Discover the Best Books Written by 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 1961 animated and 1996 live-action films produced by Disney. Her novel I Capture the Castle was adapted into a 2003 film version. 

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). Smith was born on 3 May 1896 in a house named Stoneycroft (number 118) 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, known as Kingston House, was at 609 Stretford Road. It faced the Manchester Ship Canal; she lived with her mother, maternal grandparents, two aunts, and three uncles. Her autobiography Look Back with Love (1974) 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, 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. Presently 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 in both Manchester and at St Paul's Girls' School. 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 parlor 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. She traveled 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 a festival in Zürich, Switzerland. During her mother's illness, while dying of breast cancer, Dodie and her mother became devotees of Christian Science.