Lesley Manville longs to continue playing Princess Margaret

When Princess Margaret tells her sister Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) in Season 6 of “The Crown,” “You know how much I hate an empty diary,” Lesley Manville might have been joking about her own career, which has skyrocketed in the U.S. since her 2018 Oscar nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. Manville, a longtime stalwart of British film, television and stage with seven BAFTA nominations, earned her first Emmy nomination for playing the “sober” royal of her time in “Ritz,” Episode 8 of the final season of “The Crown.”

In September, his film “Queer,” directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the short story by William S. Burroughs, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In October, Alfonso Cuarón’s series “Disclaimer” comes to Apple TV+, airing shortly after Ryan Murphy’s (supposedly) “very eccentric” “Grotesquerie,” which just wrapped in Los Angeles. There’s plenty more on Manville’s busy schedule, including three other films and a BBC/PBS television series.

In “Ritz,” Princess Margaret suffers three increasingly debilitating heart attacks, along with flashbacks to her outing to London’s Ritz hotel with the then-Princess Elizabeth. Manville describes the emotional episode as “about two sisters, not necessarily a queen and a princess, who just loved each other deeply and said goodbye.” A sadly emaciated Princess Margaret died aged 71 in 2002.

Manville was devastated by the end of “The Crown” because she longed to play Margaret more. “Of course, that’s not realistic. It’s about the whole family and I can’t complain about the quality of what was delivered. It was really a choice.” Nor will she complain about the incessant chatter around the series’ dramatizations, which in 2022 culminated in her longtime friend Judi Dench issuing harsh criticism of the show as “crude sensationalism” and “cruelly unfair.”

“It's a tiring argument that I can't be bothered with,” says Lesley Manville of opposition to the dramatization of the British royal family in “The Crown.”

(Keith Bernstein / Netflix)

“Of course, it’s speculation, a lot of it, and Judi is entitled to her opinion. We don’t know how Margaret behaved with the speech therapist, so we imagine she was probably pretty irritated. There’s that scene where she runs around Kensington Palace trying to find an old coat that might have a cigarette in the pocket. That’s drama, in the same way that Schindler’s List is based on some hard, terrible truths, but around that you write the characters and fill in all the details. I think it’s a fantastic way to create drama, so I can’t stand purists saying, ‘Well, we don’t know if the Queen ever said that. ’ Of course we don’t. It’s a tiring argument that I can’t be bothered with.”

(Jennifer McCord/For The Times)

If she held any grudge against Dench (and she doesn’t), it may have been over a 1989 stage performance of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” when Dench went all out from the wings to try to make Manville laugh by pretending she was being pleasured from behind. It worked, and is probably Manville’s most embarrassing professional experience. “I mean, peeing on stage has to be up there with the best. Judi is so naughty, and gloriously naughty.”

Princess Margaret was too. “We had to do three heart attacks in a one-hour episode, so we needed to show the progression. The first one was quite mild; he came home and before long he was drinking, smoking and behaving badly again. I went to a hospital and met several heart attack victims. It was very moving, obviously. And what a brilliant job the hair, makeup and prosthetics team did – the clever way we got the mouth and eye to collapse, all within the parameters that I could work and speak within.”

Manville’s real-life character arc continued with this year’s “Back to Black,” in which she plays Amy Winehouse’s beloved grandmother, Cynthia, a former singer who created her granddaughter’s signature beehive hairstyle.

I ask her when she has time to sleep and she laughs. “I'm planning on sleeping tonight! Then I'll start filming 'Mr. Burton.'” [a biopic of actor Richard Burton] Here in Cardiff tomorrow morning. It’s been a whirlwind of late, but that’s the way it is.” She is “excited and looking forward” to beginning rehearsals for her October-January run of “Oedipus” in London’s West End alongside Mark Strong.

Any respite in your future? “Not at the moment, no. I have almost everything booked until 2025 and probably until mid-2026. It is a miraculous and wonderful position that I do not take for granted. is “She’s getting better for women my age, no doubt, and she needs to keep getting better. There are a lot of interesting women out there to play. Surprise, surprise!”