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When Lesley Manville was 23, she met Mike Leigh – and her future immediately came into focus. Just three years before, she’d been a soap star, appearing on Emmerdale as teenager Rosemary Kendall, but she decided to branch out to see what other roles she could find. “I wanted to be a character actor,” Manville tells me, ensconced in a cosy screening room at Chiswick Cinema. Well, mission very much accomplished. Through Leigh – a defining British filmmaker known for his realistic portrayals of working-class life – she was granted the chance to play roles she never dreamed possible. “Age 16 to 23 was fine, but it didn’t enter my head to play characters; I just played me and I was doing alright. But once I met Mike and we started working together, I loved it.”
Manville has worked with Leigh on eight films in total – more than any other actor – but this just scrapes the surface of a vibrant career that’s traversed stage and screen, big and small, with the actor always bringing a commanding, lived-in aura to her roles, be they icy, fragile, menacing or warm-hearted.
She is a prolific theatre star too: she originated Caryl Churchill and Andrea Dunbar roles in the 1980s, and starred in, among other productions, Ghosts, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Oedipus. For the latter – her Broadway debut – she won a prestigious Tony Award. To mark the release of her new film, the thriller Winter of the Crow, we’re here to talk about all aspects of her career for interview series Life in Pictures – cutting her teeth on stage, through to her defining working relationships, being headhunted for Phantom Thread by Hollywood maestro Paul Thomas Anderson, her Oscars experience and the TV role she gets stopped for the most. You can watch the full interview here.
Lesley Manville on… starting out on Emmerdale in the 1980s
“It was Emmerdale Farm then. It was on twice-weekly at lunchtime. We shot the exteriors on the same kind of film that Paul Thomas Anderson would use to shoot Phantom Thread. I learnt so much about filming with a single camera. This was a great, great time for me. It was my first time living away from my home in Brighton – and I made some money! It allowed me, aged 19, to get my first flat, and that is not to be sniffed at. When I left, I remember they all said, ‘Why are you going? It’s so hard out there.’ But I knew I had to move on. I had lots more parts to play. It was a really good job. I had my first screen kiss… in a cowshed. I’ve had better screen kisses since then, obviously.”
On… her early theatre work
“My relationship with the Royal Court started from a Mike Leigh film for television that I made called Grown-ups when I was 23. It went out on the BBC and the next day, I was this new actress on the block, even though I’d been working since I was 16. I was at the Royal Court for a while. I did the original Top Girls. The original Rita Sue and Bob Too (both 1982). It was just an amazing time. It’s where I met Gary [Oldman, who she was married to from 1987 to 1989]. Everything was great at the Royal Court. You felt like you were at the cutting edge of things. Over about 12, 13 years, I did about 10 plays there, and now I think how lucky I was. Any young actor who would be able to mirror that situation now would be very lucky.”
On… working with Mike Leigh eight times
“I owe it all to him. Everything. I honestly don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t met him. He liberated me to play characters that weren’t like me. You create a character one-to-one with him for months, then he’ll start to get you involved with other people, and then the improvisations start. You’ll do them in real time – for example, with the barbecue in Another Year (2010), we did a real-time improvisation of that at an afternoon party for five hours. And then it gets distilled into a scene. I’ve done big parts with him, small parts, as do all of his repertoire of actors. But he’s going to get you to play a character that you’ve never played before. I can’t express enough what I owe him.”
On… working in Hollywood for the 2014 film Maleficent
“You get paid more and the catering’s better! Maleficent was the early days of motion capture. We had to wear what you’d wear for deep-sea diving, except it would have hundreds of cameras on it. You’d wear a helmet with two antennae cameras in your face, and cameras strapped to your body. Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and I played pixies and we had the Cirque de Soleil people harnessing us up. We were quite literally flying around the studio at Pinewood! We had to do intensive pilates training to get ready for it. It was great fun. When we did Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, which was quite some years later, the technology had come on so far, we did it all with a grey T-shirt, no makeup and like 500 cameras in a semicircle all the way around us. We were on the first film for ages; the second film, I think we did in three afternoons. I wouldn’t like to do a whole big shoot that’s all green screen. I’m not that kind of girl.”
On… being chosen by Paul Thomas Anderson to star opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread
“The big one. In 2016, my agent said, ‘Paul Thomas Anderson’s gonna call you tomorrow morning at 11am to talk about a film he’s got in his head.’ And I thought, ‘Well, OK. Wow. I bet he’ll forget.’ On the dot, he calls and says, ‘I’ve got this film. It’s you and Daniel Day-Lewis. You’d be brother and sister, and you run this fashion house, and it’s the Fifties.’ And in my heart, ‘I’m just going, ‘Please, please, please tell me this is mine!’ Because fashion has been a thing all my life.
“I’ll never forget, he said, ‘Give the script a read when you’ve got a minute.’ As if I wasn’t gonna tear through it. He called me back and said, ‘Look, Daniel and I are coming to London in a couple of months, so maybe we can meet up.’ I didn’t know if it was mine. Then I get an email from PTA over the weekend, and he went, ‘Oh sorry, I forgot to say – it’s yours.’ Little detail! So then we started shooting – it was 14 of the most heavenly work weeks of my life. The whole job was something else. I’m not superstitious, but six has been a recurring number in my life, and the script that PTA first sent me was dated 6/6/2016. I’ve still got it. It’s gonna be archived by the V&A.”
On… attending the Oscars as a nominee for Phantom Thread
“I’d never been before. At the end of the ceremony, you’ve been there for five hours and you’re hungry, and it’s a lot of small talk, you know. Nice, but a lot of small talk. I said, ‘What are we gonna do? What’s the Vanity Fair party like?’ And PTA said, ‘It’ll be just like this, but with more models.’ So we did a great thing – me, him, Maya [Rudolph, PTA’s wife] and Jonny [Greenwood, of Radiohead] went to a quiet cocktail room in a hotel, and we had omelettes and cocktails. It was the best end to the night. And at midnight LA time – which is 8am the following morning in the UK – I had to go on the Today programme, so I had to be sober. I thought, ‘I absolutely can’t be drunk as a skunk on live radio!’”
On… BBC series Mum, which ran from 2016 to 2019
“What a beautiful job that was – and it’s the thing I get stopped for the most. If I’m at the National Theatre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it’ll be a play, but on the street, on the train, it’s Mum. It was so sublime. Obviously, I get to meet and work with so many different people, and you can’t keep all of them in your contacts list, but very unusually, there were eight principal actors in Mum, and we are all close. I mean, Peter Mullan! I don’t think he’ll mind me saying this, but I think he was nervous doing Mum because he usually plays characters who’re going to, you know, scoop your eyes out. But Peter is the most gentle, warm, loving human being. It was nice to see that natural side of him come out in this. Everyone asks if we’re gonna do any more and I say no because Jacob Stolworthy Stefan Golaszewski intended it as three seasons. That’s what I always saw in my head. It’s beautifully timed – of course you wouldn’t do it again!”
On… playing Princess Margaret in The Crown
“This was an amazing job. Imelda [Staunton] and I were cast two years before, so I used to wake up every morning thinking ‘I’m gonna play Princess Margaret!’, which was so exciting. And for two years, I could research really leisurely. And working with Imelda – we’d been pixies together! Maleficent was our research, really. I knew it wasn’t gonna be 20 episodes about Princess Margaret, but boy oh boy did Peter Morgan write me two amazing episodes. Astonishing. I felt for Margaret deeply. I felt the pain of somebody trapped in a circumstance and wanting to be something, but not quite having the freedom to be that person. I loved playing her – I had a cigarette holder, a silk dressing gown and a fabulous wig. It was win-win.”
On… how she chooses roles
“All I want is to play a cleaning lady in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris [2022] and then Princess Margaret – two ends of the social spectrum. You couldn’t get further away. That’s what gets me up in the morning. I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, that’s alright for you to say, Lesley. You get those opportunities.’ I’m grateful and humble about that. But that’s my modus operandi.”
On… remaining in the UK
“I never considered moving to America. I didn’t think I would do it as a goal. Why would I do that when I was doing the best work that was on offer to anybody, anywhere? I do think we do the best theatre in the world – and I was doing it at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Royal Court, occasionally the West End, working with Mike Leigh, Max Stafford-Clark, Richard Eyre, Nick Hytner, Sam Mendes, Marianne Elliott. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Why would I go to America?”
On… going viral for saying people shouldn’t take photos in theatres
“Lots of other actresses are doing it now. The thing is, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be all right at the end of any production, but it felt particularly wrong or inappropriate at the end of Oedipus [Robert Icke’s 2024 West End production that she starred in]. You know how it ends! It’s pretty devastating. And most of the audience were sitting there just going, ‘I don’t know what I’ve just watched.’ And then you get these other people who just think, ‘I’ve gotta capture this on camera.’ Cate Blanchett was going on about it recently because somebody was filming her in Electra/Persona and at the end of the show, she quite rightly said, ‘Look, you’re spoiling it for people who haven’t seen the show yet.’ I feel I’m fighting a losing battle, but I don’t feel I can’t say anything.”
On… being a national treasure
“It’s not for me to say. All I want is for people to like my work, see what I’m trying to do – not just in each individual performance – but acknowledge that I’m trying to do characters that are different and keep it alive for myself, apart from anything. I think I’m just Lesley Manville!”
‘Winter of the Crow’ is in cinemas now