It’s hard to imagine an actor more industrious than Lesley Manville. Especially one who has been nominated for an Oscar (Phantom Thread) and numerous Baftas (The Crown, Sherwood, Mum), won an Olivier for her turn in Ibsen’s Ghosts, charmed the socks off audiences in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, has a CBE (surely a damehood can’t be far off) and is generally one of our most beloved performers.
“You’re my day off!” she says cheerfully, sitting in a west London brasserie not far from where she lives. “I’m solidly booked up until the middle of 2026.” Warm, funny and fizzing with energy, Manville, 68, looks supremely elegant on this hot August morning in a long navy dress, hair swept back from her face revealing the violet-blue eyes that she used to such devastating effect when she stared straight into the camera as Cyril Woodcock in Phantom Thread.
Her nails are bright green from the Style shoot a couple of days earlier. “I love them,” she says, laughing. She loves fashion, in fact. “Always have. Since I was a kid. I remember with my first week’s wages, when I was 16 and doing a musical in the West End, I was earning $40 a week, which was a lot of money. I bought myself — it’s very unethical, and obviously I wouldn’t do it now, but at the time it wasn’t — a white rabbit fur coat.”
So she was over the moon when Loewe asked her to star in its autumn/winter campaign. “When my agent told me, apparently I just shrieked. She said, ‘I’ve never seen you so happy.’ I suppose it’s because it’s a departure. But it’s definitely, definitely because I love clothes. That’s how I treat myself, along with looking at properties.” Well, who doesn’t love a bit of Rightmoving? “Hang on, Rightmoving? Come on, I’m going to escalate you a bit. I do Modern House and Inigo every day.” But it’s very much just looking. “I wasn’t mortgage-free until I was 60. I don’t have multiple houses. No, no, no, that is just too much stress.”
Anyway, we’re here today to talk about her next four projects. “Even though I’ve got ten coming up.” Two of them, Disclaimer and Queer, actually overlapped with her filming as Princess Margaret in the final series of The Crown (do keep up). Out next month, Disclaimer is the much anticipated Apple TV+ series from the director Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Roma). The cast includes Cate Blanchett (“so lovely to work with”) and centers on two couples, each with one son; Manville plays one of the mothers. The result is thought-provoking arthouse telly at its best — and Manville is mesmerizing.
Queer is an adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel set in 1940s Mexico by the director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers). Starring Daniel Craig — with costumes by Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe, who also did the costumes for Challengers — it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be out early next year.
Then there is Oedipus — she’s playing Jocasta opposite Mark Strong in a modern-day interpretation of the Sophocles play at Wyndham’s Theatre, London. (She hasn’t been onstage since 2020: “I’m uncontrollably excited. Incontrollably excited? Whichever it is, in or un.”) And finally there is the second series of the hugely popular Sherwood, streaming on BBC iPlayer, in which her character, Julie Jackson, is “very delicately” brought together with David Morrissey’s former detective, Ian St Clair.
Has she ever struggled to find work? “I haven’t really,” Manville admits, looking slightly sheepish. She grew up in a flat in Brighton, the youngest of three daughters. Her father was a taxi driver while her mother was a dancer-turned-homemaker. “She cooked. And boy, did she cook, every day of her life. I’ve got nothing but nice memories. But then I also very happily sort of left home quite young because of my work.”
After showing a flair for singing and dancing, she got a full grant to study at the Italia Conti stage school in London, and from the age of 15 traveled up every day. “I think I was only there about nine months because then I got my first job. And then I got my first boyfriend, Peter Duncan [who went on to become a Blue Peter presenter]. We’d go to Brighton for the weekend and he’d have to sleep on a camp bed in the living room. I mean, we weren’t allowed to sleep together. Or anything risky like that. We’re still friends.”
Up until her early twenties, she did “anything and everything”. Then she met Mike Leigh and made a film with him for the BBC called Grown-Ups. “After that I knew I wanted to choose my work a bit more carefully. Because basically Mike had shown me that I could play people that weren’t like me. But the gap between making Grown-Ups and it coming out was about a year. So I waited, I tried to live very frugally. And it paid off. Because after Grown-Ups went out, literally overnight, it was like my career changed. And I was this new kid on the block.”
The only time she has really stopped working, in fact, was when she was pregnant in 1988, “because my job’s visual. So I made a film with Gary [Oldman], who was my husband at the time, when I was three months pregnant. Then I stopped working and went back to work when he [her son, Alfie] was three months old.”
That was because three months after Alfie was born, Oldman, 31 at the time, left Manville, having hotfooted it over to Hollywood and hooked up with a 19-year-old Uma Thurman. As a single mother to a young baby, how on earth did Manville make it work? “Honestly, I don’t know how I did it, but I must have had a lot of energy. And I had to work to make money. And I wanted to work. Until Alfie was three, I only did plays. And it just kind of worked out that way, with the timings. I could be with him all day. And up in the night. I’d look after him, run the house, do the shopping, then someone would come at 5:30. You know, there was never a bit of me that thought, oh I really want to go out for a drink after work and schmooze and socialize. I always used to think, I want to get home to Alfie. It wasn’t, oh I’ve got to go home because I’ve got a son and it’s only me. It was, I’m going home because I want to.”
“After Grown-Ups went out, literally overnight, it was like my career changed. And I was this new kid on the block.”
That mentality that she had to keep going, is that maybe why she’s still such a workhorse? “If I did that then, and could do it, I felt I could do anything. I’m so good at multitasking — I mean, so good. I was never going to drop the ball on being a mum.”
After Mike Leigh, the other turning point came much later on, in 2017, when she received rave reviews after starring opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. She gets different offers now. “I mean, I don’t think I would be working with Alfonso or Luca had it not been for that film. It makes you — horrible word — but more marketable.” She has also started getting recognised more. “I’ve been filming in America for three months. I was recognized there more than I thought I would be.
“I’m glad it’s happened now, not then,” she says of later-life stardom. “I mean, there’s a lot of very, very successful twenty, thirtysomethings around. And I look at them and wonder whether they’ll still be doing it in 30 years. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Because when I was in my twenties and thirties, you didn’t think about going to America at all. I was doing plays, which is what I wanted to do, with the odd telly thrown in here and there, with the odd job with Mike Leigh thrown in. When I got the America thing, it’s like …” The cherry on top? “It is. If I’d got it sooner, or people that get it sooner … If you’re the wrong personality, I think it can be dangerous. But I think how my path has ended up happens to have been brilliant.”
Family, she says, is everything. Her sister Diana regularly helped with Alfie, as did her eldest sister, Brenda, who had her own problems: her husband had Huntington’s disease, a debilitating genetic brain disorder that often doesn’t present until adulthood. By then they had two daughters, who both inherited it.
“You know, what happened to Brenda, now that’s a tragedy,” Manville says. “She had to cope with both her daughters dying and then she was ill. She had breast cancer and recovered from that, got five years in the clear, and then gets a brain tumor. Brenda is … I am going to cry,” she says, dabbing her eyes as she remembers the sister who died in 2018. “I had this little boy who was healthy. And she would never, ever make me feel bad because my son was living and her two children had died. What a life lesson that is. So I’m never going to complain about anything. Because what have I got to complain about? Nothing. I’ve had a couple of marriages that haven’t worked out [she was later married to the actor Joe Dixon for four years]. Brenda and I would always speak on a Sunday morning. And I miss those conversations because she’d always laugh about something. She was fantastic.”
Manville and her son, who is now 35, are “incredibly close. And I’ve worked with him a few times because he works on film crew. I think, what are you doing here? Oh, yes, you’re working.” He lives nearby with his wife, Sarah (“the best daughter-in-law you could ever wish for”), and two children.
Meanwhile, she is single. Would she marry again? “In some parallel universe, I meet this fantastic guy. And everything about him is marvelous. He doesn’t snore. And he doesn’t want much wardrobe space because there isn’t much left. And he gives me space to be on my own when I need to be. That would be nice, I think.”
In any case, she seems to be surrounded by friends, from old ones such as Peter Duncan and fellow thesps Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton, to younger ones such as the actress Charlene McKenna, who played opposite her in Ghosts (“I’d never lived with a woman before, but I kind of thought it would be all right with her. And it was. We had a great 18 months.”). It’s understandable, really — you wouldn’t want someone like Manville slipping from your life.
She’s even still friends with Oldman. “Our son got married this year, and there we all were being a family for the week. I mean, he’s married. He’s on his fifth wife now. And she’s lovely. But I don’t see him all the time, we mostly bump into each other at awards ceremonies. We’re both nominated for an Emmy this year. He’s the same. We’re the same. We still make each other laugh.”
In fact, her most treasured possession came from him. “Gary did it as a present for Alfie to give to me. You know when your kids are young and it’s mummy’s birthday. It’s a little frame. And you open it out and on one side is a black-and-white photo of Alfie, aged about six. And on the other side, you press the button and there’s a recorded message and it’s his little voice saying a birthday message to me. If I’m away from home, even for a night, it’s always with me. So it has sat on the bedside table of many a hotel.”
In the past couple of years the frame has done a fair amount of traveling as Manville has hardly been at home. “I’ve almost done a world tour. I’ve worked in Ireland, Greece, America, Canada, Luxembourg, Poland, Amsterdam, Rome, Morocco.”
So if you could go anywhere and do anything tomorrow, what would it be? “I’d be at home. Everyone keeps saying, oh, you need a holiday. I want to be at home. My house was refurbished two years ago and I just want to be in it. I just want to sit in my garden and have a glass of rosé. That’s a holiday.”
Charlotte Williamson is deputy editor at The Sunday Times Style
