Imelda Staunton 's portrayal of a kind, dowdy woman who performs illegal abortions was created with director Mike Leigh's eccentric, improvisational direction, she tells Donald Clarke
Imelda Staunton is one of the cinema's great scurriers. A small woman with a busy face, she is at her best when stomping up stairs or plumping pillows or making nice cups of tea.
I can think of no film that has quite so much Rosie Lee in it as Mike Leigh's superb new drama, Vera Drake. Set in the grim, greasy London of the early 1950s, the picture follows Staunton's Vera as she potters about offering uncomplaining assistance to anybody who needs it. We see her inviting a lonely young man around for his supper. We see her tending to an elderly neighbour.
And then, shockingly, we see her matter-of-factly performing an illegal abortion on the first of several girls "in trouble". Everyone gets a cup of tea.
Having spent two hours with the kind, but desperately dowdy, creature in Leigh's film, I was delighted to spy a jolly, modishly dressed Imelda Staunton on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. She had just been nominated for a Golden Globe. After winning Best Actress gongs from the Venice Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle and the British Independent Film Awards, she must surely be tired of being congratulated?
"Oh no it's fine. Please carry on," she trills, slightly nervously.
Was she aware during the making of the picture that it was going to end up being quite so special? "No! Absolutely not. But, of course, the process is so different to any other film that it is quite hard to tell." As has always been his habit, Mike Leigh created the film through a lengthy process of research and improvisation.
"You spend six months in rehearsal even before you start," Staunton explains. "Obviously with this film we had to do so much research into the Fifties and the war. We went around London deciding where Vera's family would live. We watched newsreels. We listened to music. It was all about getting the feel of the era into your bones."
Leigh even concealed vital elements of plot from some cast members. Nobody except the director and Staunton knew that Vera was secretly performing abortions; so when they came to improvise the scene in which she breaks the news to her husband (played with heartbreaking stolidity by Phil Davis), nobody had to feign surprise.
"You just don't question Mike's techniques," she explains. "Nobody ever says: 'Mike, what are we doing here?' Each actor, including me, is concentrating on developing character. You don't say: 'Oh, but what will happen to me today?'"
The first half of the film is, despite grim moments with boiling water and rubber tubing, a reasonably upbeat business. Then, during a celebratory dinner, there is a knock on the door. At the first improvisation none of the actors - not even Staunton - knew who was outside.
"I didn't know it was the police and it was very upsetting," she says, her voice dropping to a shaky whisper. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I got such a pain in my chest. Ninety-nine per cent of me is Vera and the other 1 per cent is me and I thought: everybody we know in the film is here. Who could it be? And then Phil Davis walked in and he was absolutely ashen and said: 'Oh, it's the police.' And I got this terrible pain. It was an extraordinary improvisation and the most exciting time I have ever had working."
There is no question that Leigh's eccentric techniques work. But does it never distress the actors that he is concealing information from them? How can you place total trust in somebody who is playing such games with you?
"They are not games. That is how he gets results. It's not at all odd. It is like saying: if you are hosting a surprise party, why don't you give the surprise away," she says, slightly crossly. "Phil and I used to whisper to one another: 'How on earth does he do it?' All those people who were playing the police were all off researching somewhere else. He keeps this on the boil. He keeps that simmering. Astonishing."
As the US has drifted to the right, the issue of the legality of abortion (which many people thought settled with the 1973 Supreme Court decision on Roe versus Wade) has slowly crept back on to the political agenda. I would guess that, while doing press in the US, Staunton found herself flung into the middle of that debate.
"We were there for two weeks and we were doing questions and answers with, I think, very liberal journalists," she says. "But even within that, I had women coming up to me between the ages of 50 and 80 in very emotional states. One woman in particular just went absolutely berserk. She was sobbing and saying she had an abortion and her mother had had one and her daughter had had one. They were working class and nobody had any idea what they went through then."
Staunton, now 48 years old, has been in the business for nearly three decades. She grew up in London, the only child of Irish parents, who brought her for a holiday in Co Mayo every year until she was 14. I had read that her hairdresser mother, who sadly died just a few weeks ago, was a dab hand at both the accordion and the fiddle. One is tempted to suggest this is where the urge to perform came from.
"Yes. It might well be. I suppose it had to come from somewhere." As often happens, it was an elocution teacher, one Jackie Stoker, who first spotted the young girl's talent. With the full support of her parents - "She was so insistent they sort of had to agree" - Imelda set about getting into RADA. She succeeded. Did the Academy attempt to make her a bit posher?
"No, because RADA had changed by then. They had been through the Albert Finneys in the 1960s. You didn't have to (comes over all Princess Margaret) talk lahk thaht, though, to be honest, I think it probably helped." Having leafed through previous interviews, I sense that Staunton suffers - or suffered - from a slight inferiority complex about her background.
She got a job in repertory acting straight after college, but initially had no great ambitions to move on to the West End. There were, she has suggested, rep actors and London actors, and she felt herself to be one of the former.
"Oh yeah, well I didn't know anything. I didn't come from a theatrical family. I got my first job straight out of RADA and I was very happy with that. How would you ever become a film star? It was completely out of my experience. And you know, I never wanted to stand at the back in the RSC. I would rather play St Joan in rep."
At any rate, after slogging around the country for six years, she eventually secured a supporting role in Richard Eyre's now-legendary 1982 production of Guys and Dolls for the National Theatre. She was understudying the great Julia Mackenzie and when I ask if she ever had to go on for the star she reacts in extraordinary fashion.
"I would no more have gone on than cut my own leg off!" Oh come now. She's a professional. If such a 42nd Street moment came along she would surely have stepped up. "I would have been out that door so fast. They could have sacked me if they wanted. I really wouldn't have cared. Some actors want to go on. Some really don't."
Staunton has returned to the musical from time to time, but her main forté has been energetic, often comic character roles. Playing Gwyneth Paltrow's nurse, she was the funniest thing in Shakespeare in Love. She was equally good in Simon Nye's under-rated sitcom Is It Legal? And next year we will see her playing Mrs Sucksby - a very Stauntonesque character name - in the BBC's adaptation of Sarah Walters's lesbian romp Fingersmith. The director is our own Aisling Walsh of Song for a Raggy Boy fame. "She was bloody great. A great woman. A great director," Imelda raves.
Staunton has been married to the burly actor Jim Carter for nearly 20 years and they have a 10-year-old daughter. Is it a great comfort to have somebody at home who understands the pressures of the business?
"I think it is helpful if both actors are working and neither of you is idle for long periods. That has, touch wood, tended to be the case. It must be very difficult if one partner is getting all the calls." Despite enjoying the company of actors, she feels it is important to forget about the work after you leave the set: "Oh God, there is nothing more tedious than actors discussing their work."
She recalls comments Mike Leigh made about David Thewlis and Brenda Blethyn, the stars of, respectively, the director's Naked and Secrets and Lies. "'Imagine if they were thinking about those roles all the time. They'd just end up going stark, raving bonkers,' he said."
But some actors, Americans in particular, do end up going stark, raving bonkers when playing difficult parts.
She gives a no-nonsense shrug. "Well, they really need to get out more."
Vera Drake opens on January 7th
