Two OPs of widely differing vintage appeared prominently in a recent Channel 5 documentary "The Marvellous Maggie Smith: A Celebration." One was Dame Maggie's second husband, playwright Beverley Cross (44-49) who died in 1998. The other, described by the programme as an "actor and fan," was Tom Read Wilson (98-03).  

Beverley Cross's obituary, as published in "The Old Pangbournian Record: Volume One", is reproduced below. For his part, Tom Read Wilson stole the tv programme with a marvellously pitched and engaging performance recalling many of Dame Maggie's most famous roles and acting peaks with enormous gusto and verve. 

Cross, Beverley (44-49) was a versatile writer for stage and screen, the husband of Dame Maggie Smith and the son of a theatrical manager and an actress. At the NCP he was one of the few boys of his era to stay on to take Higher School Certificate and study for an Oxford scholarship. An obituary in the Daily Telegraph stated that he “contributed to some of the West End’s most ebullient musical comedies.” It went on: “After Pangbourne, Cross served in the Royal Naval Reserve and then did his National Service in the Army. He then joined the Norwegian merchant service as a seaman. He then went up to Balliol College, Oxford where in 1953 he began acting. He made his first stage appearance with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and from 1954 spent two seasons with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-on-Avon. In 1956 he made his first West End appearance (as Mr. Fox in Toad of Toad Hall) and joined BBC Television as a production assistant for children’s drama. But he was never really cut out to act. So he turned his hand to writing plays.”

According to the Telegraph, “Cross’s most impressive play was his first.” Conceived in the late-1950s, One More River concerns a ship’s mutiny and reflects his time as a merchant seaman. Cross “did not hesitate to vindicate the officer class, though he was writing at a time when other playwrights were in awe of socialism” noted the obituary. The play reached the West End and was much praised for its structure, characterisation and theatrical punch. “Its author never wrote anything like it again,” commented the Telegraph.

Instead Cross concentrated on the books of musical comedies and modern operas such as Half a Sixpence, Jorrocks and The Rising Moon. In the 1970s he adapted the two longest-running Paris boulevard farces for the West End, Boeing-Boeing and Happy Birthday. He also wrote numerous plays for children. In the 1980s he wrote a much admired stage version of Baroness Orczy’s novel ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel.’ He also produced two novels, Mars in Capricorn (1955) and The Night Walkers’(1966). He married three times, latterly in 1975 to Dame Maggie Smith.

An obituary in the New York Times shed light on his relationship with Maggie Smith: “The two met in 1952 at a student revue at Oxford, where Mr. Cross was an undergraduate. Mr. Cross married a contemporary from Oxford, Elizabeth Clunies-Ross, but he never forgot Ms. Smith, who was cast in his second play, Strip the Willow, in 1960. Hopelessly in love, Mr. Cross made his feelings clear in the first stage direction he wrote for Ms. Smith's character: 'She is about 25 and very beautiful. As elegant and sophisticated as a top international model. A great sense of fun. A marvellous girl.’

The two had an affair while Mr. Cross waited for his divorce to come through, but fate intervened again. Urged on by Mr. Cross, Ms. Smith joined Laurence Olivier's new National Theater at the Old Vic, only to fall in love with a fellow actor, Robert Stephens, whom she married. Mr. Cross was filled, he said later, with murderous hatred for Mr. Stephens, and later married a model, Gayden Collins. But in 1975, Ms. Smith's tempestuous marriage to Mr. Stephens ended. After their divorce, Mr. Cross obtained his own divorce and married Ms. Smith in a civil ceremony at the Greenwich registry office. In his entry in Who's Who, he ignored his first two marriages and recorded only his third.

Through it all, Mr. Cross was a steadying force for the shy and often reclusive Ms. Smith, who became Dame Maggie in 1990 and who depended on him to run interference with the outside world. ‘I'm remarkably fortunate,' she once said. '’When you meet again someone you should have married in the first place, it's like a script. That kind of luck is too good to be true.’

His school friend James Paterson (46-50) added: “Bev was very bright – Balliol scholarships are not easily come by – but in no way aloof or intellectually arrogant. Far from it; there was something of the genial ‘strolling player’ about him. He could as easily give a riveting performance as Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar as entertain us at a Divisional concert for 25 minutes singing old music hall songs and accompanying himself on a banjo! He seemed to be Chief of the College for ever, but perhaps it was only three or four terms.

I can see him now at the head of the long refectory table with his broad, smiling rather Mediterranean face, keeping us all amused with his fund of store is and the slightly exotic lifestyle he seemed to pursue in the holidays. One day I remember him looking at a newspaper and reading that his father had died in Venice (he had been separated from the rest of the family for a long time). Nor did his academic prowess mean that he had no time for games. As far as I can recall, he was in all the major teams as well as being an accomplished fencer and tennis player. Indeed, something of a polymath was Beverley.” He died aged 66 in March, 1998.