Saucy at 60
Lesley Manville on her new role
The list of well-known actresses who loudly lament the drying up of offers, once they reach midlife, is long. But 60-year-old Lesley Manville’s trajectory is heading in the opposite direction. Highly rated by her peers for decades – she has worked extensively with Mike Leigh on film and on stage – yet never quite a household name, she has become a late bloomer, landing ever-more prominent roles.
There was her Bafta-nominated turn as the fragile but effective DCI Chrissie Read in the acclaimed BBC detective drama River. Then this month sees her starring alongside Samantha Morton and Downton’s Jessica Brown Findlay as a high-class madam, all powdered face, elaborate wigs and plunging necklines, in ITV’s new raunchy Georgian romp, Harlots. And next up, she is playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in his return to the screen after a five-year absence.
“Whenever I hear someone saying how hard it gets for actresses past a certain age,” Manville confesses, almost in a whisper, as if saying it out loud might break the spell of her current run of success, “I want to lean back against the wall and say, ‘Please don’t make me feel guilty.’ I don’t know why I am having this amazing heyday.”
Appropriately enough for someone who has climbed her way, branch by branch, to the very top of her professional tree, Manville is talking to me on the glass-walled penthouse floor of the ITV tower block, sky-high above the Thames.
Discreetly dressed in a wellcut brown pin-striped suit, she is a million miles away from Lydia Quigley, her character in Harlots, owner-proprietor of the “House of Earthly Delights”, with her painted-on veneer of culture as she trades ruthlessly in female flesh.
“Harlots is quite rude,” she acknowledges with a laugh, “but I’m not involved in a lot of that. One has to have a bit of decorum once one is over a certain age. But the young girls are busy. And the boys, too. Lots of boys’ bottoms bonking away furiously.”
If the content may raise eyebrows, the perspective of the series – written by Moira Buffini and directed by Coky Giedroyc, sister of Bake Off’s Mel – is from the women’s point of view. “It is never a man being subjective about them, which I think is crucial and what drew me to it.
“One in five women in London in that period were prostitutes because, to take care of their own destiny, they had to be. They were tough.”
And underneath her delicate, tiny frame and unaffected warmth, there is an undercurrent of toughness in Manville, too, that could partly account for her late-blooming career.
Brought up on a council estate in Hove by her taxi driver dad – “he was a showman, a great crooner in the Tony Bennett mode” – and her ex-ballet dancer mum, she went to the local secondary modern and then on to stage school at 15.
While there, in 1974, Arlene Phillips tried to persuade her to join her new, saucy dance troupe, Hot Gossip, but Manville declined.
“I had my head screwed on even then,” she reflects. “I knew it would be fame for 15 minutes.” Instead, she set about, as she puts it, learning her craft and working her way up, first with a two-year stint on Emmerdale – “it was still Emmerdale Farm back then” – which, as an added bonus, earned her the deposit to buy her first flat. Then she moved on to the Royal Shakespeare Company, followed by a dozen years at London’s avant-garde Royal Court Theatre, premiering new writing.
It was all, she reflects, a world away from how today’s generation of young actors come to prominence.
“There has been this seismic shift. When I was in my twenties and thirties, it never crossed our minds to be famous, but with young people now in this profession, it’s all most of them seem to want.
“Young actresses, some of them very good friends, say things that make me boil – ‘Oh well, she got that part because she had more followers on Twitter.’ Kill me now!”
Does she tweet? “No,” she all but shouts back. Or have a website? “Why would I want a website?” She looks incredulous. “Why would I want people to know where I am going and what I am doing. I want to be anonymous. As soon as people know everything about you, are they going to believe you are the character you are playing?”
Manville could have used her private life to promote her career.
Back in the midEighties, she was married to Gary Oldman just as he hit the big-time with two standout roles as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. Soon after their son Alfie (now a cameraman) was born in 1986, however, Oldman decamped to Hollywood. “I don’t mind people knowing that I was married to Gary,” she says calmly, when his name comes up, as inevitably it must in interviews. “We loved each other and we got married for all the right reasons but, like lots of people’s marriages, it didn’t last.” And that – politely but firmly – is all she is going to say. There was a subsequent shortlived marriage to actor Joe Dixon, but Manville has raised her son alone. “I realise now, at this point in my life, that I’ve had very little done for me ever, and that’s not a sob story. It’s not great, but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to sound bitter about it. “Look, I like men a lot,” she adds, with a giggle. “I think they are great.” But there were times, she admits, when it was hard. “I was working mainly in theatre until my son was three. There was none of this, ‘I’ll have a sleep during the day because I did a play last night.’ I was up with him in the night because he was a baby. I’d get up at 6am and look after him all day and run the house, do the shopping and cooking and everything, and then at about five o’clock in the afternoon a nanny would come and I’d go off and do Top Girls or Miss Julie at the Royal Court. Light plays,” she jokes, “at the end of a long day.” Her focus is now switching to her new role with Daniel Day-Lewis, in a film directed by sixtime Oscar nominee Paul Thomas Anderson. The refreshingly forthright Manville goes suddenly coy. “All I am allowed to say at the moment is that it deals with Fifties fashion and that I am filming for the next 14 weeks.”
How does the prospect of finding fame in the States strike her? If her last brush – when she was hotly tipped for an Oscar nomination for her role as depressed, distraught and drunken Mary in Mike Leigh’s 2010 film Another Year – is anything to go by, it could be challenging. “I went over there to do a round of interviews and all they kept saying to me was, ‘Why did you look so terrible in the film?’ I thought it was obvious. That was my character.”
What they were really asking her, she eventually decided, was why she hadn’t had cosmetic surgery. “In Harlots, I have all this white make-up. Christ Almighty, it makes me look 145, the way it seeps into your skin, but Botox – never and never will I.
“You can strike me down dead if I ever have any Botox, fillers or plumper-uppers.”
The chances of her words coming back to haunt are, I suspect, zero.
Having made it thus far on her own terms, Lesley Manville is unlikely to start doing what is expected of her now.
Harlots starts on Monday at 10pm on ITV Encore