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 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!”

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.”

THAT’S CERTAINLY WHAT 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.

“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.’”

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!”

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.”

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.

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.”

BLETHYN, WHO IS A YEAR 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.”

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