Luxury? I’d rather have Simplicity – Interview with Brenda Blethyn
Interview: Alistair Duncan Portrait: David Yeo She’s met the Queen, been twice nominated for an Oscar and eats sandwiches at the Savoy, but actress Brenda Blethyn is happiest when making her own cup of tea and settling down with a good crossword BRENDA BLETHYN IS SITTING opposite me, spreading butter onto her toast. But she’s not happy. “I hate it when they cut the [...]
Interview: Alistair
Duncan
Portrait: David Yeo
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picright">She’s met the
Queen, been twice nominated for an
Oscar and eats sandwiches at the Savoy, but actress Brenda Blethyn is
happiest when making her own cup of tea and settling down with a good
crossword
BRENDA BLETHYN IS SITTING
opposite me, spreading butter onto her toast.
But she’s not happy. “I hate it when they cut the crusts off,” she
sniffs. “They’re the best bits.”
We’re breakfasting in the lavish tea room of London’s Savoy hotel.
Beneath an ornate, pleated ceiling hang vast trompe l’oeil paintings of
rural scenes. Penguin-suited waiters scamper about. Blethyn, the
much-loved British actress who shot to fame in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and
Lies in 1997 and lit up the screen as the redoubtable Mrs Bennet in the
more recent Keira Knightley-starring version of Pride and Prejudice,
must have stayed in several posh hotels in her time. But posh hotels,
she explains, can rub her up the wrong way. For instance, such was
Blethyn’s horror at the wildly inflated cost of the laundry service at
one hotel (the Four Seasons in Los Angeles) that she insisted on being
driven to a local launderette to wash her clothes. That’s even when she
wasn’t picking up the hotel bill. Her limousine driver was,
understandably, baffled. This little vignette, included in her recently
published memoir Mixed Fancies, seems a fitting thing to bring up as
Blethyn chews her crustless morsels. She chuckles at the memory: “I
don’t want my t-shirt to come back gift-wrapped in tissue paper. I just
want it clean!”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picleft">Brenda Blethyn
may not quite be a household name, but
her career has been one of glittering triumph. She’s been nominated for
an Oscar twice (for Secrets and Lies and Little Voice, in which she
co-starred with Jane Horrocks). She’s starred alongside grandees like
Michael Caine and multi-million-dollar beaus such as Jude Law and Brad
Pitt. She’s been directed by Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It
and even met the Queen to receive an OBE for her services to the film
industry in 2003. In short, she is a movie star. Why isn’t she
comfortable with the lifestyle of one?
“It’s not that I’m not comfortable,” she retorts, peering at me through
narrow spectacles perched on a small, triangular nose. “It’s just that
sometimes I want to make my own cup of tea exactly how I like it, not
have a pot of lukewarm tea turn up, with a tea-bag dangling in it. I
just want simplicity.”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picright">
she exudes. She’s jovial and
chatty, peppering her conversation with anecdote after anecdote. It
feels a bit like popping round to your auntie’s for a cup of tea and a
catchup. One minute, she is regaling me with warm memories of her
beloved Ramsgate, the idyllic Kentish seaside resort where she grew up
(”it has the third best architecture in the country, after Bath and
Cheltenham,” she proudly slips in). The next, she’s putting on an Irish
lilt as she recalls a film she made in Dublin with John Hurt. Then, she
erupts with laughter as she remembers how nervous she and Jim Broadbent
were before going on stage for Habeas Corpus. After that, she’s off on
another tangent, on the beauty of the New Forest.
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picleft">“I went there
the other week with my aunt and cousin.
It’s next to the sea and there are wild ponies everywhere,” she
enthuses. “It’s easy to get lost we ended up driving around
and around but it’s lovely countryside. Have you been?”
For 30 years, Blethyn has been with art director Michael Mayhew, but
they’ve never had children. Blethyn is the youngest of nine children
and her family remains a sprawling network of brothers, sisters, aunts
and nieces, whom she says she remains very close to. One of her nieces,
Val, proved an invaluable proof editor when she was drafting her
autobiography. Blethyn says that, being “a bit of a stickler for
punctuation”, her instinct would often be to correct the grammar of the
way her mother and father would speak. For instance, her mother at one
stage describes Blethyn’s father as “looking like a donkey looking at a
white wall”.
“I tried to correct `looking’ to `resembled’, but then Val said: `No,
keep it as it is. I love it best when I can hear you talking.’”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picright">However well
respected she is as a British actress,
Blethyn lacks airs and graces. To understand this quality, you have to
look at her origins. In her memoir, she vividly portrays her happy but
tough upbringing, growing up in a working-class family in Ramsgate,
where she was born in 1946 as Brenda Bottle. Her father served in the
army (he loved telling .exotic tales of tussling with black mamba
snakes, finding scorpions in his bed and journeying through the Middle
East) but on his return to Britain became a chauffeur. Her mother, the
matriarch of the family, was a volatile personality, loving and strong,
but given to getting a bit “squiffy” down the local pub, where she
occasionally worked as a cleaner, and irascible at times, chastising
people with brilliant phrases like: “You loppity-eyed article!”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picleft">Blethyn recounts
that both her parents were great
raconteurs who loved telling stories before the assembled flock. Is
that something she thinks she has inherited? Is that why she wanted to
write a book? “No question. We didn’t have a telly, for one thing, or a
wireless a lot of the time. We made our own amusements. Anything was a
trigger for a story or a song. And when you read my book, it’s quite
`vignettey’ as well. Although, I should say I didn’t want to write a
book. When the publishers originally approached me, I said: `I don’t
think I’ve got anything to say.’ They thought I had and said they’d pay
me. I said: `Oh all right, then.’”
After leaving school, Blethyn became a secretary and married a
footballer called Alan at the age of 20 but it didn’t last. One night
at the pub, a “beautiful neighbour called Tricia” confessed to Blethyn
that she had fallen in love with her husband. When Blethyn confronted
Alan about this “it became crashingly clear that he felt the same way
about her”. The end result may have been that her husband left but, as
with many other episodes in the book, the actress remains remarkably
sanguine: “It wasn’t anybody’s fault: Alan’s, Tricia’s or mine. It
happens and life goes on.”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picright">All the while,
Blethyn had been dabbling in amateur
dramatics. The breakdown of her marriage proved the catalyst to take
the plunge: she enrolled at Guildford School of Acting and became a
professional actress at 27, retaining Alan’s surname, Blethyn, as her
stage name. Soon, she was appearing in major plays in London, acting
alongside Diana Rigg, being directed by the formidable Peter Hall and,
curiously, finding herself in court as a character witness for an actor
friend accused of marijuana possession, only to be cross examined by a
barrister called John Mortimer.
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picleft">Her movie
breakthrough was Secrets and Lies and she
says that meeting Mike Leigh, the British director who starts with no
script, relying on his actors to improvise the narrative, was a
“godsend”. She blossomed as an actress under his tutelage and probably
pulled off the performance of her career the painfully
put-upon, hyper-nervous single mum Cynthia Rose Purley. It’s hard to
forget that voice of hers, oscillating between a shrill trumpet and a
fading fog horn. It led to her first invitation to the Oscars, a
ceremony which she found had its fair share of absurdity.
“You sit in this vast auditorium and they have seat-fillers, who come
and take your seat if you pop off to the toilet so that the cameras
don’t see any empty seats. Michael popped off and, next thing, this man
wearing a tux was sitting by me. Michael came back and said that he’d
just been talking to Shirley MacLaine. Crazy.”
I ask what she made of Dame Helen Mirren’s recent triumph at the Oscars
and she says it was “wonderful, even if the whole world knew that she
was going to win; she’s terrific in everything”. Indeed, Blethyn barely
seems to have a bad word about any of her peers certainly not
in her memoir despite the fact that she works in an industry
which surely must be brimming with egos.
“People assume divas exist only in the acting profession. Wrong; it’s
every profession,” she reasons, slipping into a broad Ramsgate accent.
“I’ve been in shops where the assistant behaves like a diva. My old
postman thought he was above everybody else.”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picright">
younger than Helen Mirren, is
perceived in a similar light by the industry, banked on by directors as
a mature British talent, capable of wildly diverse parts. But she’s not
as famous as Mirren, admitting: “I can walk down Oxford Street and not
be bothered.”
This is largely because the parts she has taken on have been character
roles in small-budget productions, often playing women in tough social
circumstance. As well as Secrets and Lies, there was On a Clear Day, in
which she played the wife of a Glasgow shipbuilder; In the Winter Dark,
a tense Australian drama in which she played a farmer’s wife who had
mysteriously lost her daughter (a performance she takes special pride
in: “I’m very, very pleased with this”); and her latest, Clubland,
another film set Down Under, about a raucous Aussie comedienne, played
by Blethyn, due out later this year.
“I love the Australians,” she says cheerfully. “They’re straightforward
people. I like that. You don’t have to get paranoid, having to second
guess whether they really mean things.” She says that this quality of
“not bulls**tting” is also a trait of her partner, Michael, whose job
it is to design the National Theatre’s leaflets and programmes. She met
him while working there in the late 1970s and the couple share a house
in South London. They talk about getting hitched a lot, apparently.
“Maybe we will,” she ponders. “I think we will. I want him to get down
on one knee. I might have a long wait.”
alt="BRENDA BLETHYN" class="picleft">In spite of her
earlier protestation that she “just
wants simplicity”, she admits to driving a Jag (although she’s trading
it in for a hybrid) and loving designer clothes: “Armani and Escada for
ceremonies.” But her particular thrill something she
luxuriates in is doing crossword puzzles.
“I love The Times’ cryptic crossword puzzles,” she announces with
relish. “My brother and I have a race to do it. I’m also doing them
online these days. There’s a race-the-clock one. Some people claim to
have done it in one minute, 32 seconds, but I don’t believe them. It
takes that long just to write them in.”
Blethyn claims that she takes after her father in not being the
ambitious type. She often gets asked which roles she still yearns to
play but for her this is a pointless question. “I just don’t think in
those terms. It’s setting yourself up for disappointment. Anyway, you
only have the choice of what you’re offered.”
Ambitious or not, as one of the country’s bestloved character actors, I
wonder how fame has treated her. “What I don’t like much,” she tells me
in hushed tones, “is when you’re at a private function and you become
the focus of attention inappropriately, just because you’ve been on
telly or films or whatever. If I get invited to a wedding and it’s
their day, I don’t want to be the focus of attention. But I don’t know
how to avoid it.”
A reluctant celebrity who’s been up for an Oscar twice; an
habitué of glamorous hotels the world over who loves nothing
more than a nice cup of tea as she does her crossword; Brenda Blethyn
is a refreshing soul one of the finest actresses of her
generation but as down to earth as they come.
Photography: Rex Features
