Before meeting Lesley Manville, I watch a preview of Citadel, the new Amazon spy thriller in which she stars alongside Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra and Stanley Tucci. It’s glossy, supercharged, high-body-count, fights-to-the-death-in-speeding-train-lavatories TV. Punches have squelch sound effects. Hitmen are covered in blood splatter. Chopra is tossed about like a rag doll. Manville’s scenes are sedate by comparison. She plays an “incredibly bad” UK ambassador to the US – bowing to the boilerplate that the UK government is upper class, sadistic, speaking only in clipped Anglo-Saxon. All well and good. Until I ask Manville her view of the violence. She frowns. “Oh,” she says. “I can’t watch violence. I don’t watch any.”
“It’s a big topic, really,” she says. Possibly “too big” to cover here. She hesitates, perhaps sensing a conflict between principles and practice. She offers a disclaimer – she hasn’t seen the final edit of Citadel, isn’t certain of the full extent of the violence. Then: “I hate it, basically. I get offended by it. I really think it’s bad news. People talk about Game of Thrones. I’ve never been able to watch it. Also, it’s pretty violent towards women. I really don’t want to see that.” She shudders when I mention Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She watched it in Los Angeles with Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Phantom Thread, for which she was nominated for an Oscar in 2018. Upsetting? “Yes. Yes.” Her position is not merely squeamish, it’s political. “I’m a woman, for a start. Being a woman is a political position,” she argues. “You need to understand what’s going on, the risks, what you’re up against.”
Why, she wants to know, when we’ve worked so hard with #MeToo and #TimesUp, ensuring women are better respected, better paid, visible as they age, has this ultraviolence towards women become mainstream? “It’s as if we were doing all the work over here, and, while our attention is focused on that, they’re undermining it over there. Well, haaaaang on. It was not a trade-off.”
Of course, Manville is quick to acknowledge the benefits of what she calls the “shifting tide” in Hollywood. Here she is at 67, enjoying a career that has sprawled in ways inconceivable even 10 years ago. “I’m working so much. Who would have thought? I imagined that when I got to my 60s [getting parts] would be really hard.” Right now she has two series running: Citadel and Magpie Murders on BBC One. She is simultaneously filming season six of The Crown – she is Princess Margaret opposite Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth – and Disclaimer, a miniseries directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Two more films are to come: The Critic, written by Patrick Marber, and Back to Black, the Amy Winehouse biopic in which she plays the late singer’s grandmother, Cynthia. Last year, her lead role in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, the story of a cleaner, heart set on a Dior dress, saw her up for a Golden Globe.
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To achieve this formidable output and overlapping commitments, Manville is obsessive. She says life admin – endless emails and so on, which she deals with herself at home in London – is an irritant. “If I’m focusing on a script, my desk needs to be clear. I don’t want outstanding business.” She does her own accounts, has done since she was 16. She’s pin-straight while saying this, her deportment betraying her dance training, and speaks deliberately, as if reading in church. In front of her is a small cake. Despite four hours of photoshoot, she won’t eat while we talk. “That would be rude.” Instead, she gets up to tell the packers-up to keep the noise down. She is slight, but her voice carries like a military battery. “That’s better,” she says of the instant quiet.
A PA would improve things “enormously”. “Trouble is, I know I’d interfere. I’d think, have they done that? Have they done it properly? What about that email?” She’s been known to follow her cleaner around doing it all again. Terrible, she knows, but “I have a control-freak side to me”.
For this reason, she cannot conceive of sharing her life. She’s twice divorced. First from Gary Oldman, who ran off with Uma Thurman when their child, Alfie, was three months old (he’s now 35, and Manville has two grandchildren); then from actor Joe Dixon (2000-04). “It sounds awful and makes me sound a bit cold,” she says, “but if I don’t have somebody at home, I don’t have to consider them. While warmth and all that is wonderful for some people, I just think, ‘Well, phew. Thank goodness.’ Because I’ve got so much else to do going from job to job. I like the uncluttered nature of my life.”
She doesn’t date. “Nobody asks me. But that’s not a problem. I don’t think, come on, where are you?, because meeting someone that you like enough to say, ‘I might invest some emotion, some time in this’ is … ” She gathers her thoughts. “The cocktail of the man that I need is so difficult. They’ve got to be good at their job, really good at it. They’ve got to be funny, that’s top of the list. I know there are brilliant, funny men out there, but it’s harder as you get older. Most men my age are with someone. They tend not to be good on their own. They’re needy. They want somebody doing things for them. In that respect, I’m not their girl.”
Anyway, she’s good on her own. “Very, very.” So much so that, “I can’t work out whether I could live with somebody again.” She’s declared before that her one piece of life advice from experience is not to date an actor. Even a bad one, I tease, with fewer neuroses? “No! I wouldn’t want to go out with a bad actor. You see? My hands are tied. I don’t know what to do.” She erupts in a merry laugh. “Maybe I should go out with an accountant.”
She flaps away my question about loneliness saying: “I have great friends. Very close friends.” She considered getting a dog. She loves dogs. But that, too, would require organisation – dog-walkers, kennels, what-have-you – because of the amount she travels for work. “Right now, I can put clothes in a backpack, slam the front door and I’m off.”
I ask what she spends her money on, and she laughs and says: “Waitrose.” Then: “Clothes.” Sotto voce, she tells me: “There’s 85% off on the Outnet, FYI.” She’s also delighted with her Transport for London Freedom Pass. “Every time I touch in on the bus or tube, I think, great! All those years of national insurance paying off.”
Manville’s roles offer few clues as to who she really is. In Mike Leigh’s Another Year she is fluttery Mary, “glugging” wine, driving haphazardly, desperately lonely. In the BBC sitcom Mum she’s widowed, pained, but ever patient. In Phantom Thread she’s composed and softly powerful, more than holding her own against Daniel Day-Lewis. In The Crown her Princess Margaret is fabulous, heartbroken and troubled.
I wonder if her genius is in her eyes. They are deep, grey, damp; have limitless capacity for emotion. She confirms that one strength is being more than ordinarily attuned to others. “I notice somebody who is not having a good time,” she says, “somebody who is in some way in agony.” It might be on the bus. It might be on set. At school she remembers being taken to one side in an RE class. “There must have been a discussion and I said something, I don’t know what. But it displayed some unusual understanding of the human condition. Afterwards, the teacher said, ‘Is everything all right at home?’ I said, ‘Yes. Thank you, Mrs Rawlings. Everything’s lovely.’ But I’ve had those antennae for human chaos and emotional turmoil all my life.”
Home really was lovely, by the way. She grew up in Brighton, youngest of three. Manville clasps her hands at the memory of her parents – Ron, a cabbie who liked a flutter, and Jean, a former ballerina. She remembers making her mum up as Cleopatra, giant black sweeps in the corner of her eyes, and Ron returning from snooker at the British Legion to a wife who, “literally looked like Elizabeth Taylor”. There were no books, but plenty of “homely love and support”. “I have friends who grew up with nannies and never sat down with their parents for a meal.” At night watching telly, “I’d lie across my mum’s lap and she’d tickle my back. Then I’d make my dad do it as well. It was sweet, normal and wholesome. There was pizzazz about them, too. My mum was glamorous. She’d wear a roll-on [corset], you know, like a swimsuit: bra, stockings, suspenders and all. I’d think, why are you putting that on to do the hoovering and cook dinner? But she was always looking … ” she clicks her tongue and puts her thumb and forefinger together.
Her family were Labour, so I ask what she thinks of Keir Starmer. “Sometimes I think, well, he’s the only alternative, but I do like him. There’s a lot of criticism against him. But I like hearing him speak. I know his history; he’s used to that. But he can form a sentence. And he’s quite eloquent. I think that’s really important. So, yes … that’s where I am: I like him.”
Manville has two sisters: Diana was four years older, Brenda, nine. Brenda left home to marry young, says Manville, but ultimately had a life of tragedy. Neither Brenda nor her husband knew he carried Huntington’s, or that he had passed the disease on to their children. He died aged 40. Brenda nursed their daughters until they died (one at 50, the other in her early 30s). On Desert Island Discs in February, Manville broke down when she talked about how Brenda, who died of a brain tumour in 2018, “had a really difficult life”. “How you begin to deal with losing your children, God knows.” Today, she says: “If you looked under the microscope at Brenda’s lot, it wasn’t great. But she was always celebratory, always wanting to push the boat out. She travelled a lot and would’ve done more if she hadn’t got a brain tumour. It was just awful what happened to her. It has obviously made me very grateful for having a healthy child. But she always made me think, don’t shy away from doing what you want to do. Have the adventures. I’ve been through run-of-the-mill things – divorce, heartache, all that regular stuff. What she went through was exceptional. She was quite an extraordinary woman.”
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Adventuring is in the genes. She was an independent teen, trudging off to Italia Conti aged 15 in her miniskirt, blue cape, white leather boots over the knee. She could sing, she knew that – she even considered opera. Her teacher Arlene Phillips – later of Strictly fame – told her she could also dance. Manville declined her offer of a spot in the troupe Hot Gossip, but otherwise took “any job that came along”, including Emmerdale Farm. “I had this funny career from 16 to 22. Quite showbiz, jazz hands, panto. I thought, I must perform.”
Her feminist education she owes to playwrights such as Caryl Churchill and Andrea Dunbar, whom Manville worked with at the Royal Court Theatre aged 23. “It was very informative. I understood feminism, how powerful I could be. How I could say no, if it was what I wanted to say.” She read Edna O’Brien (“all those Irish girls trying to break free”), Françoise Sagan, Margaret Drabble and went to Greenham Common. “For the day,” she clarifies, “to research a play. I didn’t camp for two years.”
It was the director Mike Leigh who pushed her into parts beyond the limits of her experience. He taught her to improvise, to focus, and, perhaps most importantly, that she was talented. “I thought, right, I can do this. I can spread my net. I can play this woman and that woman; different classes, different types. It was exhausting, but exhilarating.” Leigh is similar to her in his meticulous approach. “His thoroughness appealed to me – he leaves no stone unturned.” She is proud of their association, reminding me that she is the actor he has worked with most. She also delights unashamedly in his approval. Only the other day, having watched something she had done on TV, he emailed. “I’ve saved the email because I think, yeah, that’s all I want, really: the thumbs up from Mike.”
What Leigh is not responsible for is her stamina. Yes, she knows it’s unusual. Yes, it possibly does come down to extra-durable genetic material. “Certainly, I have something funny going on inside.” She regales me with the times she has skipped through scheduling that would leave most of us dead. For instance: filming the TV series Harlots (playing a brothel madam) in 2018, at the same time as her 10-week stint in London’s West End playing Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s gruelling Long Day’s Journey Into Night. On days the jobs overlapped, she rose at 5.30am, put in a full day on a set near Watford, then travelled to the Wyndham’s theatre for curtain up. If she timed it right, she snatched an hour’s sleep in her dressing room. Then she was in the car, up to Watford, in bed after midnight.
Leaving aside the lack of sleep and the white-knuckle timetable, how did she switch between these two roles? Oh, she says, one of the first things Leigh taught her was the importance of not taking a role “home” – especially the complicated women he had her inhabit. “Anyway, I can never not be Lesley 100% because I am Lesley. But the discipline I learned with Mike stayed.”
The flipside is that when Oldman left her quite literally holding the baby in 1989, it was her personal life she had to switch off. “I was in Glasgow for my first job since giving birth. We were opening the play at nine o’clock. [Oldman had] agreed to come to Glasgow to look after Alfie while I worked. But then he got on a plane and that was it. Gone. I had nobody to look after my child. Absolutely nobody. And I was in shock.” She had thought she and Oldman would be together for ever. Nevertheless, she knew she couldn’t fall apart. She knew she had to keep working.
She grabbed the Yellow Pages and found one listing under nanny agencies. The woman on the telephone promised to fix up an interview the following week. “No,” Manville choked. “I need someone in 10 minutes. And she’s got to be qualified because this is a baby.” Incredibly, they were able to find someone. “They sent a complete angel. I wish I knew where she was now and I could … I must have been such a wreck.” She has no idea how she kept going, she says, but it taught her incredible discipline about work. Also: “I found my voice and speak up for myself now. I absolutely would not put up with the mess that I had to deal with then. I wouldn’t even get into those situations where I could have had the rug pulled from under me so severely.”
Now her “bullshitometer” is pretty damn acute. She won’t stand for nonsense in Hollywood, either. What constitutes Hollywood bullshit? Has she encountered it?
“Yes. And you just kind of … ” she demurs. “Maybe they are perfectly lovely and really talented,” she starts, as if prepared to be diplomatic, “but you just don’t gel. Normally, if I’m not gelling with someone, it’s because they’re not a very nice person. Or they might just be a bit of a pain, or a bit up themselves, a bit full of themselves. You never get any of that with Mike [Leigh] or Paul [Thomas Anderson], or most of the people I work with.”
Perhaps conscious this might put the cat among the pigeons, she enacts her familiar backpedal, assuring me that she has been lucky and “avoided the bullshit”.
While her career is “fun” – don’t get her wrong, she is having the time of her life – she insists it’s important not to be complacent. We must resist the creep of ultraviolence against women into mainstream film, she says, adding that she doesn’t have time to say everything she’d like on the subject today. Just: “You need to keep fighting. It’s been a slow battle over hundreds of years for women to get where they are today. It’s unbelievable how far we still have to go.”
• This article was amended on 22 and 23 April 2023. In the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, Manville plays the singer’s grandmother, Cynthia, not her mother, Janis. And Andrea Dunbar was a playwright, not a director.
• Citadel starts on Amazon Prime on 28 April
