We both become a little emotional when we discuss the death of Brenda’s husband and daughters from Huntington’s disease (an incurable neurological genetic condition that also runs in my wife’s family). Manville’s sister was “miraculously brilliant” because, while she had so many troubles, “she never made me feel that what I was doing, and how my life was – with a healthy child and a successful career – wasn’t to be celebrated and wasn’t important, even though she was going through this most horrific… just hell”.
Seeing something like that puts one’s own troubles into perspective, I suggest. “Of course it does,” Manville agrees. “Nothing compares, nothing gets even close, and I’m not a moaner. I just get on with it, and that’s very much my philosophy.”
Manville caused a bit of a stir recently when she said that she found it “insulting” when audiences filmed or took photographs of performers on stage during curtain calls and asked: “Why can’t they let it live in their souls for five minutes?”
The comments went viral, and she now gives off the impression that she is once bitten, twice shy. “I don’t really want to talk about that in this interview, because I just don’t want to,” she says. “I said what I said, but I don’t want to start dragging it up again.”
When I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses a couple of weeks after Manville’s meditation on theatre etiquette, there were announcements before each act with a request for audience members to keep their phones in their pockets, and ushers held “no photography” signs at the front as the curtain came down. And subscribers to The Telegraph Culture newsletter wrote in record numbers to express their views on the topic, almost all of whom were on her side. “Oh, well, that’s nice,” she says. “No, I believe most people do feel that, but for those who don’t, I don’t want any kind of poking at me anymore.”
Manville’s candour is as refreshing as her self-assurance. Not for her the trite sentiments about being “lucky” or having “imposter syndrome”, which, these days, is the stock-in-trade of so many of her fellow actors.
“I haven’t just turned up, dialled something in, and [gone]: ‘Oh, great, I’ve done well,’” she says. “I’m not a flash in the pan, I’ve earned this.” Few would disagree.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is at the National Theatre until June 6 and in cinemas from June 25