She found fame playing ordinary people in an extraordinary way - now Brenda Blethyn is set to appear in Dublin in an Edna O'Brien play
'SHE INHABITS a part. She lives it. She isit . . ." That's what the novelist and playwright Edna O'Brien thinks of Brenda Blethyn as an actor. That's why she re-modelled a script she had originally written in the 1960s and turned it into Haunted, a three-hander for Blethyn, Niall Buggy and Beth Cooke. And so the woman who has been a screen mother to Brad Pitt, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bobby Darin, Keira Knightley and the unfortunate mouse-boy Bruno from The Witchesis coming to Dublin to play the childless Mrs Berry, driven to distraction by her husband's interest in Cooke's doe-eyed ingenue.
Hauntedis no simple love triangle; it's more of a stately gavotte which explores themes of love and loss, trust and betrayal, compassion and selfishness. "It's enchanting," says Blethyn of the script. "It's such a wonderful celebration of language. In an age where we're so used to texting and abbreviating things, the art of language and conversation seems to be going out of fashion. This is like a feast of language, and it has everything. Desire. Regret. The only thing it doesn't have are guilty people. No baddies or goodies, just ordinary people and Edna seems to see what makes them tick."
Seeing what makes ordinary people tick - and recreating it on stage and screen - has become something of a speciality for Blethyn, who will be 64 in February. It's a skill which may well have its roots in her rambunctious family background. The youngest of nine children, her grandparents were Irish - "from Wexford, I think" - and her parents met while they were both in service. "My mother was a lady's maid, and a kitchenmaid also, and my father was a chauffeur. I was born just after the war, so there wasn't much money to be had. It was a struggle for Mum and Dad. But a lot of people were in the same boat. It was a struggle for everybody." But when she thinks of her childhood, she says, it's not the hardships she remembers. "It's the laughter we had. We're a pretty close family. When I was growing up, Ramsgate was a thriving seaside resort. It had amusement arcades galore along the seafront, and we used to go and play down there. One day I found a machine - it was one of those where you flicked a ball along and if you won, you got a chocolate bar - so I flicked, and the ball went into the 'win' slot and I got a chocolate bar. But the ball came back again without me putting any money in. I flicked it again, and each time, whether I won or lost, a chocolate bar came out."
Eventually, she ended up with an empty machine and a massive stack of chocolate bars. "So I made a bag out of the front of my skirt and carried them all home and hid them under my pillow." When her mother found the stash, she marched young Brenda all the way back to the arcade and made her give the bars back. "But the next day, when we had our tea," Blethyn recalls, "we each had a chocolate bar by our plates. She wanted me to learn a lesson - but she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She was great, my mum."
BLETHYN'S ROUTEto a professional career in theatre got off to an unlikely start. "I was working with British Rail, as a secretary," she says. "And they had an amateur dramatic society. They were entering a comp in Manchester and one of their actors was sick." It was just a matter of delivering one line. "So they said, 'Brenda, could you help us out?' I said, 'Don't be so stupid. I couldn't do that'. They said, 'Please. We're desperate. Otherwise we wouldn't be asking you'. I said, 'Oh, well, if you put it like that. . .' So I went on, and I did my one line, and I was terrible, and we didn't win. But what I loved about the experience was, I found the camaraderie between all the people so interesting and so rewarding. Somebody had painted the scenery. Someone had made the costumes. Somebody had organised the transport. Somebody worked the lights. And then there were the actors. So there were people of all different talents and abilities, all coming together to make this thing work."
She joined up and, within a couple of years, began to get leading parts.
"People started to say to me, 'You know, you could be professional'. I'd say, 'Don't be so silly. Give up my good job?' I didn't know any actors. It seemed the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. But the more I did it, the more I loved it. I felt at home on the stage. It's a strange thing - it's like something that fits you well." Eventually she applied - secretly, "for fear of being laughed out of town" - to the Guildford School of Acting, and was accepted. After several seasons at the Royal National Theatre, she won the London Critics' Circle award in 1981 for best supporting actress in Steaming. Even so, when her agent told her that she'd got an audition for a BBC television play, Grown Ups, with the director Mike Leigh, she was still pretty wet behind the ears. "I said, 'Oh, great, let's have a read of the script'. And he said, 'Oh, for goodness' sake, Brenda - come on. There's no script. There's never a script with Mike Leigh'. I went to meet Mike, with some trepidation, and did the exercise he asked me to do. And apparently . . . well, he must have liked it, because I got the job."
As it turned out, it was a career-changing moment. She declares without hesitation that working with Leigh on that play 30 years ago has informed every other job she has done since. In particular, it informs the way she approaches a new script.
"I always try to figure what the character is like in normal circumstances," she explains. "A play is at a time, or an event in a person's life - well, there's got to be something dramatic happening, hasn't there? But it's important for me to know what they're like on an ordinary day. What were they like at the top of page one, before we meet them? Did they have a good night's sleep? I mean, I'm exaggerating now. But, you know - what is their normal life like, before the crisis that happens in the play."
Given the strength of her admiration for Leigh's modus operandi, it's appropriate that Blethyn's big breakthrough should have come with her extraordinary performance as Cynthia Rose Purley in his 1996 drama Secrets & Lies. The events of the film take place over a fortnight, but the actors spent six months creating the characters, then three months filming. "The whole of the film was improvised and filmed up until the final scene, at the barbeque - can you remember that scene?" Blethyn asks. "The whole film was in the can, but we still had not improvised that scene. And none of us knew - we never discussed - what was going to happen." Throughout the preceding eight and a half months, she says, she had been giving Claire Rushbrooke, who plays her daughter in the film, a lift home. "And in the last week we improvised and filmed the barbeque scene. And when we got to the bit where I announce that Marianne Jean-Baptiste is Claire Rushbrook's sister, she fled from the house. When she came back she was trembling. Claire, I mean, not just the character. And at the end of the session she said, 'Brenda, how could you have driven me home for eight and a half months without letting slip that there was a sister?'" Such is the hyper-reality which working with Mike Leigh creates.
He is also a master of bittersweet comedy, so perhaps it's no accident that that, too, is something Blethyn handles with consummate flair. "I always think there's such a fine line between comedy and tragedy," she says. "But if you find the truth, people can decide for themselves whether it's funny or tragic. The important thing is to be real and truthful. I mean, how often have you seen something happen in the street, and there'll be one person roaring with laughter and splitting their sides, while somebody else is in tears and somebody else says 'What are you laughing at?' When you don't know whether to laugh or cry - that's what I like the most."
THERE'LL BE PLENTYof opportunity for her to exercise this double-edged quality in O'Brien's Haunted, with its shifting perspectives and determinedly unresolved storyline. "Its plot is a hazy thing half-hidden in a Celtic twilight," one critic observed after it opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester last May - though the reviews were, on the whole, highly enthusiastic. Hauntedwill tour to Dublin, Belfast and four theatres in England between now and the middle of March. After that, the hope is that it will make it to the West End. "But I'll believe that when it happens," says Blethyn.
She extends this pragmatic approach to awards, of which she has won many, including a Bafta, a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Secrets & Lies. She also got a slew of nominations for her role as Mrs Bennet in the 2006 film of Pride & Prejudice. "Oh, well," she says. "That's not the reason that we do the work. It's nice when something is celebrated and a prize comes along - but it's all based on opinions, isn't it? I mean, when you look at something like the Oscars, it was invented by the movie industry for the movie industry to promote the movie industry. And the only films that actually get seen are those that have a distributor and are publicised, you know? There are many, many films that don't have that backing. They're really, really good films, but they don't get a look in."
Such is her latest film, London River, in which she plays a mother who is waiting for news of her missing child after the London bombings of July 2005, and who strikes up a friendship with a Muslim man whose child has also disappeared. "It's not a jolly night at the theatre by any means, but I'm pretty proud of it," she says. With any luck it will find a distributor in plenty of time for a July release.
Meanwhile, Blethyn is happy to forge ahead with her first love - the theatre. "I came into the business to work in theatre," she says. "It never entered my head that I might one day be in a film or on telly. I love the theatre, where you turn up and where each performance is for the audience who are there on that night - and who come to enjoy it after their day's work."
Edna O'Brien's Haunted, directed by Braham Murray and starring Brenda Blethyn, Niall Buggy and Beth Cooke, is at the Gaiety Theatre from February 4th-13th and at the Grand Opera House, Belfast from February 15th-20th.