Lesley Manville, Actress

NYT article by Amanda Hess
Mary Tyrone casts a long shadow over “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” while she’s onstage, and while she’s not. For much of the second act, this morphine-addicted mother haunts her husband and sons with her absence. They know that once she disappears up the stairs of their ramshackle summerhouse, she is finding a vein, getting a fix and slipping away. Meanwhile, as soon as Mary steps offstage, the actress Lesley Manville has shaken off the character and started taking care of business. She spends her long break, before returning for Mary’s final dope-fueled monologue, getting her own life in order: taking a shower, doing a bit of sewing, answering emails.

Her mother danced ballet but quit when she married. She wore a girdle under her clothes every day, even if she was just at home doing housework.

She’s since collaborated with Mr. Leigh more than any other actor, and from him she learned to maneuver easily in and out of character, to always have her “Lesley antenna” up even as she’s playing someone else. “You can’t say, ‘Well, I’m just 100 percent Mary.’ I’m sorry, I don’t buy that. You’re not,” she said. “You can’t completely erase your entire life.”

Taking care of the business of life is an artistic choice as well as a personal one. Many of the details she builds into characters “I’m getting for nothing,” she said. “That’s just what having a life brings you. I have an inherent understanding of someone who’s lost a husband, or someone who isn’t married, or someone who’s lonely.” Or someone who is not lonely at all. For Cyril, who eschews marriage and instead pair-bonds with her brother in the “quiet, anal, hermetic world” of the House of Woodcock, “control is almost a kind of sex,” she said. If she identifies with Cyril, it’s in this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time happily on my own. I’m very sure of who I am.”