In the endearing and captivating new movie, Little Voice, Jane Horrocks gives a glowing, cherishable performance as a painfully shy young Lancashire woman whose whole world revolves around her room and her late father's formidable vinyl collection which she treasures and which, since his death, is the only thing that gives meaning to her life.
The obverse of this mousy personality is her quite remarkable ability to impersonate the singing and speaking voices of the divas on those old records: Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey and Marlene Dietrich. Horrocks's character is known simply as LV, for Little Voice, an understatement if ever there was one given the big, bold singing voice she releases in those rare moments when she allows herself out of her shell.
LV lives in the daunting shadow of her oppressive mother, a brassy harridan played in a gloriously outsized performance by a cast-against-type Brenda Blethyn. In another sharp contrast, Ewan McGregor goes against the grain of his cockier roles to play the introverted young pigeon-fancier who chastely fancies her. And in his best, most vigorous performance for years, Michael Caine features as the seedy, failed talent agent who manages to persuade LV to perform her gifted impersonations at a local club.
The film is directed with sensitivity - and with a stirring sense of the theatrical - by Mark Herman, who made Brassed Off, and who adapted the movie's source material, Jim Cartwright's play, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice for the screen.
Cartwright wrote the play specifically with Jane Horrocks in mind because of her own uncanny ability to impersonate the aforementioned divas. Horrocks and Cartwright became good friends after she acted in an earlier play of his, Road, she explained when we met in London recently.
How did he become aware of her gift for impersonations? "Because I did them for him in my back garden!," she says in her strong Lancashire accent. "I did Judy and Shirley and some of the others.
At the beginning of Road they have the album of Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall playing. I knew Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but I didn't know of her as an older concert performer, so I was really blown away by the album, listening to it every night in the wings as I got ready to go on. She was obviously a passion of Jim's as well, and we just came together on it."
The play opened by excellent notices at the National Theatre in London with Horrocks in the lead and it transferred successfully to the Aldwych. Horrocks played the role for eight months. "I got a great buzz every night," she says. "There was such a feedback from the audience that I felt like I was giving them a good piece of entertainment, so it was very enjoyable to do it. I've been in things since then in the theatre where you don't get that kind of response, and it really does make a difference.
"Every night was a real challenge for me. Because I'm not technically trained as a singer, there was no guarantee that my voice was going to come out right every night. And I had to do such a variety of singers. Some nights my Judy would be appalling and the same night my Marilyn might have been fantastic. So it was very weird. There was no consistency on any night."
Now 34, Horrocks says she always wanted to act, and she enrolled at RADA when she was 18. Ironically, she says, it was the most prestigious of all the drama schools to which she applied - and it was the only one to offer her a place.
I wondered if she had any classmates at RADA who went on to do well for themselves. "You might have heard of Ralph Fiennes," she says, adopting the tone of a confidante. "And Iain Glen and Imogen Stubbs. They were the posh end of the class. But there were some working-class people like me in there as well, so it was a good mixture from different classes."
Jane Horrocks went on to make her name in theatre, playing a controversial Lady Macbeth - controversial because she urinates on-stage - and Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret which was directed by her former off-stage partner, Sam Mendes, and went on to earn Tony awards on Broadway with Natasha Richardson as Sally.
Horrock's television work notably has included her own comedy special, Never Mind the Horrocks - "It was very flattering to be asked to do my own show," she said - and the recurring role of Bubble, the bumbling public relations woman in Absolutely Fabulous. "I've got fond memories of that," she says, "and they keep repeating it, so it's certainly been nice from the money side of things with little pay cheques still rolling in. It was fun filming it in front of a live audience, although it got a bit boring at times during the rehearsal period."
On the cinema screen she featured in The Dressmaker, Memphis Belle, Second Best - and memorably as the chocolate-smeared, anorexic teenager in Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet - before landing the leading role in the movie of Little Voice.
Given that the play was written for and built around her abilities, she was, or at least should have been, the obvious choice to play the same character in the film version. But it's not as easy as that in the film industry, where factors such as box-office appeal play such crucial functions in getting movies financed and given the green light to go into production.
Jane Horrocks was perceived by the backers as somebody known only to that minority audience which saw movies such as Life is Sweet on the art-house circuit in the US. And it seemed for a while that the role of LV might to go to an American, Gwyneth Paltrow, who had shown her flair with an English accent in Emma. "That's true," Jane Horrocks says. "Anyway it came back my way. I wasn't that pissed off given that I had played the role for eight months in the theatre, so I felt I'd had a fair crack of the whip.
But anyhow, that's the name of the game. That's Hollywood. If they need a more bankable name they'll go after one. But then at one point Brad Pitt was being mentioned to play Ewan's character. And I think they talked about Meryl Streep, too, for the film.
"So the film was obviously going to be a very different entity, nothing like the Little Voice I was associated with. So I wasn't really livid about it. Anyhow I think Gwyneth Paltrow is too statuesque to play a wallflower. I think she's a very good actress, but I've never been particularly moved by her on screen or found her particularly vulnerable in any way."
Before appearing on stage in Little Voice, Jane Horrocks had sung in public just once. "That was when I was at RADA and we had these ridiculous evenings called "Stand Up and Entertain", and the only thing I could think of doing was my Shirley Bassey. I did Goldfinger, which had been my party piece up until then. I did the whole kaboodle, actually. I even blacked up. I actually looked like her - amazingly!"
Getting the many different inflections right is all in the detail, she modestly explains: "I suppose it's because I've listened to them so much that they're just in there really. I think I've probably got a receptive ear. And because I'm such a fan of those people it was easy to listen to them anyway."
She clearly relished the extremes of LV, who is either virtually silent and shrivelled up - or belting out the big tunes with unstinting panache. "I suppose it's everything you want to do rolled into one performance, really," she says. "This is my works! It was a great acting opportunity to be able to do that."
She speaks warmly of her costars in the film. Michael Caine was "so behind it, so supportive all the way". Brenda Blethyn was "fantastic", she says. "Brenda normally plays such sympathetic people, and it's funny, the more I watch the film the more I like her character. Maybe it's because I've been brought up in the north of England where people are so outspoken - and quite cruel to each other without thinking."
And, I note, Ewan McGregor is not only so subdued in the movie, but, unusually for him, fully clothed from start to finish. "I know," she laughs. "I wonder where he could have exposed himself in the film. In his pigeon coop, I think!"
Jim Cartwright, who created Little Voice for her, remains one of her close friends that she calls "my collection of writers". Prime among them, however, is the man she calls "my chap", Nick Vivian, who recently wrote Hunting Venus, a television film in which she co-stars with Martin Clunes, who also directed it. She lives in Twickenham with Nick Vivian and their son, Dylan, who is nearly two years old, and she is expecting their second child next month.
That "collection of writers" also includes Alan Bleasdale, and the Irish playwright and screenwriter, Frank McGuinness. "I haven't seen Frank for ages," she says. "In fact, the last time I saw him I was very drunk in a restaurant in Dublin and singing Over the Rainbow to him. We had just come back from a New Year's Day party at Paul McGuinness's house and we decided to go out to dinner."
She says that she and Timothy Spall, who was in Life is Sweet with her, had an idea for a joint project. "We wanted Frank to write something for us. We asked him because Someone to Watch Over Me is such a beautiful piece of writing. But Frank is so elusive, he's always so busy doing other things."
The subject of Frank McGuinness came up again later in the interview, when I remarked on the close resemblance between Jane Horrocks and the young Marianne Faithfull. If ever an actress looked the part - and there is that significant bonus that she can sing and so precisely catch the nuances of other singers - then Jane Horrocks would appear to be the perfect casting whenever somebody makes a movie of Marianne Faithfull's enthralling autobiography.
Jane Horrocks is thrown by the suggestion at first. "I don't think I'm sexy enough to play her," she says. "Marianne Faithfull is so voluptuous. But then, of course, Frank is a friend of hers . . . "