Lesley Manville on chemistry with Liam Neeson in new film ‘Ordinary Love’

Ahead of this interview, Lesley Manville took the Tube through London. As sometimes happens, a stranger approached — “very discreet, called me Miss Manville” — to tell her he was a fan of her work. With the train shrieking into Bond Street station, he asked what she was in next. At that moment, the doors opened directly opposite a platform poster for the film Ordinary Love, in which Manville stars with Liam Neeson. Her own face, four feet tall, stared back into the carriage.

“It was a gas,” she says. “Don’t let me ever get blasé about that.” Until now, she says self-mockingly, she has only appeared in small adverts for theatre productions, “the ones up the escalators”. The scale of things has expanded since her performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and since her BBC comedy Mum became a much-loved hit (the final series aired this year). “Journalists,” she says, giving the word a winking emphasis, “like to say I’m having a late-flowering career. Which is strange, given I haven’t stopped working since I was 16.”

After the Tube, she arrives at the National Theatre, a slight, almost fragile-looking woman in a black winter coat, with a quick, confident walk. In the new year, she will star here in The Visit, a staging of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s darkly comic revenge story, newly adapted by American playwright Tony Kushner.

When we meet, she has been attending a lunch for sponsors and donors to the theatre, Manville being the kind of actor who can be trusted to make high-end small talk with important guests. “You have nice wine, nice food,” she says. “It’s fine.”

Before The Visit comes Ordinary Love, a deeply human story set in Belfast about a middle-aged couple whose life unravels when Manville’s character Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer. The poster now gracing the London Underground — the two stars in contextless close-up — illustrates the challenge of marketing a film about illness and long-term relationships. The script allows Manville and Neeson a rat-tat-tat of affectionate bickering. “They’re a funny couple, aren’t they? They still like each other. Still fancy each other.” She hopes audiences respond to the ticklish thought of Neeson and herself as co-stars; he the global action movie star, she the fine-tuned portraitist. It attracted her, after all. “Between Liam and the writing, it’s not a job where you’re going to say ‘No, I really must do the Cadbury Creme Egg advert instead.’ ”

Yet at the centre of the film is the existential reminder that even the closest couples are ultimately made up of two separate journeys. “We come in and we leave alone. Horrible, isn’t it? Yeah. I feel that very strongly.”

Manville smiles, as she often does and her characters do too, women whose default friendly bearings have a million emotionally precise calibrations. Those intricate smiles are much in evidence in Ordinary Love. “The aim is small but epic. You want the audience to read our faces.” She and Neeson had never met before he asked her to co-star in the film with him. Rehearsal was minimal. “It’s a case of ‘OK, you’ve been married for 30 years and . . . action!’ I could see people on set thinking ‘Christ, Lesley and Liam better have chemistry.’ Because bad chemistry is always possible, and then what do you do?” Has she experienced that with a co-star before? The question dangles. She bursts out laughing. “I couldn’t possibly say.” But if she had? “Then I make it fine.” Instantly, she edits herself. “All parties make it fine.”

Within her industry, Manville has a name for staunch professionalism. She is punctual and courteous to all, favouring public transport over chauffeured cars. For much of her career she was a single parent, raising her now adult son Alfie from her marriage to actor Gary Oldman. She herself left home at 16 to start acting. Now 63, she has a certain air of self-containment. The part she plays in Ordinary Love could be hard psychological terrain. At the end of each day she returned to her hotel, talked to friends, shook off the angst. “I’m good at being in it when I’m in it — I mean, utterly in it — and as soon as I hear ‘cut’, I’m also good at going off to have a biscuit.”

It’s a case of “OK, you’ve been married for 30 years and . . . action!” I could see people on set thinking “Christ, Lesley and Liam better have chemistry

Manville grew up in a Brighton council house, the daughter of a taxi driver father and one-time dancer mother. She left home young, she says, simply to get on with life as a performer. She took every acting job she could — musicals, pantomimes, the rural TV soap Emmerdale Farm. An unexpected twist arrived when Mike Leigh cast her in his 1980 TV film Grown-Ups. “Before Mike, it had never occurred to me not to do girls next door, characters who were exactly like me.”

A different professional life took shape, one of forward-thinking plays at London’s celebrated Royal Court — but Manville felt uneasy among her new collaborators, acutely conscious of not having been to university. Finally, rehearsing the 1987 debut of Caryl Churchill’s stock market critique Serious Money, she mustered the nerve to tell the playwright her own ideas for her character. It worked: Churchill rewrote her part. “That was a turning point. Until then, I’d always felt intellectually inferior.”

If a star was not yet born, a subtly spectacular actor grew in confidence, her technique honed on stage and on TV long before any “golden age of television”. Years later, Mum would offer a weekly small-screen masterclass. Then came an out-of-nowhere call from Paul Thomas Anderson, the American director wanting to cast her in his tale of 1950s London haute couture, Phantom Thread. Manville played Cyril Woodcock, pin-sharp sister of Daniel Day-Lewis’s grandiloquent designer Reynolds. Actors playing opposite Day-Lewis had long all but vanished from the screen, swallowed whole by his magnetism, but at the end of Phantom Thread it was Manville whom audiences left quoting, still hearing the heel-clack of the fearsome Cyril.

The Oscar nomination followed, and the articles about her late-flowering career. Joking aside, Manville acknowledges the Before and After. It does not escape her either that personal success has coincided with interesting times, culturally and politically. “MeToo has brought real change. You see a lot of blokes looking quite scared.” Her own experience of the industry has been thick with sexism. “I started out at 16 doing panto. Countless older men patted my bottom. No one said a thing.” For a moment, she looks incandescently angry. “I’ve had to claw and push in every aspect of my life, and when I meet brilliant women my age who have endured, I know they all went through that same clawing and pushing.”

And the rolling crisis in British life? “I feel like I’ve lost the appropriate language. For the shame, the sadness of it all. I don’t know how David Cameron sleeps at night.”

The temptation might be to seize the professional moment and exit to LA. She shakes her head. “Not going to happen. I love London too much.” But the US offers options now. Among her films awaiting release is Let Him Go, in which she stars alongside Kevin Costner in a North Dakota-set thriller. An accent is involved. Costner, she says, greeted her arrival with visible scepticism about the British character actor before him. “But then the mischievous thing in my head goes, ‘That’s all right, Kevin.’” Her voice falls into a sugary coo. “‘Hello Kevin. Lovely to meet you. You have your doubts, Kevin. That’s OK. Just you wait until I start doing the scene.’” Manville being Manville, she stresses how collegiate Costner eventually was, that it was all fine in the end. Then she smiles. “Quiet revenge. I love it.”

In cinemas in the UK from December 6 and in the US from February 14

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