17 Facts About Dodie Smith

Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith was an English novelist and playwright.

Dodie Smith is best known for writing I Capture the Castle and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Dodie Smith's parents were Ernest and Ella Smith.

Ernest was a bank manager; he died in 1898 when Dodie Smith was two years old.

Dodie Smith was an avid theatregoer, and they had long talks about Shakespeare and melodrama.

Dodie 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.

In 1910 Ella remarried and moved to London with her new husband and the 14-year-old Dodie Smith, who attended school in both Manchester and at St Paul's Girls' School.

In 1914 Dodie Smith entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

When Dodie Smith travelled to America to cast Dear Octopus, she brought with her Alec Macbeth Beesley, who had worked at Heal's and had become her longtime friend and business manager.

Dodie Smith lived for many years in Dorset Square, Marylebone, London, where a plaque now commemorates her occupation, although her date of birth inaccurately states 1895 instead of 1896.

Dodie Smith felt homesick for Britain, which inspired her first novel, written in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, named I Capture the Castle.

Dodie Smith's first play back in London, Letter from Paris, was an adaptation of Henry James's short novel The Reverberator.

Dodie Smith died in 1990 in Uttlesford, north Essex, England.

Dodie Smith was cremated and her ashes scattered to the wind.

Dodie Smith had named Julian Barnes as her literary executor, a job she thought would not be much work.

The first was named Pongo which became the name Dodie Smith used for the canine protagonist of her The Hundred and One Dalmatians novel.

Dodie Smith had the idea for the novel when one of her friends observed a group of her Dalmatians and said "Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat".