Chic couture, bio-terror and a whole load of Mike Leigh: Lesley Manville’s finest films – ranked!
With her 70th birthday around the corner, we assess the greatest screen outings of everybody’s favourite underrated doyenne of British cinema
10. Queer (2024)
Among the bold choices in Luca Guadagnino’s feverish film of William S Burroughs’ novel are the late 20th-century pop and alternative soundtrack (Nirvana, Prince, New Order) for a 1950s story, and the casting of an unrecognisable, orc-like Manville in a trumped-up cameo as the shaman Dr Cotter, who was male in the original book.
9. Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
In a vision of the French capital that makes Amélie look like La Haine, Manville plays a 1950s cockney cleaner and war widow, who resolves to blow a windfall on a couture frock. The movie is mush but there’s pleasure to be had from seeing Manville square off against a cartoonishly snooty Isabelle Huppert, and bring gor-blimey cheek and pluck to the stuffed corsets at Dior. It all plays like the sunny, below-stairs flipside of Phantom Thread.
8. Sparkle (2007)
This unjustly forgotten romcom features a plum role for Manville, as the pub singer who rides the coattails of her restless son (Shaun Evans) when he moves from Liverpool to London. She specialises in cover versions that seem to comment on the plot: particularly Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime and Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. These, along with Manville’s endearing scenes with the not-so-secret admirer played by an adorably low-key Bob Hoskins, give the film an extra shot of charm.
7. Cold Storage (2026)
Within the first 10 minutes of this horror comedy, scripted by David Koepp (who wrote the 1993 Jurassic Park screenplay), Manville is wearing a hazmat suit and wrestling a colleague infected by a killer fungus. Not at all the sort of thing Mike Leigh ever asks her to do, and more’s the pity. Reunited with Liam Neeson, her screen husband from Ordinary Love, she plays a bio-terror expert who isn’t too distracted by extraterrestrial horrors to neglect health and safety: “Bend your knees, you moron!” she tells Neeson while lifting. She also has a tough-cookie comeback to the question of how she has survived so long: “Too mean to die.”
6. All or Nothing (2002)
A strong contender for Mike Leigh’s most gruelling film. Manville is Penny, the mousy supermarket cashier living on a joyless south London estate with her soggy mop of a partner (Timothy Spall) and their two adult children. James Corden is her scowling, splenetic son, who thinks it is perfectly reasonable to finish the dinner she has cooked for him and announce, “That was shit” – then tell his mother to “fuck off” when she objects. No wonder Penny doesn’t smile until two hours into the film. (The running time is two hours and eight minutes.)
5. Ordinary Love (2019)
Originally titled Normal People but renamed to avoid any Sally Rooney-related confusion, this drama, starring Manville as a woman stoically undergoing treatment for breast cancer and Liam Neeson as the husband supporting her, avoids some of the obvious pitfalls. Cancer and chemotherapy are represented by more than just a headscarf, and illness reinforces the couple’s commonplace joys rather than ushering in any epiphanies. The emphasis on desire is refreshing, too. “There aren’t many middle-aged love stories on screen,” she said in 2019. “And I’ve done most of them. ‘Over-50s having sex? Let’s get Manville!’”
4. Let Him Go (2020)
After Phantom Thread, said Manville, “America has opened up to me”. Exhibit A: this thriller about a grieving couple (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) whose former daughter-in-law marries a ne’er-do-well after the death of their son. Wishing to maintain contact with their grandchild, they must reckon with his new stepfamily, headed by Manville as the platinum-haired Medusa of a matriarch, who is not too shy to deploy an axe if her famous pork chops fail to persuade an enemy to see things her way. This is Manville “unleashed”, as the LA Times put it. The ease with which she steals the show should qualify this as a heist movie into the bargain.
3. Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Mike Leigh’s first period film is a fastidious backstage drama about the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, with Manville sublime as Kitty, patient wife to WS Gilbert (Jim Broadbent). She conveys the mute exasperation of cheering on a partner who is apparently impervious to encouragement, all while maintaining a jaunty, unflappable demeanour. Until, that is, her moving final scene, in which Kitty’s pain at being childless and overlooked is expressed through the only language she can be sure will register on her husband’s radar – the sort of dream imagery that may have been torn from one of his operettas. It’s a delicately judged moment, the emotional floodgates creaking under the strain without ever quite bursting.
2. Phantom Thread (2017)
Infinitely more intimidating than Reynolds Woodcock, the 1950s British dressmaker played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is his purse-mouthed sister, Cyril; a role that gives Manville room for endless variations on the prim, thwarted or tightly scheming smile. Reynolds’ affectionate term for Cyril – “My old so-and-so” – makes her sound like a cuddly teddy bear, but nothing could be further from the truth. She does her brother’s dirty work, “letting go” not only their employees but his romantic partners, too, and fighting for territory with the ones who make it through – such as the waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps), whom Cyril sniffs when they first meet, as though scenting blood. The Oscar nomination that came Manville’s way was the least she could expect.
1. Another Year (2010)
Manville has been collaborating with Mike Leigh for nearly half a century, starting in 1979 with the radio play Too Much of a Good Thing (not broadcast until 1992). But Another Year, for which she was Bafta-nominated, represents her bravest and most complex work for the director. As the movie cycles through the seasons, she charts the emotional disintegration of Mary, the clinging, sozzled friend of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), an ebullient and ever-so-slightly smug London couple who indulge her chaos and self-pity (“Why do I always get it wrong?”) until she crosses the line. Manville can elicit contradictory responses from the viewer in the space of one scene, or even one line; from laughter to dismay, empathy to extreme irritation. Her face is an open book with tear-stained pages, her performance a transparent record of how other people’s happiness can be desperately wounding when your own is in short supply. The film ends with a minute-long closeup of Manville, the music fading out until we are left with nothing but silence and the full, scalding force of Mary’s loneliness.
• This article was amended on 5 March 2026 to use a picture of Lesley Manville in Topsy-Turvy. An earlier version used a picture that showed Shirley Henderson and Dorothy Atkinson in the film, not Manville as its caption said.