It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.
The last 15 years have seen her graduate from widely respected actor to garlanded star: since 2011 there has been that Tony, two Oliviers, an Oscar nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and seven Bafta nominations. Her cinematic collaborators have included not only PTA but Luca Guadagnino, Alfonso Cuarón and Joel Coen. This relatively late blooming has come as a relief.
No one went to LA for pilot season when I was young – we were just interested in doing the work. But you’re right, there has been a shift. Winning the Olivier for Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2014 took me somewhere else, theatre-wise.
An Oscar nomination makes a difference. A whole sequence of high-profile television, not least The Crown, which obviously wasn’t all about Princess Margaret but boy did Peter Morgan write me two astonishing episodes. Mrs Harris Goes to Paris brought me to a new audience, and Mum is the thing I still get stopped about most.” These are just some of the most recent projects from an amazing body of work, one of which Manville – whose combination of wry wit, warm intelligence and stern savvy keeps me on my toes throughout our conversation – is rightly proud.
Marble Hall Murders, her new TV series, starting on BBC One this week, completes Anthony Horowitz’s trilogy of ingenious Susan Ryeland mysteries. It may be one of her lighter pieces, but it’s no less satisfying for that. Manville was willingly cajoled into returning as publisher-cum-crimebuster Ryeland by Horowitz, who offered to write a third book if she’d do a third series.
Susan is back being single, back in London and back in publishing – albeit reluctantly – when a young writer proposes to conclude the bestselling saga of fictional detective Atticus Pünd. As before, many of the cast take dual roles as fact and fiction intertwine, and Pünd’s investigation into the murder of a publicly beloved, privately monstrous children’s author in Corfu is reflected by events in Susan’s world, where her sparring partners include Mark Bonnar and Rupert Penry Jones. If it is indeed the end, Manville will miss Susan immensely.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
