Dodie Smith

English · 1896 to 1990

Dorothy Gladys Smith, known as Dodie, was born on 3 May 1896 in Whitefield, Lancashire, an only child whose father died when she was two. She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, worked for years selling furniture at Heal's in London, and only found her real success as a playwright, first under the pen name C.L. Anthony, then under her own, scoring West End hits through the 1930s with Autumn Crocus, Call It a Day, and Dear Octopus. It was at Heal's that she met her future husband, Alec Beesley, then her manager there. They married in 1939, and in the early 1940s the couple moved to the United States so that Alec, a conscientious objector, could avoid the difficulties of wartime Britain. Homesick in Pennsylvania, Smith turned that longing into her first novel, I Capture the Castle (1948), narrated by seventeen year old Cassandra Mortmain from the kitchen sink of a crumbling, rented castle, and the book was an immediate success that she later adapted into a stage play in 1954. Back in England after the war, settled with Alec and a growing pack of Dalmatians, they kept as many as nine, at their Essex home, The Barretts, Smith drew on that devotion for The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), which became her most famous work worldwide and, through Walt Disney's 1961 animated adaptation, one of the best loved dog stories in children's literature. She continued writing novels, memoirs, and plays into old age, remaining at The Barretts until her death on 24 November 1990, at ninety four. She named the novelist Julian Barnes her literary executor.