Lesley Manville tells Steve Pratt about working with veteran filmmaker Mike Leigh, bad driving and being in it for the long haul.

IT begins with a phone call.

“Do you want to be in my next film?” asks British film-maker Mike Leigh. “There’s nothing to tell you about it, because there’s nothing to tell. There are no characters created yet. So it’s literally that, and you say yes or no,” explains Lesley Manville, who’s been working with Leigh on and off for 30 years.

The only thing that can determine the scale of an actor’s involvement is how long they’re booked for.

“For example, Jim Broadbent and I both do little cameos in Vera Drake, and we were only each on that for a month,” she says.

Leigh’s latest film, Another Year, was a different matter. They were booked “for the duration” which meant 18 weeks rehearsal, and then ten or 11 weeks filming from the script Leigh writes from the rehearsals.

Mary, her character in Another Year, drinks too much, drives badly, yearns for romance and is, above all, very lonely. “I get a lot people saying they’ve been like Mary,” says the actress.

“It’s the particular cocktail of Mary, isn’t it? She’s lonely, had a pretty miserable life, had terrible relationships, been abandoned by her family.

“She talks too much, she’s desperate to stay looking young, she drinks too much. It’s the whole mix with her that makes her what she is.”

Surprisingly, considering the depth of research and characterisation, Manville wasn’t affected by playing Mary, as she’s very good at shutting off when filming ends.

“Once I’ve done it and I go home, that’s it, it’s out of the way. I wasn’t particularly miserable while I was playing Mary. It doesn’t quite get to me in that way. Thank God, actually, otherwise it would be a bit grim.”

What lingered with her was playing drunk convincingly, something she hadn’t been called on to do before. “We didn’t really analyse it, but it sort of took care of itself. Oddly enough, it was the only thing I’ve ever done where I felt that I kind of needed to keep in the mood of it, between takes.

“That’s not like me, because I can do big emotional scenes, stop, have a cup of tea, have a chat, make a few phone calls, and then go back and do those big emotional scenes again.

“But I found really hard to go in and out of the drunk scenes. It’s to do with a kind of slowed-down, semi state. So I took myself off into a room and stayed in a kind of half-drunk feeling, bringing my energy down.”

In the film Mary becomes the proud owner of a “little red car” which she drives badly. In real life, Manville feels she’s a fantastic driver. “I’ve been driving since I was 17, and touch wood, I’m a really good driver,” she says.

“To make it look on the camera like bad driving, you have to exaggerate it a lot, so I was doing what I thought was regular bad driving, but they said it didn’t look that bad on camera, so I said, ‘what if I park half-way up the kerb?’.”

Since Leigh introduced her to his working method, she’s always loved the liberation and freedom of not having a script. “It’s always thrilled me.

It gets quite hard when you’re really pinning the dialogue down, because you’re going to film it the next day.

You know some line is not quite right, and you’re grappling around for the right words,” she says.

“There are times when it’s challenging, but I’d choose it over having a script any day, although a great script is a great thing to have and I’ve worked on some great scripts”.

Her performance has sparked talk of awards, including an Oscar nomination.

“They should just give it to me and be done with it,” jokes Manville. “It’s very exciting. Why wouldn’t you want to be nominated for an Oscar? But it’s quite a way off.”

It would give her the opportunity to work in the US although she has no complaints about her career here. She works virtually all the time with amazing directors in the theatre, making films with Leigh and in some really good television.

“But if this film is going to afford a new little adventure for me, then I’m up for it.

“I’m clearly in it for the long haul, and I’m not looking for some kind of sudden fame, that’s ridiculous. I’m the age I am, and I’m not hungry for it in that way, but I’m up for another adventure.”

She doesn’t feel typecast as a Mike Leigh actress because there are huge gaps between working with him.

“I’ve done more stuff at the National Theatre in the last five years than I’ve done with Mike, but I don’t think people think of me as a National Theatre actress.

“Well, they can if they like, because I quite like the sound of that – Mike Leigh/National Theatre actress.”

■ Another Year (15) opens in cinemas on November 5.