‘Everyone must have a voice’

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.