows the young women's attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to attract the attention of a play-wright and a theater producer in order to obtain dramatic roles.
Her next show, Dear Octopus (1938), starred DBE Marie Tempest and Sir John Gielgud. The unusual title refers to a toast in the play: "To the family--that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to." Brooks Atkinson who called Smith a "domestic panoramist" and compared her to a lot of English novelists, from Samuel Richardson to Archibald Marshall and called her the "appointed recorder" of the English family. The production in London ran for 376 performances, compared to the New York one for only 53. When Smith came to America to cast Dear Octopus, she brought along with her Alec Macbeth Beesley, her longtime friend and business manager, whom she married in 1939. She would not return to London theatre until 1952. She did have a play, Lovers and Friends, play at the Plymouth Theatre in 1943. The show starred Katharine Cornell and Raymond Massey.
She spent most of her years as a writer living in a townhouse in London, where a plaque now commemorates her occupation.
Later life
During the 1940s, she and her husband moved to the United States due to legal difficulties with Beesley's stand as a conscientious objector. While living in the U.S. and feeling homesick for England, she wrote her first novel in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, I Capture the Castle (1948). They also would stay in Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Wilton, Connecticut.
During the American interlude, the Beesleys became friends with writers Christopher Isherwood, Charles Brackett, and John Van Druten. In Smith's memoirs, she credits Alec with making the suggestion to Van Druten that he adapt Isherwood's Sally Bowles story Goodbye to Berlin into a play (the Van Druten play, I Am A Camera, later became the musical Cabaret). In her memoirs, Smith acknowledges having received writing advice from her friend, the novelist A. J. Cronin.
Her first play back in London, Letter from Paris, was an adaption of Henry James's short novel The Reverberator. She followed the adapting style of William Archibald's The Innocents (adapted from The Turn of the Screw) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz's The Heiress(adapted from Washington Square).
Death
Smith died in 1990 after naming Julian Barnes as her literary executor, a job she felt would not be much work. She was cremated. Her ashes were scattered in the wind. Barnes writes of the complicated task in his essay "Literary Executions", revealing among other things how he secured the return of the film rights to I Capture the Castle, which had been held by Disney since 1949 Smith's personal papers are housed in Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, and include manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and correspondence (including letters from Christopher Isherwood and John Gielgud).
Legacy
Smith is best known for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) (which was adapted into the Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians). Her novel I Capture the Castle also has a devoted following (a film version was released in 2003). I Capture the Castle was voted #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).
Personal life
She was a mistress of the chairman of Heal and Son, Ambrose Heal. In 1939, she married Alec Beesley, another employee at Heal's, until his death in 1987.
