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Lesley’s brightest hour
Lesley Manville is not only starring in a TV comedy and getting rave stage reviews – she’s also up for an Oscar at the same time as ex-husband Gary Oldman
As she approaches her 62nd birthday next month, actress Lesley Manville has plenty to celebrate. She’s had an Oscar nomination for her performance in the hit film Phantom Thread and glowing reviews for her role with Jeremy Irons in the West End revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And now she’s set to reprise her bittersweet portrayal of the widowed Cathy in the acclaimed comedy drama Mum, which returns to BBC2 for a second series this week.
‘Maybe this is no more than life treating me well at the moment but I’ve been saying for the last five years or so that parts for women of my age are getting better and more plentiful,’ says Lesley. ‘I think producers and directors are waking up to the fact that women over 40 want to see people they recognise on the screen and not an endless succession of svelte 22-yearolds. Look at Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren, women in their 60s and 70s who are still attractive, still playing women obviously having a sex life.’
She might well be joining the ranks of those Oscar-winning women soon, with the prospect of that award for Best Supporting Actress, which will be handed out next month – though Leslie won’t be at the ceremony, as she’ll be in the middle of her theatre run in London. ‘ I’m rather giddy with excitement at the wonderful news,’ she says. ‘It will be quite a day for my son, Alfie, having both parents nominated in the same year.’ Alfie, a 29-year-old cameraman, is her only child from her marriage to Gary Oldman, who is tipped to pick up this year’s Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Gary, now 59, and Lesley met when they were in a play at London’s Royal Court Theatre and they married in 1987. Two years later, Hollywood beckoned and Oldman left his wife and three-month- old child behind. The couple divorced in 1990.
Lesley has never discussed the split, although when Alfie was five she did suggest that Gary wasn’t the perfect parent. ‘ He plays a small part,’ she said, ‘with the accent very much on the small, however much you might have read in the papers about how wonderful a father he is.’
Gary, of course, has gone on to huge roles – and now it’s Lesley’s turn to take the spotlight, with her work in Phantom Thread as Cyril, the formidable sister of top couturier Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel DayLewis. ‘The director Paul Thomas Anderson rings you up when he says he’s going to ring you up – at 10 o’clock on the dot – and tells you he’s written a script. Would you like to be in a film with Daniel Day-Lewis?’ She didn’t need to be asked twice.
Lesley spent almost six months, on and off, with Day-Lewis before shooting began. They didn’t rehearse scenes, but instead took time to get to know each other. ‘Daniel and I became friends,’ she says, ‘so we could take that ease of Lesley and Daniel and put it into the ease Reynolds and Cyril have with each other.’
She feels the same affinity with the small cast of Mum. ‘We really have bonded like a little family so it was such a treat when the second series was commissioned and you realised you were going to be together again for eight solid weeks.’
Mum, which has already been commissioned for a third series, tells the story of the newly widowed Cathy and her family friend Michael (Peter Mullan, cast against type after gritty roles in Trainspotting and Top Of The Lake), whose feelings for Cathy are obvious to everybody except the woman herself.
‘Cathy and Michael are the emotional centre of Mum,’ says Lesley, ‘surrounded by all this madness.’ That madness comes in the form of Lesley’s family. Her dim- witted son Jason (Sam Swainsbury) lives at home with his dozy girlfriend Kelly ( Lisa McGrillis). Dropping by, often unannounced, is Cathy’s emotionally illiterate brother Derek (Ross Boatman) and his snobby, girlfriend Pauline ( Dorothy Atkinson). ‘I do not work in a supermarket,’ she corrects Kelly. ‘I work at Waitrose.’
As it happens, Lesley and Dorothy have also been working together on the ITV period drama Harlots. ‘We laugh because it’s a complete role reversal,’ says Lesley. ‘Dot plays an evangelist and I’m a nasty, evil brothel keeper. Every time I’m horrible to her in Harlots, I whisper, “Cathy’s revenge!” It’s very good karma.’
Lesley, who had a second, brief marriage to actor Joe Dixon which ended in 2004, has had a slow-burn type of career. After an early TV role on Emmerdale Farm (as it was known) when she was 18, she’s appeared in a succession of parts on stage and screen, most notably in Mike Leigh films including Another Year, All Or Nothing and Mr Turner. ‘I love the way Mike works to create a character meticulously, over months, so you really embody them,’ says Lesley. ‘Mike and I are very similar. We’re both quite fastidious and we don’t like to leave any stone unturned. It’s very nice to have somebody like that in your life.’
She clearly enjoys the variety of her working life. ‘Professionally speaking, I jump around,’ she says, ‘I’d get very bored otherwise. I like jumping from a classic upper-middle- class woman, like my character in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to somebody a bit more working class and contemporary, like Cathy. What actor wouldn’t want versatility like that?
‘I credit Mike Leigh with giving me such a varied career,’ she adds, ‘because nobody’s been able to pigeonhole me since. Lucky me.’ Mum, Tuesday, 10pm, BBC2.