Film: Old and Grey

Los Angeles — It’s a shock when British actress Imelda Staunton walks into the hotel room. She looks lively, sprightly and fashionably contemporary. Hip, even.

Pink lace peeks out from under the top of her bright blue blouse. There’s a blush to her wide face that passes as a glow and complements her blue eyes and curly brown hair.

Staunton looks far different in Vera Drake. As the title character in this wrenchingly sensitive film by Mike Leigh (Naked and Secrets & Lies), she plays a seemingly older and far plainer — dowdier, even — woman. Her work earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination, while Leigh is a Best Director nominee for this film, which has been playing art houses nationwide for months and opens in Cincinnati Friday.

Vera is a British mother and domestic worker in gray 1950 London who also — believing in the rightness of it — helps frightened young women receive illegal abortions. Her role is an important one because Britain didn’t make abortions legal until 1967.

Vera is positively babushka-like in her sweet bedside manner, staidly dressed and seemingly always ready to make tea. But when she’s arrested for botching an abortion, the fright and shame make her seem even more aged than she already is. It’s as if all the sadness in the world has fallen on her weary body and is steamrollering her toward loneliness, abandonment and crushing punishment for her criminality.

Naturally, I ask Staunton what it was like to play a much older woman, and I’m quickly corrected.

“I’m 48, and she’s 50,” the accomplished British stage actress says. “Women looked 100 years old in those clothes and in those times. They were hard times and people had hard lives and that makes you look older … and they didn’t have the food we did.”

It is because of Staunton’s transformation that this unknown-in-America actress suddenly is lighting up the radar screen. In Great Britain, her acting has won three Oliviers, the top live-theater award. She’s been on several popular British television series, including the popular drama Fingersmith, which soon arrives with a new series of episodes.

But while Staunton has had supporting roles in such movies as Shakespeare in Love and Sense and Sensibility, this is her breakthrough. It’s also her first film working with Leigh, who has a reputation as a consummate actors’ director because of the time he spends with them working on their characters.

At last September’s Venice Film Festival, Vera Drake won the top Golden Lion award; Staunton won for Best Actress. That instantly short-listed her for every other best actress award, culminating in her recent Oscar nomination. It’s fair to say all the Oscar attention is pushing Staunton to the verge of major celebrity.

“I’ll have to deal with that (American fame) as I can,” she says. “I have no idea what it will be like. This has happened to me at a time of life when my head is fairly screwed on. It ain’t going to be spinning anywhere. And the best experience has happened to me — I’ve had this film. All of this is like going to a party.”

Staunton can be snappish in conversation, especially when asked about her personal life.

“I don’t want to talk about my family, thank you,” she replies curtly. (She has a husband, actor Jim Carter, and a daughter.)

Leigh, who joins Staunton on our conversation, can speak in the borderline-exasperated way of a college professor dealing with naively questioning undergraduates. When I ask him one too many questions about the evolution of Britain’s abortion laws, he testily replies, “What you’re actually asking is beyond the remit of this discussion — how society evolves in its moral ideas.”

But he acknowledges that Vera Drake has a message about abortion.

“Certain things are beyond dispute,” he says. “Outlaw abortion, and amateurs will be there to practice.”

Beyond that, he doesn’t mean for Vera Drake to be a political screed.

“What I tried to do is create a kind of prism through which we look at these events which present questions of good and evil, good intentions and criminality, in a way that an audience has to deal with,” he says. “It isn’t for me to be reductionist and slam the audience with black-and-white propaganda, which I couldn’t do anyway.”

Leigh is a beefy-looking intellectual — short gray hair, trim white beard — with an intimidating vocabulary. But his casual manner of dress, loose jeans and black jacket on this day, suggests a familiarity with working-class life.

At 61, he’s dedicated Vera Drake to his late parents, identified in the credits as “a doctor and a midwife.” In conversation, he’s more expansive.

“The experience shown in the film doesn’t come out of anything directly with my parents,” he says. “I put that homage at the end because I would have loved to talk to my father last year when I was making this film about his experiences as a working-class doctor in the 1940s and later.

“My father qualified as a doctor in 1939, but he never got to practice other than as an Army doctor until 1946. He began in general practice and within 18 months the new Labor government introduced a national health service. My father, who was a committed socialist, was absolutely a committed health-service doctor and couldn’t wait to get rid of (his) private patients. And he also devoted a lot of his time to being an industrial doctor going to factories.”

Leigh says his father during those years likely had to deal with pregnant women and with the aftermath of abortions gone wrong.

“I know nothing about his feelings or experiences or relationship to these things,” he says. “I would have loved to talk to him, but I couldn’t because he died in 1985.”

On Vera Drake, which is typical of Leigh’s collective approach to filmmaking, Staunton and the other actors spent six months developing their characters through often-improvised rehearsals. Three months was spent filming.

“It’s such a creative atmosphere — six months of preparing these characters and all you’re doing is building this person day by day,” Staunton says. “But never for a minute as an actor are you saying, ‘How should I be, what should I do?’ All you’re doing is reacting as (the character) would react.

“He creates that atmosphere. He enables every actor in film to be honest and truthful. The concentration is enormous, but you’re so nourished by the work.”

Addressing his approach, Leigh says, “So as far as letting them improvise, it’s essential to the creation of the film. But, of course, as in all my films what you see is not improvised before the camera. It’s all been distilled and structured and rehearsed and scripted through rehearsal so that what we shot is actually very precise.”

Whether a Best Actress Oscar awaits her, the biggest prize for Staunton was to be in a Mike Leigh film. She’d like to do it again.

“Yes, please, as soon as possible,” she says.

This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.