Maxine Peake
‘Fertility is a very important conversation’
Maxine Peake hasn’t even started rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and already everyone is worried about her accent. It’s the first thing anyone asks her when she tells them she’s taking on the role of Tennessee Williams’s troubled Southern belle, Blanche DuBois.
“Every time I’ve said I’ve been doing it, people have said: ‘Oh what about the accent?’” Peake admits. “Is it because I’m a Northerner that people are concerned?”
It’s almost as if people think she’s incapable of disguising the flatness of her Bolton vowels. When she was a scholarship student at Rada, teachers told her she was “too earthy” to play certain parts. Peake’s response was a robust: “Nonsense!”
Purists needn’t worry. Peake has already started with a dialect coach and, she grins, “it won’t be Northern. It won’t be set on a terraced street in Salford”. We are talking in a posh London hotel and Peake, on a day-trip from her home in Salford, sits on a high-backed sofa in a loose white shirt and wide trousers, looking as if she’s just walked off a barricade during the French Revolution. It’s true that it takes a leap of imagination to imagine her as Blanche, with her fragile nerves and twittering femininity.
But if anyone can do it, Peake certainly can. At 42, she is one of our most gifted actresses, unafraid of taking creative risks on stage and yet equally at home in mainstream television drama.
Her big break came in Dinnerladies, the sitcom penned by the late Victoria Wood in the Nineties. Later, Peake was the brassy Veronica in Channel 4’s hit drama Shameless and feisty Martha Costello in the BBC legal series Silk. She portrayed Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer, in 2006’s chilling See No Evil and has had parts in the Red Riding trilogy, Criminal Justice
and The Village. She is one of those rare actresses who seems to have got more busy with age.
“I don’t know when that will stop,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ve got another couple of years and then I’ll be looking into the abyss.”
The only thing that’s changed is that she now gets sent a lot of scripts with pre-menopausal female characters, “desperate-for-last-stab-at-a-child kind of thing”. Fertility, she says, is “a very important conversation” and Peake has been open about enduring failed IVF treatment and two miscarriages with her art director boyfriend Pawlo Wintoniuk.
“I think women can feel ashamed,” she said in 2014, “like they’ve failed or like they’re not a woman somehow if they don’t have kids, and that’s wrong. It shocks me that in this day and age motherhood still often defines a woman.”
Today, she does not want to expand on that personal, painful time and you can understand why she might not be drawn to exploring that particular territory in drama. “It just depends if, at that time, I find that story interesting,” she says.
Peake seeks out good writing and challenging parts. And sometimes, she chooses not to play women at all: she took on Hamlet at the Royal Exchange two years ago, directed by Sarah Frankcom, who is also directing Streetcar. Peake’s bravura performance as Shakespeare’s Danish prince was described as “stunningly good” and “ferocious” by critics.
“I think it’s interesting to go from Hamlet, which was quite androgynous, to… Blanche, who seems to be, whether rightly or wrongly, described as the epitome of femininity,” she says.
An actor friend of hers told her recently: “You won’t be able to play it in brogues and wide-legged trousers, Maxine.” Peake gives a resigned little wince. “I said: ‘I know’.” She sounds disappointed.
Peake is an unlikely thespian. Born in Bolton, her father, Brian, was a lorry driver and her mother, Glynis, a part-time care-worker. Her older sister, Lisa, is a police officer.
Her parents divorced when she was nine and, six years later, when her mother moved in with a boyfriend, Peake stayed with her grandfather, Jim, so that she could continue studying for her GCSEs at the local school. Jim was a formative influence. He supported his granddaughter’s nascent ambitions to act, even when she was rejected by regional theatre companies and spent three years trying and failing to get into drama college before finally being accepted by Rada at the age of 21.
He also encouraged Peake to be politically engaged. Some of her early memories are of the 1985 miners’ strike and being petrified by the threat of nuclear war. To this day, she describes socialism as her “faith” and is a big admirer of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
“I’m behind him 100 per cent,” she says. “I’m slightly annoyed with people in my business who backed him at one point and then, for whatever reason, probably their own personal interest, have now [abandoned him].”
She saw Corbyn recently at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Devon and they “had a lovely little chat… He’s so calm and collected and seems unruffled and unfazed by [the leadership contest]. I said ‘How are you?’ and he just said ‘Weathering the storm. It’ll be alright.’ He’s just a great role model… He’s someone who’s got compassion.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Peake was known as “Red Max” at Rada but she didn’t mind. “There was a girl in my year I used to call Polly Posh Pants. We all had little nicknames for each other.”
She has always felt her politics feeds into her work: “I can’t separate the two now. If people don’t want to hire me because of it, that’s the way it’s got to be, I suppose.”
Does she think it is now more difficult for people from working-class backgrounds to break into acting? “Absolutely. It is shocking and it’s getting worse as well.” It must be slightly exhausting having to care so much all the time. Is she happy? “I don’t think sometimes ‘happy’ is always the most productive emotion. But yeah, I think in general, I am, if you look at it on paper.” Given the intensity of her focus and the power of her talent, Peake’s Blanche DuBois will doubtless be riveting to watch. When she took on Hamlet, she left the stage every night feeling physically and emotionally drained. By the end of the run, she had anaemia. This time, she intends to take things a bit easier and give herself time to unwind after each performance. “When I get home, I’ll put the kettle on. Pav would normally be in bed so I’ll have a cup of tea and a quick look at the papers in the kitchen with the radio on.” What paper, I ask? She grins, opens her satchel and takes out a copy of the Morning Star. One wouldn’t expect anything less from Red Max.