Interview with Lesley Manville: "Me Too needs to keep shouting as loud as it possibly can!"

We 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 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 know 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 quite rightly 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 Oldman, and has long been respected for her incredible work in theatre, television and film - including her career-long collaborations with acclaimed director Mike Leigh.

"I'm so indebted to him," Manville gushes. "I met him when I was 22 and I don't know if I would be the actor I am today without him having been such a force of good in my career. He taught me fundamentally that I could play characters that are unlike me, which up until that point, I didn't think I could do. I didn't have a breadth of understanding about my own capabilities, so he brought that to my table.

"Every job with him has been glorious, whether it's a big role like in Another Year, or a smaller supporting role in something like Secrets & Lies. I've had the most amazing experiences because he's never asked me to play the same character twice. It's really been the most brilliant creative influence throughout my career, and I hope there's another thing we do together in the future."

Though Manville has always been doing respected work, the actress is now enjoying what she refers to as a "golden period", receiving acclaim both in the UK and internationally. As well as Phantom Thread, she has recently starred in the BBC sitcom Mum, appeared in Disney's Maleficent and its sequel, and starred in an international touring production of Eugene O'Neill's magnum opus, Long Day's Journey Into Night.

"I'm working too much, I've got too much work on!" she laughs. "One can only be grateful."

Manville's latest film, Ordinary Love, is a beautifully quiet drama that stars Manville and Liam Neeson as a married couple who are left reeling when Manville's character is diagnosed with breast cancer. Neeson and Manville share the warm, teasing chemistry of a couple who not only love each other, but like each other immensely - though the weight of the diagnosis destabilises their easy routine. Written by Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty and loosely based on the experiences of McCafferty and his wife Peggy who survived breast cancer, the film feels realistic, grounded and emotional, which is exactly what attracted Manville to the role.

"Then there's the Liam Neeson element, which is not be sniffed at!" Manville laughs. "I was asked did I want to do virtually a two-hander with Liam Neeson, and my hand shot up immediately - yes please! But it's a beautiful film and I think it very delicately and accurately conveys what it's like to go through this experience. You don't want to make a film about such a difficult subject and get the factual stuff wrong or get the procedural stuff inaccurate. But we had real technicians and nurses when my character is having her biopsy and chemo, so they could really talk me through what it would be like, to help me to play it. And there's hardly anyone who isn't affected by cancer in some way in their lives, so it's important."

Neeson and Manville are lovely on-screen together, showcasing the quiet, ordinary joys of life - the jokes, the dinners, the affection, the contentment - and how their characters try to keep valuing their everyday life together, even when going through something as devastating as cancer. Manville is proud of and grateful for the intimacy she and Neeson conveyed onscreen.

"Directors just have to put out the offers and hope that the chemistry is going to be there, because you can't predict that," she notes. "I think they knew Liam and I were both nice, easygoing people and neither of us have a reputation for being difficult, but we didn't know each other beforehand. Liam lives in New York and I was doing a play in New York a few months before we started shooting the film, so we met up and had some time together. But it was - and I think Liam would say the same - just easy to be with each other, the chemistry was there. Which is lucky, because we have to do such intimate scenes, and I felt very easy in his company."

One quiet revolution of Ordinary Love is how the relationship between Neeson and Manville's characters bucks absurd and pervasive Hollywood conventions. Manville, now 63, is an age-appropriate partner for 67 year old Neeson - a ridiculously rare occurrence onscreen - and the characters also have sex, which Manville was delighted to see.

"Bring it on!" she exclaims. "Isn't it great? It's a really beautiful sex scene, because the next day she's having her double mastectomy, and it's a beautiful farewell to the breasts that have been such a part of her life and his life. It's wonderful, and Liam had a really lovely idea for the scene to remove the headscarf that she's wearing. It's a lovely way of saying 'I love you as you are. You're going through this, you haven't got your hair, but you're beautiful to me however you are.' I thought that was a really great thing to have done. It's a deeply tender, beautiful scene. And absolutely let's have more sex scenes with people over 50, because what do you know - it happens! Shocking! What will the 25 year olds say, they didn't know people carry on having sex!"

Hollywood is not a kind industry to women, particularly to actresses over 30, and Manville has been determined to seek out interesting roles for women her age. She has found them - but acknowledges that they are few and far between.

"I'm having a golden time at the moment, but I do know a lot of my peers are fed up being offered The Wife or The Mother," shares Manville. "These characters have no dimension and aren't the driving force of the piece; they're just serving the male characters. But I do think it's slowly getting better because the film industry is realising that if you put an interesting story with a woman over 40 on the screen, people will want to go and see it - they've proven that, in their droves. And it can be any kind of film, from Mamma Mia to Ordinary Love. They're films that are properly representing my generation, and aren't just pigeonholing them into uninteresting roles. It is getting better, but there needs to be more progress."

The actress has been keenly observing movements such as Time's Up and Me Too, and says she was lucky to have had a career free from any harassment or outright discrimination.

"Thankfully, I haven't had any experiences like that, but I was working a lot during the mid-to-late '70s and certainly there was a different atmosphere surrounding young actresses who were working, myself included," she reveals. "I've thankfully never been on the receiving end of anything that made me feel really uncomfortable, but there was just an atmosphere of sexism and it's taken way too long for that to start to be addressed. Me Too needs to keep shouting as loud as it possibly can."

You can read the interview with Lesley Manville in the Hot Press Annual – in which we distill the highlights and low-points of the year, across 132 vital, beautifully designed pages. Starring heroes of the year Fontaines D.C. on the front we cover Music, Culture, Sport, Film, Politics, the Environment and much, much more. Buy this superb publication direct from Hot Press here.