FEATURE LESLEY MANVILLE
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Lesley Manville discusses her latest film Ordinary Love, a powerful and emotional drama in which she stars opposite Liam Neeson. INTERVIEW ROE McDERMOTT
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e haven’t even spoken yet and actress Lesley Manville has already landed me in trouble. Not intentionally, nor recently, to be fair. In 2011, when the nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards were announced, I was asked to speak about the nominations on the radio. I spent so long angrily ranting that Manville hadn’t received a nomination for her sublime performance as a lonely, desperate divorcee in Mike Leigh’s quiet drama Another Year that I barely discussed the actual nominations, annoying the producers – but I stand by my rage. Manville was finally nominated for an Oscar last year for her brilliantly scalding performance in Phantom Thread – but in my heart, she will always be “Two-time Oscar nominee Lesley Manville.” Manville laughs appreciatively when I tell her this. “Thank you!” she says, with the modest air of someone who values the compliment – while also agreeing that
"If you put an interesting story with a woman over 40 on the screen, people will want to go and see it" 24
her performance deserved a nod. “Who knows what goes through the voters’ minds, but I know it was a complicated one for Sony Classic Pictures who were distributing it. It was looking promising that year that I was going to end up with a nomination, but no-one knew whether to put me as a Supporting Actress or a Leading Actress. I’m an Academy member myself now, and you can put anybody in whatever category you think. I kind of feel maybe that’s where I came unstuck – you can get a split vote where a number of people put you in Supporting and others put you in Leading, and that’s it, you’re done for!” “But listen,” she says conspiratorially, “I got the nomination for Phantom Thread – payback time!” This introduction is Manville in a nutshell: warm, mischievous, assured, humble, and always authentically herself. “It was a great film to make,” she enthuses. “Paul Thomas Anderson is heralded as one of the world’s great film directors, and quite rightly, he’s wonderful. I had 14 glorious weeks of filming that with Daniel Day Lewis and Paul, so it was one of the stand-out experiences of my career. The Oscar nomination was just the icing on the cake. I didn’t grow up in a culture that expected Oscar nominations, so to get one was just thrilling!” Manville may not have grown up in a culture of awards, but she’s growing into it beautifully. The Brighton-born actress started acting as a teenager, was married to Gary
