Lesley Manville: ‘Historically the Royal family haven’t publicly exposed their emotions’

At the age of 66, in a career that has included one Oscar and three Bafta nominations, eight films with Mike Leigh and a starring role in the acclaimed television series Mum, even Lesley Manville is somewhat surprised to find herself as the go-to actor for stories set in the world of haute couture. 'Surprised, yes,' she says with a laugh. 'But also delighted.'

In 2017 Manville played the role of Cyril Woodcock, the tightly wound sister of haute couture designer Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in Paul Thomas Anderson's film Phantom Thread.

It was a role in which she ruled with a firm hand over the Woodcock atelier - and her brother. Now she is back in haute couture with a new film, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, but this time not in command of a fashion house, but as an unlikely interloper.

Based on the 1958 book by the American novelist Paul Gallico, who became famous for his comic, sentimental novels and short stories, perhaps the most famous of all being The Snow Goose, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris tells the story of a widowed charwoman, Ada Harris, who while tidying the wardrobe of a rich, titled client sets eyes on a sparkling turquoise couture dress from the house of Dior, aptly named Ravissante.

Spellbound, Ada holds up the dress and admires herself in the mirror - and is sold.

Determined to buy a Dior dress herself, through scrimping, saving - and the apparent intervention of her late husband from beyond the grave - she sets off for Paris. In a comic fantasy of suspended disbelief, she walks from Orly Airport to the centre of Paris, inveigles her way into the house of Dior, is befriended by a marquis, and sets in chain a series of events that saves Dior from imminent bankruptcy. It would be giving it away to reveal whether or not she gets the dress she desires; suffice to say, it is the sweetest, most gently amusing film you will see this year.

'It's like a balm,' Manville says. 'And I hope it will encourage a slightly older audience to go back into the cinema. I went to a screening for cast and crew, and there were a couple of older friends there in pieces - crying and smiling.

'There's nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned, sweet story about a rather marvellous woman. You want good to come her way because she gives so much goodness. She's a real little dynamite force of nature, Mrs Harris, and I just loved her.'

The film was made in Budapest - which gives a superlative performance as 1950s Paris - in 2020, at the height of Covid and under strict health protocols. Cast and crew were tested each morning, 'and if we were going to be very close to somebody or to kiss them - which I didn't have to do - then you would use a mouthwash that would protect you for 15 minutes or so. The crew were masked all the time, and the cast only took off our masks to do a take. And there was not one incident of Covid.'

The house of Dior and its creations, of course, have a starring role. The multi Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan worked closely with Dior in replicating some of the famous pieces from the period, seen in the show for clients held in a grand salon at the house - as was the custom at the time - and in the atelier, where the camera dwells lovingly on the seamstresses as they fashion silk and organza with fastidious care. 'It's not sewing, it's making moonlight,' says the wonder­struck Ada.

As Manville puts it, 'They are truly works of art.' Working with Beavan and with Mark Bridges, the costume designer for Phantom Thread, was a delight, she says. 'The detail that goes into it all, the eye they have, to look at something and know a button must be changed, or a shape made slightly different somewhere. I loved going for fittings and watching them do their thing.'

Manville has always loved clothes and fashion. 'I liked sewing at school and I used to make a few clothes for myself, and I have a very eclectic wardrobe, I think. Back in the day when Topshop was rather marvellous, it was known as a shop for teenagers, but they did some wonderful lines for the older woman as well.' Walking into the photo shoot for this issue, she wore a pair of trousers that everybody on set, she says, thought had come from the British designer Margaret Howell. 'And I delighted in saying, no, they're 10-year-old Topshop. But then I have really lovely designer pieces as well.'

This year, she points out, marks her 50th anniversary as an actor. 'Although I did start very young, I hasten to add.' She laughs. 'Very young.'

A happy childhood

She was brought up in Hove, East Sussex, the youngest of three sisters in a family that she describes as 'working class but not poverty-stricken'. Her father was a man of all trades - a taxi driver, bookmaker, printer, plumber, and 'a bit of a gambler - but not an unhappy one. He never gambled away our money so the electricity bill couldn't be paid.' When there was money it would be lavished on the family. For a while, Manville and a sister had a pony. 'My father went to the British Legion most days for a pint, and on Sundays he'd go there and play snooker and I'd keep the score.' Her mother kept house. A happy childhood, then.

After attending a secondary modern school locally, at 15, dreaming of becoming an actress, she took herself off to the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, commuting each day from Sussex. The idea was to divide her day between dance and drama and studying for her O-levels. But after nine months she was offered a job in a West End musical, I and Albert, directed by John Schlesinger. 'I was off and running and I never looked back.'

She went on to appear in panto, present a children's programme for Westward Television, and act for more than a year in the television soap Emmerdale Farm, as well as on the stage at the RSC, where in 1979 she met the director Mike Leigh, beginning an association that would extend more than 16 years.

She describes Leigh as 'the single biggest influence on my career, not only because of the huge variety of roles he's given me - which have meant, thankfully, that I've never been typecast - but also because he was the first person to really say to me, "Look, you've got a talent, you can really do this, and you can play people that are not like you." I hadn't really seen that before or thought about playing people that weren't like me.'

In a sense she has adapted Leigh's method of improvisation into her own acting vocabulary.

Making Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson joked that Manville became known as 'teacher's pet' because he focused the camera on her so often, delighting in the smallest gesture that would define the character of Cyril.

There is a telling moment in the film when she calmly rounds on her difficult, narcissistic brother. 'Don't pick a fight with me, you certainly won't come out alive. I'll go right through you and it'll be you who ends up on the floor. Understood?' - the threat punctuated by an unscripted slurp from her teacup that seems to carry a world of menace. Anderson described it as 'my favourite moment in the movie'.

In recent months she has been playing Princess Margaret in the fifth season of The Crown, which is scheduled to be aired in November. How to approach playing someone so familiar? She has faced the challenge before, appearing as Margaret Thatcher in an episode of the television series The Queen, in 2009. 'That was a strange job. They said, don't worry, you don't really have to "do" Margaret Thatcher. I thought, well of course I've got to "do" her. I can't play her as if she's from the Gorbals in Glasgow? I had a week to get it together. But I did my best, and it wasn't a bad shot at Margaret Thatcher at all.'

She plays the other Margaret, she says, at 'a quieter time' in her life, with her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones and her relationship with Roddy Llewellyn both behind her. 'She was putting her own lifestyle as it were on the back-burner and devoting herself to the Queen and serving the Crown in a much more full way. But it was also a lonely period of her life, I think.'

She has pored over books and documentaries preparing for the role.

'There's actually very little footage of her talking in this period in her life. It's not Rory Bremner time. But it's a drama we're doing, and it's about trying to find the essence and play the emotion of the person, which of course is harder to know because historically the Royal family haven't exposed their emotions publicly.'

Filming The Crown has involved frequent visits to stately homes and a glimpse into lives completely different from her own.

'These vast rooms...' She pauses. 'You realise how rarefied that existence is, but then they know nothing else. It's very odd for me because I'm totally self-sufficient. I completely look after myself apart from my cleaner, and to be playing somebody whose morning tea is made, whose bath is run, whose clothes are ironed. You do think, wow... for this to be the norm...'

Manville lives alone in west London. She has been married twice - first to the actor Gary Oldman, by whom she has one son, and then to the actor Joe Dixon.

At the age of 66, she says, she is a contented woman, more successful, more in demand, and more passionate about her career than ever.

'I've always known my life would be a slow burn, and it has been and I love the fact that my career feels like the culmination of five decades of continuous work. I feel I'm getting better, and it's right I'm getting better, because why wouldn't you, if you've lived life and you carry on observing the world around you, as I do?

'And I love being given the opportunities to play roles giving women of my age a platform, which Mrs Harris certainly does. I'm playing a woman who is at the forefront of her life, and at the same time I'm kind of making a statement saying, "Yes, here we go; I'm a leading actress, fronting a film and putting interesting women of my age on screen."' She laughs. 'It's great!'

Mrs Harris Goes To Paris opens in cinemas on 30 September