Lesley Manville

Lesley Ann Manville was born on 12 March 1956 in Brighton, East Sussex, the youngest of three daughters of Ron Manville, a taxi driver, and Norma Manville, a former ballet dancer known as Jean. She grew up in nearby Hove and began soprano vocal training at age eight, winning the under-18 championship of Sussex twice. As a teenager she appeared in television series including King Cinder, and at fifteen secured a place at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. Her first boyfriend was actor and former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan, whom she met at the school. After declining an invitation from teacher Arlene Phillips to join the dance troupe Hot Gossip, Manville studied improvisation under Italia Conti teacher Julia Carey. She made her professional stage debut in the 1972 West End musical I and Albert, directed by John Schlesinger.

Manville's early screen work included 80 episodes of the ITV soap opera Emmerdale Farm between 1975 and 1976, a role she has credited with funding her first flat. From 1978 she performed in new plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Warehouse and the Royal Court Theatre, where she met director Mike Leigh in 1979 while he was seeking RSC actors with improvisational skills. Her Royal Court work in the 1980s encompassed Andrea Dunbar's Rita, Sue and Bob Too in 1981, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in 1982, and Serious Money in 1987. She also appeared in the Off-Broadway production of Top Girls in the United States in 1983. For the RSC she starred in As You Like It and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both in 1985 and the latter running into 1986. She made her film debut in 1985 with Dance with a Stranger, directed by Mike Newell, a film telling the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Further stage work included The Cherry Orchard at the Aldwych Theatre in 1989, directed by Sam Mendes, and Three Sisters at the Royal Court in 1990.

Her long collaboration with Mike Leigh spans eight films: Grown-Ups (1980), High Hopes (1988), Secrets and Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004), Another Year (2010), and Mr. Turner (2014). For both All or Nothing and Another Year she won the London Film Critics' Circle Award for British Actress of the Year. Her performance in Another Year also earned her the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and nominations from the British Independent Film Awards, the European Film Awards, and the Chicago Film Critics Association. She received the Best Supporting Actress prize from the San Diego Film Critics Society for the same film.

Television credits from the 1990s and 2000s include the BBC sitcom Ain't Misbehavin' (1994), the dramas Holding On (1997), Real Women (1998–99), The Cazalets (2001), North and South (2004), and Cranford (2007), as well as a 2006 feature-length episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot titled Cards on the Table. She received Royal Television Society Award nominations for Best Female Actor for Other People's Children (2000) and Bodily Harm (2002), and played Margaret Thatcher in the Channel 4 drama The Queen in 2009.

From 2005 onward Manville appeared in multiple National Theatre productions, including His Dark Materials (2005), The Alchemist (2006), Her Naked Skin (2008), and Mike Leigh's play Grief (2011), the last of which brought her a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress. At the Old Vic she starred in All About My Mother (2007) and Six Degrees of Separation (2010). Her portrayal of Helene Alving in the 2013 revival of Ibsen's Ghosts earned her the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress and the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's 2017 period film Phantom Thread, Manville played Cyril Woodcock, sister to Daniel Day-Lewis's dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock. The performance brought her nominations for both the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress. That same year she appeared in the BBC series Harlots as Lydia Quigley, the madam of a brothel whose clientele included members of the judiciary, nobility, and upper echelons of Georgian society. In 2015 she had starred opposite Stellan Skarsgård in the BBC drama River, earning a BAFTA TV Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and she starred opposite Peter Mullan in the BBC sitcom Mum, for which she received BAFTA TV Award nominations for Best Female Comedy Performance in 2017 and 2019.

Manville was cast as Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon for the final two seasons of the Netflix historical drama The Crown, a role that earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination as well as British Academy Television Award nominations. In 2022 she starred in the Anthony Horowitz murder mystery series Magpie Murders alongside Daniel Mays, Alexandros Logothetis, Jude Hill, and Claire Rushbrook, and played the title character in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a performance that brought her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical. In 2023 it was announced she had joined the cast of the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (2024) in the role of Winehouse's grandmother Cynthia Winehouse. Her film Queer was released in 2024, and she also appeared in Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).

In 2024 Manville played Jocasta in Oedipus at Wyndham's Theatre, directed by Robert Icke, winning her second Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for the performance. The production subsequently transferred to Studio 54 in New York, where Manville made her Broadway debut in October 2025. She is a four-time Laurence Olivier Award nominee in total, having won the award twice. In the 2021 New Year Honours she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama and charity.