No matter how far you’ve gone to help a stranger, you probably haven’t gone as far as Alan Bennett.
For some 15 years, the British actor, playwright and screenwriter (“The History Boys”) allowed a combative homeless woman to live in a van parked in the driveway of his London townhouse.
“I meet people who think I’m crazy, but I have to explain how this came about,” Bennett tells The Post. “I have to explain that I’m not the sort of philanthropist I might seem to be.”
The bizarre true story is the basis for “The Lady in the Van,” in theaters Friday with a script by Bennett and starring Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings.
In the late 1960s, an elderly vagrant calling herself Miss Mary Shepherd appeared on Bennett’s tree-lined Chelsea block. She would park her Bedford van in front of a house, piling plastic bags around the automobile, until the homeowners told her to move on.
She worked her way down the street until her eyesore of a vehicle, sloppily hand-painted yellow, came to rest in front of Bennett’s address.
“She was there in full view of my window while I was working,” Bennett says. “She used to get pestered by people. I used to go out and tell [those] people to clear off. This distracted me from my work, and it gradually got to the point when it was harder for me to work than it should be, and the only way to break through the situation was to invite her [in 1974] into the drive, where no one else would bother her.”
The writer thought she’d stay for three months. She ended up occupying his driveway for over a decade until her death in 1989.
“She was very strong-willed,” Bennett says. “She made no attempt to go, and I’m quite lazy. It was easier to leave her where she was.”
Had he known she would stay so long, he never would have made the offer — especially considering Miss Shepherd’s charmless personality. (The film portrays her as a slightly more sympathetic character.)
“She was difficult to like,” he says. “She never smiled, she had no sense of humor, her politics were very different from mine . . . And all these things made her an aggressive personality.”
She would litter Bennett’s yard with trash and excrement and occasionally come to him with problems, such as the time she saw a boa constrictor in the road, or when she asked for help getting on the ballot for Parliament. She was rarely allowed inside.
“She was so smelly that you couldn’t have her in the house for too long,” he says.
So she mostly sat locked in her filthy van, listening to the radio, praying, or penning political pamphlets with titles such as “True View: Mattering Things” that Bennett agreed to type up for her. Nuns occasionally brought by food to supplement groceries purchased with her Social Security payments, though she didn’t have a way to cook.
Miss Shepherd rarely revealed information about her past. It was only after she was found dead from heart failure in the van by a social worker that Bennett began to get answers.
It was he who filled in the details of his sister’s life. She had been a gifted pianist as a child, training with the renowned conductor Alfred Cortot. She gave up music after deciding to become a nun.
Following World War II, her brother had her briefly committed to a mental institution because of Shepherd’s constant arguing with their mother.
She later went on the run when a motorcyclist struck her van and was killed. The accident wasn’t her fault, but Shepherd fled the scene, ultimately winding up in front of Bennett’s home at 23 Gloucester Crescent. (The actual house was used in the film, though the writer moved out a few years ago.)
Bennett mined the story for a 1989 magazine article, as well as a book and a stage play.
“I miss her in a sense,” he says. “[For a while], every time I heard a van door . . . I’d say, ‘Oh, there’s Miss Shepherd.’ But Miss Shepherd wasn’t there anymore.”