BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ British actress Lesley Manville was 59 years old when here career changed overnight. She was already well known in England for scores of films with innovative director Mike Leigh, her precipitous stage performances and her juicy parts on the telly.
But a mid-morning phone call from an American director led to an Oscar nomination and turned her into an international star.
"My agent said, 'Paul Thomas Anderson is going to ring you tomorrow at 11," she recalls. "I said, 'He is? What for?' I thought, 'OK. Fine. He won't call; he's Hollywood. He won't call. If he does, it won't be at 11. He'll forget and call me at 3.' On the dot at 11 o'clock Paul called me," she says.
"'Hey, Lesley, I've this script for you, going to send it over, have a read. And when you've got a moment, give me a call.'"
"When you've got a moment!" she squeals.
The role was that of the dependable sister of a quixotic dressmaker played by Daniel Day Lewis, in "Phantom Thread," for which she was nominated as best supporting actress.
"Suddenly America opened up to me, which is not something I'd particularly been seeking," she says.
"I'd made films here and the Oscar nomination made a huge difference overnight! I've been at the top of my game in terms of theater, films and television for quite some time in England. So it was just, 'Oh, well, there's a kind of an international seal-of-approval for Lesley now.' So that had some repercussions in England. But the big thing that 'Phantom Thread' did was open up this side of the pond for me. And it was not anything I was looking for," she says.
Ever since she was 15 and made the hourly commute on the train to study at a drama school in London, Manville has been happily performing. "Everyone's got to earn a living somehow and acting's probably what I do best," she shrugs.
"But I'm not that kind of person, I'm not going to go: 'I'm going to go for America and MAKE them take me seriously.' I always thought, 'I'm here in England. Here's my work. You can see my films with Mike Leigh. You can see me on stage.' I'd done stuff in New York. 'If you like me, you can ask me.' But Paul's offer just came absolutely out of the blue from nowhere."
Her latest role in the hit comedy "Mum," which is streaming on Britbox, proved equally challenging. In fact, that's what Manville likes about acting. "It's full of variety _ not just that I do lots of theater and I do television and I do films _ but because I play different characters," she says.
"And that's what gets me up in the morning, that I'm not going to play the same character this week that I played last week."
Manville admits that she's not nearly as patient as the woman she plays in "Mum." "I would be far more judgmental of some of the ridiculous things she has to deal with among the people around her," she nods.
"She doesn't judge people and doesn't look at them as though there were ridiculous. She's just kind and very tolerant."
Peter Mullan, who costars with her in "Mum," reports that there's nothing phony about Manville. "You feel very safe working with Lesley, because there's no side to her," he says. "It's all there, and it's open. And that's very precious. And it means when you're about to embark on a scene, be it high emotion or be it broad comedy, it doesn't matter. It's all truthful in the most important way. I can look into Lesley's eyes and know that we are what (our characters) are together. There's no vanity, there's no gamesmanship, and that's the sign of a great actor."
Married twice, Manville has a 29-year-old son by actor Gary Oldman, with whom she's still friends. Although she's always been self-sufficient, she confesses that she might like to have a partner. "But I'm kind of tootling along fine without one," she says.
"Once I get off the treadmill of work and have had a few days at home and settled back in and calmed down, got my fridge filled again, I sometimes think it might be nice to have someone around. But I don't lose sleep over it. Sometimes I think would it be nice to go through this autumn period of my life with somebody."
COURT IS BACK IN SESSION
Twenty-four hours of courtroom drama disappeared in 2008, but Court TV is back and will be arguing cases again in the 17 of the nation's largest cities come Oct. 28. The network, which is owned by Katz Networks, will capitalize on the nation's passion for real-life crime stories and offer documentaries and docuseries about authentic crimes and cases, drawing on its own massive library of court proceedings. The new network will also feature gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Harvey Weinstein rape trial set to begin in September.
According to Jonathan Katz, CEO of Katz Networks, a division of The E.W. Scripps Co., the network will slam into the field with original works. "We are going to move to complement our live trial coverage with original series, and the first is a documentary series entitled 'O.J. 25,' looking back every week at the trial of the century, 25 years later," he says.
"It's hosted by acclaimed legal analyst Roger Cossack, and Roger is going to provide exclusive and new interviews from key players in the trial, as well as fresh, legal, behind-the-scenes perspective as only Court TV can. Also in programming next year, we're going launch a new docuseries called 'Court TV Mysteries,' where we're mining that vast 1,000 trial library from the Court TV archive. It's true, live stories of greed, deception and murder that result in justice in the courtroom."
ACTRESS HITS THE SKIDS IN 'FLORIDA'
Kirsten Dunst is displaying a whole new facet as the struggling but resourceful young widow in Showtime's new series "On Becoming a God in Central Florida," premiering Sunday. As the ambitious single mother, Dunst discovers her husband's obsession with a pyramid scheme that put the family in dire straits. She determines to rectify the situation by out-maneuvering the con men.
Shooting was difficult, she says, because she'd just given birth to her son, Ennis, when filming began. But she worked hard on the character of the Machiavellian Krystal.
"For me, every character I approach, I work with someone and I kind of make my own witch's brew of, this movie, this song, this character," she says.
"I did watch some Honey Boo Boo just to free myself up ... Just to get a little more free in that way. There's so much rage within Krystal that I feel like I don't necessarily always get to express in characters, but I think us as women have a deep threshold. So I feel like a lot of things I could let out, and having just had a child and all of it. And I was so tired and we worked so hard ... You just kind of put everything you have into it and be the most emotionally vulnerable you can so that you connect with your audience and each other while working," she says.
'FARGO' MOVES TO MISSOURI
Those of us restless for our North Dakota fix will be happy to know "Fargo" will be back on FX, but we have to wait until next year. And this time it won't be North Dakota the show is featuring, but Kansas City, Mo. Loosely it's about two warring factions in the underworld of the '50s: African-Americans and Italians. Casting has already been done for the next installment with Chris Rock headlining along with Jack Huston and Jessie Buckley.
Rock, who's known for his stand-up comedy, was only 19 { when he challenged his first audience as a comedian. "The best part of stand-up is the hours," he says. "They're great. You do a show a night, maybe two, so you work for 2 { hours. So you get the rest of the day off.
"That's the best part. The worst is people expect you to be 'on' all the time. You can't be sad about anything. I miss the comfort of being sad."
