Being happily married means more to me than acting

The actress talks to GARTH PEARCE about her new film Finding Your Feet, life with Downton Abbey’s Carson and why she has never relied on her looks to win roles

they are in the majority. So when a good one comes along you grab it.”

And that is exactly what she did with Vera Drake. Although Staunton says she knew it was a good script she had no idea how audiences would react. “I did not know what to think,” she told me at the time after a private screening at the Venice Film Festival.

“I went home to Jim and said, ‘I really have no idea.’ I thought it was a good film and was proud to be in it.”

But at Venice, it not only won best film but best actress for Staunton. “Helen Mirren was on the jury and she loved it,” she recalled. “We had seen her earlier walking towards myself and Phil Davis, who played my husband. She was crying and I thought something must have happened in her own life. But she had just seen our film and emotional state.”

Staunton missed out on the Best Actress Oscar in 2005 to Million Dollar Baby’s Hilary Swank but admits that she never expected to win. “Because it happened to me later in life I knew I had my career and it would not change my life so I could absolutely enjoy the whole thing without thinking, ‘This is going to make me’,” she says.

Yet there is no denying that Vera Drake had a positive impact on her career. Her movie success in Peter’s Friends in 1992, as fussy Charlotte Palmer in Sense And Sensibility in 1995 or Gwyneth Paltrow’s nurse in the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love in 1998, left her always in work but never fashionable.

Today she seems to be developing the golden touch 40 years after a typically unstarry start.

Staunton was brought was in up, an the only child of road worker Joseph and his hairdresser wife Bridie above her mum’s shop in Archway, London. “The 1960s did not start, miraculously, with the beginning of the new decade,” she says. “I was in London but there wasn’t much evidence of the Swinging Sixties from where we were living.”

For most people, she says: “The foods, the expressions and the clothes were still from the 1950s. There was lots of tinned food, boiled bacon and cabbage. And the streets, the colour, the cold in the house and running down to the only fire in the kitchen – all this went on for most of us.”

Acting was not so much an escape but an interest. “I did school plays and had a wonderful drama teacher called Jacqueline Stoker who insisted that I audition for drama school,” she says.

“She prepared me and I auditioned for three. I did not get into two of them but was accepted by Rada. I started at 18, left at 20 and then for six years did repertory theatre. My first job was The Mistress Of The Inn, a Restoration comedy at the Swan Theatre, Worcester. I then joined reps in Nottingham, York and Exeter. I would play the maid one week and Joan of Arc the next. It was a great apprenticeship.”

And versatility is still very much at the heart of what she does. “I am a character actress and have never had to rely on my looks. That has paid off the older I get.”

Asked what the secret to her longevity is, she says: “My only aim was to stay in work and learn as much as I could. I was not reaching for the stars. I just wanted to keep myself financially afloat by acting. That was the extent of my ambition, really.”