Lesley Manville wanted to be in musicals, but that was before she started making films with Mike Leigh. Now on her seventh Leigh movie, All or Nothing, improvising is about keeping things hidden, she tells Michael Dwyer
On the last Sunday in May this year, Lesley Manville was one of many actors and directors waiting around for the telephone to ring with news of the Cannes Film Festival awards. She was widely regarded as a front-runner for the best actress award, for her deeply touching performance in Mike Leigh's honestly observed and superbly acted new film, All or Nothing, in which she plays Penny, the hard-working common-law wife of a lazy, fatalistic hackney driver (played by Timothy Spall) and the mother of their two grown-up, seriously overweight children.
As usual, the Cannes jury was keeping everyone on tenderhooks, finally delivering its verdicts to the organisers at mid-morning on the festival's closing day.
"It's such a silly system," Manville says. "You have to be packed and ready to go back if they call you, and we were booked on the one o'clock flight from London to Nice. I was sitting there, not knowing whether I would be going or not. Then, around 11.15, I got a call saying none of us had won anything. Maybe there's a view that every time Mike has had a film in Cannes, he's walked away with so many prizes. That shouldn't matter, of course, but there you go."
Some of Manville's most effective scenes in the film do not call for any dialogue, leaving her face to express everything there is to say about Penny's disappointment with her lot in life. She gets completely under Penny's skin.
"It all comes out of the process of creating the character," she says, "and none of it is conscious. You work with Mike very much on a one-to-one basis, at some length to begin with, and that relationship with Mike stays throughout the film. Whenever I have to discuss aspects of the character with him, it's always private and never with the other actors around.
"There are things that only Mike and I know about the character - things the others don't need to know. It's vital that they don't because, otherwise, the improvisations just wouldn't work. You can only trust the improvisations if you know that the other characters don't have pre-conceived notions and opinions about the hidden depths and subtexts of your character."
The preparation period for All Or Nothing began five months before shooting.
"I was in on day one at 10 in the morning," she says. "It's very intense, so you can't work on anything else during that period. There are about 16 significant characters in the film and you can't bring them in all at once. So he starts with the key characters, and then the others come in gradually. It's a very slow process of feeding other characters into your character's life. It is a major commitment, but the five months goes by just like that.
"I can't think of too many actors in England who would say no to working with Mike because, really, it's like taking a degree in acting."
Manville got into acting by fluke. Born and raised in Brighton, she originally set her sights on being an opera singer.
"I was trained to be a singer, a classical singer, and I was very good, actually. My talent was nurtured, but at the age of 16 I decided to leave school and to go to a stage school, where I could do musicals.While I was there I met a young woman who was teaching drama, and I got interested in it. Her class dealt with improvising, oddly enough, and I found I was quite good at it. That was it, really."
Lesley Manville made her professional début in a West End musical about Queen Victoria, I and Albert, directed by John Schlesinger.
"It didn't last too long, about four months, and I was in the chorus. After that, I did all sorts of things - pantomime, presenting a TV programme for children, and some acting. I just idled my way along until I met Mike Leigh. Somehow I ended up at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Mike was casting a play there. He was kind of forced to choose me for economic reasons, because I was already in the company. I did an audition with him and I really wasn't any good at all. Anyhow, he reluctantly put me into this production, which never went ahead after all, for reasons too boring to go into.
"Then Mike asked me to work with him again and we did this play for Radio 4 called Too Much of a Good Thing - and it got banned. It had a scene in it where this girl loses her virginity, and it was quite graphic in terms of what you could hear. It finally got an airing 13 years later."
It was third-time lucky when Leigh approached her to work on his BBC film, Grown-ups. It went ahead and was transmitted.
"All Or Nothing is my seventh time working with him, so he's a friend, as well."
One of her earliest roles was in the mid-1970s, when she was 19, as a character for a year on Emmerdale Farm, as it was then. In 1982, she did four episodes of Coronation Street. "I was in awe, because I had grown up watching it, and there, suddenly, I was in the Rovers Return with Julie Goodyear."
On stage, she was in the celebrated original production of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. "I was Cecile, the young woman who is deflowered. It was a heady cast - Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan, Juliet Stevenson, and believe it or not, Fiona Shaw as my mother. When we did the very first preview, I knew I was in something very special. We did it in this tin shed in Stratford, which was perfect for a play about the dirt beneath the fingernails of the French aristocracy."
Manville spent most of the 1980s on stage, most significantly at the Royal Court in the original productions of Caryl Churchill's plays, Top Girls and Serious Money, and with Gary Oldman in the acclaimed revivals of Edward Bond's Saved and The Pope's Wedding.
In 1988, shortly after she and Oldman were married, she played the wife of his suit-wearing, middle-class football hooligan in Alan Clarke's searing BBC film, The Firm.
"It was very powerful stuff, and you should see some of the stuff they cut! There was a seven-minute scene where he comes home and rapes his wife. However, at the end of the scene, they erupt into hysterical laughter and it transpires that this is what she's into."
Was it difficult for a newly married couple to film scenes of such intensity and then go home together at the end of the day?
"It was fine, we just laughed it off when we got home," she says. "Gary and I had worked together before on the Bond plays, so we knew each other on an acting level. What nobody except Gary knew when we were shooting The Firm was that I was pregnant. I was only in the early stages, but we didn't want Alan or anyone to get nervous."
Most recently, Manville and her All Or Nothing co-star, Timothy Spall were reunited for Bodily Harm, a two-part Channel 4 drama to be broadcast next week.
"Once again it's about a family in crisis," she says, "but it's very different territory for Tim and me. We're playing a couple again, a married couple this time. He's a commodities broker and they're well-off. She's a party organiser, a peroxide blonde dripping in Versace. But they have a very different set of problems. It's a heavy, heady piece again."
Bodily Harm will be shown by Channel 4 on Monday and Tuesday. All Or Nothing will be released here on Friday