The big interview: Imelda Staunton

Character acting has long been seen as a job for the boys.

Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, the late, great Pete Postlethwaite – the names just roll off the tongue. Women have historically struggled to gain entry to this predominantly male club, but alongside Brenda Blethyn, Imelda Staunton is one of a select few whose life membership is assured.

Hers is a CV overflowing with the kind of gritty, challenging and deeply unglamorous roles demanded of character actors. There’s Staff Nurse White in The Singing Detective, 1950s abortionist Vera Drake, town gossip of Cranford Miss Octavia Pole. In between, she’s also found time for a glut of Shakespearean roles, stage musicals, TV sitcoms and a scene- stealing role in Harry Potter.

Staunton has barely had time to draw breath in three-and-a-half decades on stage and screen and this weekend, she will fill one of the few remaining windows in her diary when she takes part in a gala evening at York Grand Opera House.

Yet despite having the kind of career this year’s crop of drama school graduates would kill for, Staunton insists there has been no grand plan and puts her achievements largely down to a fear of saying, “No”.

“Right from leaving drama school, I decided that I would always take the next job I was offered. I never looked at a script and thought, ‘This isn’t for me, I really should be playing bigger roles’. I just took what was going.

“My first job was in rep at York Theatre Royal. I honestly thought there were two types of actors, those who worked in London and those who didn’t and you know what? I was happy to be one of those who didn’t.

“As long as I was acting that was good enough for me. What was the alternative? To stay at home and not work? For me that wasn’t an option.”

It’s a policy which has taken her down some interesting roads, from Dorothy in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Wizard of Oz to the Queen in the television drama Cambridge Spies and seven years ago to the set of Vera Drake.

It was her first experience of working with the legendary Mike Leigh and while the unsettling film proved an unlikely mainstream hit, Staunton admits that she had a rare moment of doubt and it almost never happened.

“Before Vera Drake, I had been doing a lot of smaller roles on television and I thought, ‘Well that’s the way things are going to be’. There was no bitterness, no desperate auditioning, I just thought that I had got to that stage in my career.”

The call from Leigh came completely out of the blue. While Staunton had always been an admirer of his work, from Abigail’s Party to Secrets and Lies, she wasn’t sure she was the kind of actor he was looking for. She had, after all, provided the voice for Bunty in Chicken Run, about as far removed from Leigh’s brand of kitchen-sink realism as you can get.

“At the time, I thought he probably doesn’t really want to me meet me. I just couldn’t see myself in one of his films. However, he kept calling and eventually my agent said, ‘Look Imelda, he’s been on the phone again, I think he really does want to meet you’. So we met, and he convinced me that he hadn’t got me confused with someone else.”

Cast in the title role of the working-class woman with a double life – when not caring for sick relatives and neighbours, Vera helped women induce miscarriages – Staunton, along with fellow cast members Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville, put herself in Leigh’s hands. The director doesn’t believe in pre-written scripts, instead preferring his cast of actors to improvise their way to the final story.

“There’s no director in the world like him. Jim and Lesley had worked with Mike before, so I very much felt like the new girl in the class, but I loved it.

“All of his projects start off being called something like Untitled O3. When I arrived for the first day of Vera Drake, I didn’t know what it was really about or what kind of person I was going to play.

“However, you get six months to prepare and improvise, so by the time it comes to the filming you are pretty clear about where you’re going

“The whole experience was like jumping out of a plane, but knowing someone else is holding the strings. It was frightening, exhilarating, but I always trusted that it was going to work out fine.”

The portrait the film painted of Britain in the 1950s was an uncomfortable one, but the critics were united in praise of Staunton. The portrayal won her a Best Actress Bafta and nominations for the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, but contrary to popular belief it didn’t lead to a pile of first-class scripts landing on her agent’s desk.

“The great thing about Vera Drake was that it didn’t come down on either side, but I think people imagine that once you’ve appeared in a film that wins awards suddenly the doors of the entire industry are thrown open. I did get sent a lot more scripts, but they weren’t necessarily better scripts.”

Hollywood has never held any particular allure for Staunton and, politely rejecting many of the offers which followed after Vera Drake, she went back to working in British television and stage. However, when she was offered the part of Professor Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series, it was one blockbuster role she couldn’t turn down.

“I have been lucky and because I have always been in work, I have never had one of those periods where you think, ‘Oh dear things aren’t going well, may be I should give it a go in America’.

“Being part of something like Harry Potter was a lot of fun and obviously it’s appealing to a completely different audience to the one I’m used to, but I really don’t get recognised that much, people tend to leave me alone.”

You suspect, that’s exactly the way she likes it. She met her husband of 26 years, fellow actor Jim Carter, in a production of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in the 1980s and with their daughter Bessie, they have led a notably unstarry life. Similarly, when it comes to her career, it’s substance not style which counts.

“It’s true, I have not had a huge amount of very glamorous parts, although they do crop up occasionally. I don’t really mind what I look like, it’s much more important whether a role is meaty. I’ve just finished a run of the Edward Albee play A Delicate Balance and it was fantastic. I played a pretty troubled alcoholic, but that’s what I like, something with plenty of light and shade.”

Like all actors who spend much of their time on stage, the looming arts cuts were the topic of much dressing room conversation. However, Staunton is not among those who believe the loss of Arts Council funding will silence the most culturally interesting voices.

“We were just saying last night that there’s a lot of good theatre on at the moment and I see no reason why that won’t continue. Look, when it comes to cuts, there’s not really much choice between saving a hospital and saving a theatre, but if anything I think the arts will be stronger for it.

“It will make people work harder and they will come out fighting. Having said that, we should remember that this country’s culture is rooted in theatre, just like America’s culture is rooted in film, and it is something that we should be proud of and protect.”

It’s more than 35 years since Staunton made her professional début and with her daughter Bessie following in her parents’ footsteps – the three of them appeared together on screen in Cranford – she is conscious of how much has changed since she auditioned for RADA as a 17-year-old.

Her talent for acting was first spotted by an elocution teacher, and while her parents had no connection to showbusiness – her mother worked as a hairdresser, her father a labourer – they supported their only child through the prestigious drama school where she studied alongside the likes of Timothy Spall and Juliet Stevenson.

“I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I never realised how important RADA was, which I think was probably a good thing. Had I known, I would have probably been terrified by the prospect, but it just felt normal.

“Most leave drama school now with an agent, which hardly ever happened in the 1970s, but it is hard, I think there’s definitely an expectation that success will happen overnight and if it doesn’t people are disappointed. In York, I had six years really cutting my teeth and it was the best training I ever had.”

Next up for Staunton is the musical Sweeney Todd, but before then her friend, the former Royal Ballet principal Marguerite Porter, has persuaded her to take part in the gala evening at York to raise money for the Yorkshire Ballet Summer School. When we speak, she doesn’t yet know what she will be performing, but it takes more than a trifling detail like that to put her off her step.

“I think I will be trying to sing something. Of course, as an actor you get asked to do a lot of things and it’s a very good platform to get things done, but I think everyone should give a little something back, its a little churlish not to.”

* Summer Gala Evening, hosted by Sir Derek Jacobi, with contributions from Imelda Stanton and Wayne Sleep, Grand Opera House York, tonight. July 24, 7.30pm. 0844 847 2322.