‘If I can become an actor, anyone can’

‘Ilike ordinary people,” says Brenda Blethyn. “I think they’re as fascinating as extraordinary people – and probably harder to play, actually.” Blethyn has built a career making ordinary characters feel extraordinarily alive, from suburban housewife Cynthia in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies to crotchety, unglamorous Vera in the eponymous ITV detective drama. She’s still most recognised, though, she says, for playing long-suffering lovebird Alison in Eighties sitcom Chance in a Million.

This Christmas, she will be lending her voice to the female lead in Ethel and Ernest, a featurelength animation of Raymond Briggs’s 1999 book. It traces the lives of his parents from their first encounter in 1928 – Ethel was a lady’s maid, Ernest was a milkman – to their deaths in 1971, while also taking in the 20th century’s defining events. It’s a deeply affecting portrait of a relationship, and over the course of it, we see their only child, Raymond, grow up, too.

Briggs was at the recording as Blethyn and Jim Broadbent voiced his mother and father. “When Jim and I came out from the studio, he was in tears,” Blethyn says. “He remembers his parents saying those things. He said it was just like having his parents in the room.

“What’s lovely about him is he’s not soppy, he’s honest,” she says. “It’s ‘ this is how I remember it, even if Mum and Dad say otherwise’, and I think everyone gets that.”

Briggs has been known to play the curmudgeon. He professes not to like Christmas and has described the animation of his most famous book, The Snowman, as “corny”, yet Blethyn is in no doubt as to why people have such a strong emotional response to his work. “He sees the beauty in the mundane, he sees beauty in the ordinariness of those people, and he’s not just talking about his own parents, he’s talking about people generally.”

Blethyn, who grew up in poverty in Ramsgate as the youngest of nine children, found it easy to identify with Ethel. Her own mother, Louisa, had been a maid. “They had a similar background, Mum was one of 14, Ethel was one of 11, and grew up in service. To get to be a lady’s maid was a pretty high-level achievement. My mum started downstairs and got to be a lady’s maid, too. It was a big deal.”

In the film, Ethel is ridiculed by her employer for leaving to marry Ernest at the age of 30. “Most women would have been married much younger than that,” says Blethyn, “but when she was 20, it was just at the end of the First World War – eligible men would have been few and far between. I could hear them telling Raymond the story of how they got together. I could feel his fondness for them, and regret. You can’t help but feel regret for the things that you could have done.

“Why couldn’t Ethel and Ernest have seen that art was a way forward for Raymond? Well, how could they possibly? I didn’t tell my mum and dad when I was thinking of becoming an actor until I knew for certain. But you just wish that you could have achieved more in their lifetime so that they could have benefited from it, too.

“It’s sad that Raymond’s parents died before his universally acclaimed books were written. Honestly what would Ethel be like now if she was here… all this fame, she’d be tweeting away, (she slips into Ethel’s voice): ‘Have you heard of The Snowman? That’s my Raymond.’ She’d be so proud.” It’s hard to convey just how funny Blethyn is in person. Now 70, with short hair, and spectacles that magnify her eyes as she turns her inquiring gaze on you, she’s an owlish presence. But whenever she slips into a perfectly executed vocal mannerism, which she does often, it’s hard not to laugh out loud. When I ask her how the acclaim for her performance in the 1996 film Secrets and Lies affected her career – she won the Bafta, Golden Globe and Best Actress award at Cannes, as well as receiving an Oscar nomination – she admits that it opened doors for her internationally. “People had never heard of me. Then it was [she affects an American movie-producer’s accent]: ‘ What about that little Beryl Boothright? Let’s take a look at that little English girl.’” That little English girl, born Brenda Bottle, just over nine months after V-E Day, has come a long way

Brenda Blethyn drew on her poor background for a role in Raymond Briggs’s new animation, she tells Chris Harvey