Actress Lesley Manville: "I want to go dancing and drink too much"
She has an extraordinary work ethic. “Exceptional stamina,” she says. While performing last year as a morphine addict opposite Jeremy Irons in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, she spent her days filming the TV show Harlots, removing her 18th-century makeup in the car each night between the TV set and the theatre. She is perennially busy; one job is never enough.
The experience that really informed her work ethic, she says, was leaving her secondary modern aged 15, before her O-levels, to enrol at the Italia Conti stage school in London.
“There were no mobile phones. I was very much on my own. So I just rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.” She has a knack for asserting the need for no fuss while emphasising the ordeal.
“I still roll up my sleeves and get on with it. I’m never late. I always know what I’m doing. I don’t let people down on set. I’m very, very professional. I’m very pleasant,” she says, with a briskness that makes pleasantness sound highly professional. “I’m not arsey,” she adds. “You know, I don’t big it up or anything.”
“Getting on with it” is something of a mantra for Manville.
She applies the same “getting on with it” to her experience as a single mother. Her first husband, Gary Oldman, left when their son, Alfie, was three months old. Although she says: “We’re friends. We like each other. It’s nothing horrible,” it is also true that early parenthood brought terrific challenges.
“Getting on with it” is also, apparently, a favourite phrase of Mike Leigh; Manville has worked on 11 of his films, more than any other actor. “We have said time and again in our lives, in our friendship, in our working thing: ‘Just get on with it,’” she says.
...buses are becoming trickier for Manville. It’s not just the “oomska oomska oomska” of tinny music emitted by other people’s headphones, which “irritates the fuck out of her” and is turning the public space into a private entertainment zone and spoiling the opportunity for earwigging.
This is “a golden period”, she says, in which “film companies and television companies see there is a market” for strong female characters beyond the age of 40. “I’d just like there to be more of it, so that my girlfriends and peers and colleagues who are my age but not enjoying the kind of halcyon days I’m enjoying can share in it, too. More,” she says. “More, more, more. It’s important for young people to see that older people have not turned off a button and become this kind of muted, non-feeling entity.” She is speaking quickly now, in long sentences that showcase the kind of stamina for which she is known. “I do want to go out dancing and get sweaty and drink too much and go home at three in the morning, and I do want to have sex, and I do want to dress how I want to dress, and I want to have a life and be able to choose what I want to do; and I am over 60.”
She thinks it is a pity that actors who try to circumvent the natural ageing process with Botox don’t take the same advice. “Chrissake, get on and deal with it!” she says. “We’re going to die, we’re going to get older … I just don’t think some of them realise how silly it is. Not just how they look - you know, those foreheads that don’t move. But the whole notion of it. Being 80 and looking 40. Highly intelligent women. But I understand the fragility.”
She once said that single parenthood provokes introspection, but she sounds very sociable to me.>
“I am. But I spend a lot of time on my own and I need it,” she says. “I am very inward-looking. I listen to my own voice and instincts. I’m very single-minded, but I hope not in an arrogant way. I’m just incredibly self-sufficient.”
Older people often have certain things they like to do at set times, she says, and this is how her preferences have hardened. She dislikes it when people send a car for her. “I really want to drive myself to work. I like to start the day in my own space.” She says taxis “don’t sit well” - another favourite phrase - while fidgeting in her seat, as if the very thought makes it difficult to get comfortable.
She likes to make her own lunch, apply her own makeup and answer her own emails. She doesn’t have a personal assistant, staff being another thing that doesn’t sit right. “I’ve got nobody at home looking after me,” she says, in a voice that seems to invite a morsel of pity without a yearning for change. If a driver is absolutely necessary, she tells them straight away: “Hello, lovely to meet you. We’re going to blah-de-blah. Please don’t drive too fast, ’cause I don’t like it.”
Eschewing some of the perks of the job is about more than wanting an ordinary life, though. For Manville, it is a professional choice. There are disadvantages in the “rarified” life. From earwigging on the bus (“heaven”), to singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow by way of thanks to the grocery boy when she was a kid, she has had a life gilded by the joy of unvarnished experiences. “Because of the life I had, and the life I continue to have, I understand people quite well - the essence of people - and then convey that,” she says. “So I think I have a humanity.”
- Extracts; source
The experience that really informed her work ethic, she says, was leaving her secondary modern aged 15, before her O-levels, to enrol at the Italia Conti stage school in London.
“There were no mobile phones. I was very much on my own. So I just rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.” She has a knack for asserting the need for no fuss while emphasising the ordeal.
“I still roll up my sleeves and get on with it. I’m never late. I always know what I’m doing. I don’t let people down on set. I’m very, very professional. I’m very pleasant,” she says, with a briskness that makes pleasantness sound highly professional. “I’m not arsey,” she adds. “You know, I don’t big it up or anything.”
“Getting on with it” is something of a mantra for Manville.
She applies the same “getting on with it” to her experience as a single mother. Her first husband, Gary Oldman, left when their son, Alfie, was three months old. Although she says: “We’re friends. We like each other. It’s nothing horrible,” it is also true that early parenthood brought terrific challenges.
“Getting on with it” is also, apparently, a favourite phrase of Mike Leigh; Manville has worked on 11 of his films, more than any other actor. “We have said time and again in our lives, in our friendship, in our working thing: ‘Just get on with it,’” she says.
...buses are becoming trickier for Manville. It’s not just the “oomska oomska oomska” of tinny music emitted by other people’s headphones, which “irritates the fuck out of her” and is turning the public space into a private entertainment zone and spoiling the opportunity for earwigging.
This is “a golden period”, she says, in which “film companies and television companies see there is a market” for strong female characters beyond the age of 40. “I’d just like there to be more of it, so that my girlfriends and peers and colleagues who are my age but not enjoying the kind of halcyon days I’m enjoying can share in it, too. More,” she says. “More, more, more. It’s important for young people to see that older people have not turned off a button and become this kind of muted, non-feeling entity.” She is speaking quickly now, in long sentences that showcase the kind of stamina for which she is known. “I do want to go out dancing and get sweaty and drink too much and go home at three in the morning, and I do want to have sex, and I do want to dress how I want to dress, and I want to have a life and be able to choose what I want to do; and I am over 60.”
She thinks it is a pity that actors who try to circumvent the natural ageing process with Botox don’t take the same advice. “Chrissake, get on and deal with it!” she says. “We’re going to die, we’re going to get older … I just don’t think some of them realise how silly it is. Not just how they look - you know, those foreheads that don’t move. But the whole notion of it. Being 80 and looking 40. Highly intelligent women. But I understand the fragility.”
She once said that single parenthood provokes introspection, but she sounds very sociable to me.>
“I am. But I spend a lot of time on my own and I need it,” she says. “I am very inward-looking. I listen to my own voice and instincts. I’m very single-minded, but I hope not in an arrogant way. I’m just incredibly self-sufficient.”
Older people often have certain things they like to do at set times, she says, and this is how her preferences have hardened. She dislikes it when people send a car for her. “I really want to drive myself to work. I like to start the day in my own space.” She says taxis “don’t sit well” - another favourite phrase - while fidgeting in her seat, as if the very thought makes it difficult to get comfortable.
She likes to make her own lunch, apply her own makeup and answer her own emails. She doesn’t have a personal assistant, staff being another thing that doesn’t sit right. “I’ve got nobody at home looking after me,” she says, in a voice that seems to invite a morsel of pity without a yearning for change. If a driver is absolutely necessary, she tells them straight away: “Hello, lovely to meet you. We’re going to blah-de-blah. Please don’t drive too fast, ’cause I don’t like it.”
Eschewing some of the perks of the job is about more than wanting an ordinary life, though. For Manville, it is a professional choice. There are disadvantages in the “rarified” life. From earwigging on the bus (“heaven”), to singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow by way of thanks to the grocery boy when she was a kid, she has had a life gilded by the joy of unvarnished experiences. “Because of the life I had, and the life I continue to have, I understand people quite well - the essence of people - and then convey that,” she says. “So I think I have a humanity.”
- Extracts; source