Marianne Gray talks to the down-to-earth Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn about her latest film
Brenda Blethyn doesn’t really understand why people continually ask her why she plays dowdy, often downtrodden characters, like Cynthia, the despairing mother in Secrets & Lies, or James McAvoy’s heartbroken mother in Atonement, or Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who horse-trades her daughters. Or, indeed, like her latest role, the anxious Elizabeth, an ignorant, conservative, prejudiced woman, in London River.
‘I just don’t see it like that,’ says Blethyn, who has made a brilliant career out of playing understated, restrained women. ‘Everyone must be portrayed. Everyone must have a voice, even the flawed ones. I don’t try to smooth out the edges. I try to present people as honestly as possible, even if I wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon with them.’
We meet in London and spend part of a pleasant afternoon together. She has just finished work in Edna O’Brien’s Haunted at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, a play the actress describes as a ‘feast of language, with words that reach the parts other plays don’t’.
Unfussy, neat and chatty, with a little giggle that punctuates her stories, she has a lack of starriness and a down-to-earthness which are surely what make her performances so convincing, and enable us to empathise easily with her characters, whatever their faults.
‘My character in London River has plenty of flaws. She’s a woman perfectly happy living her parochial life full of prejudices she doesn’t even know she has. Then her daughter goes missing and, for the first time, she has to start to question her attitudes.’
London River is a film about two parents — a white Christian woman living in Guernsey and a black Muslim man living in France — who meet in London while searching for their children who are missing in the aftermath of the 7 July bombings in 2005.
The film was written and directed by the Franco–Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb, whose film Days of Glory was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. He wrote the role of Elizabeth for Blethyn, having seen her in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. The late Malian-born French actor Sotigui Kouyaté plays Ousmane, also looking for his missing child.
‘When Rachid asked to meet me in London I didn’t know who he was but I was intrigued by the story,’ she says. ‘Somehow it was a project that ticked all the boxes. At the time I was working in Manchester on stage in The Glass Menagerie. To do the role in Rachid’s film I would need to learn some French a bit sharpish because a lot of the scenes between Ousmane and Elizabeth were improvised.
‘I like a challenge and did a quick crash course at the French Institute there and somehow we managed to get through the shoot with pigeon French, English and Malian. It was a journey I’m glad I took, because I learnt so much along the way.’
The circuitous journey of the career of Brenda Blethyn, OBE, holds many awards and two Oscar nominations (for Secrets & Lies and Little Voice). Her autobiography, Mixed Fancies, written a few years ago, tells quite a rackety tale. Born Brenda Bottle, the youngest of nine children, and the only one born in wedlock, she was brought up in Ramsgate, the daughter of a mechanical engineer and a part-time cleaning lady. She left home at 17 to train in secretarial studies.
‘I had no hankering to become an actress and had hardly ever been to the theatre,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to do what most girls did then and that was to become a secretary and get a proper job.’
At 19 she moved to London and became a secretary at British Rail and joined the BR AmDram Society where she met and briefly married a graphic designer, becoming Mrs Brenda Blethyn.
‘I should have kept my maiden name. It would have sounded so great at the Oscars,’ she says chattily, her extraordinary golden brown eyes amused.
She tells me that she got on stage purely by default, as a stand-in when someone fell ill, with one line about the weather: ‘It’s a really dirty old night…’
Gradually, it felt as though acting could be more than a hobby. ‘I thought I’d have a go at it, using my BR savings to pay for a place at Guildford Drama School,’ she says. ‘It was really quite courageous of me because I gave up everything: my job, a steady income. I didn’t tell my parents for some time as I didn’t want to worry them but, when I did, Mum just said, “Well, if you’re doing this acting all day, how do you make your money?”
‘I’ve acted professionally since the early 1970s and, even when there was no work, I never regretted it, absolutely not.’
After graduating she went into theatre, working at the National from 1975. Her first break came when Kate Nelligan left the cast of Tales From the Vienna Woods and Blethyn stepped in. The turning point was when Mike Leigh asked to meet her.
‘I’d never heard of Mike Leigh before he asked to meet me for Grown Ups [his 1980 BBC play],’ she recalls. ‘But my agent urged me to take it, saying it was the best job I’d ever been offered.
‘I said, “Let’s have a read of the script then,” unaware that he opted for improvisation rather than written scripts. It came as a huge shock but working with Mike gave me a crash course in character study. I learnt how to fill in all the gaps in a script. The more you understand the character’s journey, the easier the thoughts they have come to you.’
Her work has been regular and varied, floating between comedy and drama, television, film and theatre. She says that at 50 she thought her career would decelerate but she’s 64 now and it seems to have gone into almost perpetual motion.
‘I once mentioned retiring in an interview and was inundated with offers of work. I’m so working-class I’m just happy being paid for coming in to work so it’s unlikely I’ll stop soon. Although Michael [her very long-term partner, Michael Mayhew, formerly the National Theatre’s art director] and I have a pipedream of touring the world by camper van.’
First she’s off to Cornwall to make a film, then there’s an ITV crime drama called Vera and in December she goes to New York with Haunted. Unsurprisingly, she sometimes feels as though she’s never home — at their houses in Ramsgate, Kent, and Lewisham, south London. But she has one comforting international constant: her crossword puzzles.
‘I’m a cryptic puzzle fanatic and member of the Times Crossword Club. I have a code name and play online and race my brother every day with the regular Times crossword.
‘I’m lucky to have that and I’m also lucky to have a real private life, not to have really been affected by fame. I sometimes get looks, and people say, “It can’t be,” and walk on. Just recently I was doing some DIY in the Ramsgate house and went to Woollies in my jeans and overheard two women behind me talking. One said, “Isn’t that…?” and the other snapped, “It can’t be, looking such a mess. Anyway, Brenda Blethyn’s better looking than ’er.” ’
London River is released on 9 July.
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