When Princess Margaret tells her sister, Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton), in Season 6 of “The Crown,” “You know how I hate an empty diary,” Lesley Manville could have been joshing about her own career, which has skyrocketed in America since her 2018 Oscar nod for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. A longtime stalwart of British film, television and theater with seven BAFTA nominations, Manville, 68, has scored her first Emmy nomination for playing the royal “spare” of her day in “Ritz,” Episode 8 of “The Crown’s” final season.
In September, her film “Queer,” directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on William S. Burroughs’ short novel, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In October, Alfonso Cuarón’s series “Disclaimer” hits Apple TV+ and airs shortly after (she presumes) Ryan Murphy’s “very off-the-wall” “Grotesquerie,” which she just wrapped in L.A. There is plenty more in Manville’s packed schedule, including three other films and a BBC/PBS TV series.
In “Ritz,” Princess Margaret succumbs to three increasingly debilitating strokes alongside flashback scenes of her and then-Princess Elizabeth’s V-E Day outing to London’s Ritz hotel. Manville describes the emotional episode as “about two sisters, not necessarily a queen and a princess, who just deeply loved each other, saying goodbye.” A sadly etiolated Princess Margaret died at 71 in 2002.
Manville felt bereft at “The Crown’s” conclusion because she yearned to play more of Margaret. “Of course, that’s unrealistic. It’s about the whole family, and I can’t grumble about the quality of what was delivered. It was really choice.” She won’t grumble either about the incessant chatter surrounding the series’ dramatizations, which in 2022 culminated in her longtime friend Judi Dench issuing scathing criticism of the series as “crude sensationalism” and “cruelly unjust.”
“Of course it’s speculation, a lot of it, and Judi’s entitled to her opinion. We don’t know how Margaret behaved with the speech therapist, so we imagine she was probably pretty irritated. There’s that scene and her running through Kensington Palace trying to find an old coat that might have a cigarette in the pocket. That’s drama, in the same way that ‘Schindler’s List’ is based on some hard, terrible truths, but around it you write the characters and fill in all the bits. I think it’s a fantastic way of creating drama, so I can’t be doing with purists saying, ‘Well, we don’t know if the queen ever said that.’ Of course we don’t. It’s an exhausting argument I can’t be bothered with.”
If she had any hard feelings for Dench (and she doesn’t), they might have emanated from a 1989 stage run of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” when Dench went all out from the wings to try to make Manville laugh, pretending she was being pleasured from behind. It worked, and is probably Manville’s most embarrassing professional experience. “I mean, wetting yourself onstage has got to be up there. Judi’s so naughty, and gloriously so.”
Princess Margaret was too. “We had to do three strokes in a one-hour episode, so we needed to show the progression. The first was quite mild; she came home and before too long was drinking, smoking and behaving badly again. I did go to a hospital and met a variety of stroke victims. It was very moving, obviously. And what a brilliant job the hair, makeup and prosthetics team did; the really clever way we got the mouth and eye collapsing, all done within the parameters of me being able to work and speak.”
Manville’s real-people arc continued with this year’s “Back to Black,” in which she’s Amy Winehouse’s beloved grandmother Cynthia, a former singer herself who created her granddaughter’s signature beehive hairdo.
I ask when she finds time to sleep, and she laughs. “I’m planning on sleeping tonight! Then I start filming ‘Mr. Burton’ [a biopic of actor Richard Burton] here in Cardiff tomorrow morning. It has been a whirlwind lately, but that’s the way it goes.” She’s “thrilled and itching” to then start rehearsals for her October to January run of “Oedipus” in London’s West End opposite Mark Strong.
Any break in her future? “Not for a while, no. I’m pretty much booked up right through 2025 and probably until mid-2026. It’s a miraculous, wonderful position I don’t take for granted. It is getting better for women my age, certainly, and needs to keep getting better. There are quite a lot of interesting women out there to play. Surprise, surprise!”
