A late-blooming romance

There's a bit of Brenda Blethyn that will be forever embedded in my laptop. It's a video clip of an interview she gave after she stormed the Cannes Film Festival with Secrets and Lies, in 1997. Last week, in the cafe of London's Royal National Theatre, she enacted the clip all over again: "When it came to an end, they all stood up and clapped and I said to Mike (the director Mike Leigh ) what do we do and he said: `Stand. It's a standing ovation'." The clapping went on and on, and in the end she looked round: "And they were still clapping, everywhere, up in the circle, rows of them, " and she flaps her hands upwards in gob-smacked amazement. Just like the clip: actors are rarely off-stage. Secrets and Lies took Blethyn to Hollywood, where she was nominated for an Oscar for her part as the hopeless, put-upon, working-class mother whose daughter - the one she'd given up as a baby and whom no one knew she had - turns up unexpectedly and proves to be black, beautiful and clever. A second nomination came her way for her role as the blousey, blustering mother in Little Voice, victim to Michael Caine's lounge lizard scheming.

In Dublin this week, she opens in the Irish-made film Night Train, co-starring John Hurt. This time, she plays a drudge of a daughter - to Pauline Flanagan's awful mother, who thinks her daughter should have done better for herself. Night Train itself is a bit of a miracle, having been made on a budget of £2.7m - low for a feature film. So how was it that someone who has twice walked the red carpet of the stars and gets recognised on the streets of the US, agreed to work in a modest, low-budget film in Dublin?

"Well, after I'd read the script, the director, the scriptwriter and the producer came over to London and we had lunch and it was as if we'd all known each other for 25 years. There were no egos flying about, but lots of enthusiasm, and I just wanted to be part of that. Of course, the clincher was John Hurt."

Blethyn is no stranger to prizes, big or small. On numerous occasions she won the British Rail Amateur Dramatic Annual Award - in the days when she had a respectable office job, with prospects. So good was she that people were always saying she should become an actress - but she didn't know any, had never been to a theatre and, in any case, got married. When her marriage broke up, however, she did get herself to drama school and from there, the whole thing took off.

Although she has played Shakespeare and Ibsen and worked from Manchester to Manhattan, she's mainly known, in England, for her cardigan roles: "I seemed to play unfortunate women who cried a lot".

It's what people identify with. So much so, that they often confuse her with the roles she plays and say things like: "You must miss all your friends in the factory". Even in America where, directed by Robert Redford, she played Brad Pitt's mother in A River Runs Through It, people at the premiere remarked how proud she must be of her boy.

The thing is, she's good at accents and nips into one before you can say "voice coach", so that no matter what country she's in, locals claim her as their own. On Night Train, the accent wasn't a problem except that it had to be explained to her that what passes for a middle-class accent in Dublin required her to pronounce "Orient" as "Awrient".

That's "Orient" as in "Express" - for the film is about two lonely people, stranded on the edge of life somewhere in a Dublin suburb, who fall quietly in love and set off on a dream journey that begins at the ferry port and ends on the magic train to Venice. It was the poetry in the story line that originally attracted her to it: "Here are two middle-aged people who fall in love. I like that. It shows that love is not the sole domain of the young and beautiful. And then that's juxtaposed with some very violent scenes." The one in which a cow meets its untimely death has put her off her meat and we'll draw a veil over the one where a criminal tangles with the business end of a Black and Decker drill.

The music for the film - the original score was composed by Dubliner Adam Lynch - still sends warm feelings through her: "it's so evocative, the sort of music you could listen to all evening", and she tucks her hands into the sleeves of her black winter coat and settles comfortably into her seat as if there for the day. And smiles, demonstrating that it's the mouth that's Blethyn's thing - small, pursed like a naughty nun forever on the brink of bursting into raucous laughter. Not really a cardigan person at all.

Night Train goes on release in selected cinemas today. See review, right. Love and carriage: Brenda Blethyn and John Hurt in Night Train