Extraordinary love for Lesley
Lesley Manville said she ‘ danced around the kitchen table’ when she was offered the chance to star ‘opposite liam!’
That’s liam neeson, of course. He and Manville play Joan and Tom, a long-married couple in Ordinary love, which opens in cinemas today,
‘To have a middle-aged love story on screen is very important,’ Manville told me. ‘you see a couple who’ve been together for a long time, and they still have chemistry. They’re sexy with each other, and desire each other still.’
Joan and Tom exercise daily, speed-walking along the seafront. But their world goes into a tailspin when Joan finds a cyst on her breast, which is diagnosed as cancer.
The drama in Ordinary love, which was written by Owen McCafferty and directed by lisa Barros D’sa and Glenn leyburn, comes from the way McCafferty observes the everyday.
‘i love the film for the way ordinariness comes into focus,’ Manville told me. ‘and what i really love about this couple is that even in the midst of cancer, they’re still managing to make each other laugh.’
The film is unflinching in showing how the disease affects the couple’s lives. in one scene, Joan and Tom are in bed and about to make love. ‘i’m wearing a turban, to cover up Joan’s baldness, or her chemo hair,’ Manville explained.
‘it was liam’s idea to take the turban off — they love each other no matter what. it was such a wonderful idea of liam’s to do that, because it said that his character still sees the beauty in her,’ Manville told me, adding that because she had to go on to shoot the BBC comedy Mum, she was not able to shave her head for the film role.
The scenes of Joan having a mammogram, a biopsy, and then chemotherapy and other procedures were shot with real-life medisex cal staff, which Manville found invaluable, and ‘humbling’.
‘They talked me through the procedures, and then i’d act it,’ she said, though she never got used to ‘ this horrible clicking sound’ for the scenes where she’s meant to be undergoing a biopsy.
When i saw the picture at a public screening during the Toronto international Film Festival, the audience appeared to be mesmerised by the observation of daily routines. But such ‘ordinariness’, as Manville puts it, can only be made to look effortless in the hands of thespians as skilful as her and neeson.
and then there’s the sex. ‘The scene in the film is important,’ Manville told me, ‘because after 40, no one has sex on screen — and no one has sex through the middle of chemotherapy, with no hair.’ The actress, who won a Best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role in Phantom Thread, joked when i asked her what had made her decide to go for this latest role. ‘now, what attracted me to Ordinary love? With liam neeson?’ she mused. ‘My agent said: “it’s a twohander. With you and . . . liam neeson.” i didn’t stop dancing round the kitchen table for a while! ‘nothing will ever dampen the girl in me who goes: “Woo, woo, lucky me! all this terrific work is coming my way now . . . and liam, too!” ‘Of course, you want to do a film with liam — and i hope he was dancing round the kitchen when he heard it was with me. He’d better have bloody been!’ Her delight in appearing opposite Mr neeson reminded me of viola Davis, who last year described her ‘middle-aged female joy’ when she got the chance to appear opposite — and shoot a sex scene with — the actor in Widows.
There’s been an increase, recently, in films that feature roles ‘ for women my age’, Manville noted.
‘There’s a real hunger for women to see stories where they feel they’re represented.’
Mum was a big hit for Manville, as was BBC One’s World On Fire — which has been renewed for a second season.
There’s other major work in her diary, too; including leading Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The visit, or The Old lady Comes To Call which Jeremy Herrin will direct on the Olivier stage from January 31.