The lady's a tramp
Brenda Blethyn is tiny, beautifully coiffed, and slightly posh. The characters she plays most definitely are not. 'It's a little alarming when directors are casting these trampy characters and they say, I know who that is. It's Brenda Blethyn!' she laughs. She has a little voice and giggles a lot.
She goes into character for a minute, back to Mari Hoff, the appallingly sluttish woman she played in Little Voice (for which she has received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination). She starts to cry.
'I can't help it,' she says. 'I feel so sorry for her, she's so pathetic.' Mari Hoff is larger than life: vile, trampy, and horrible to her daughter Little Voice, or LV (Jane Horrocks). As played by Blethyn, she falls out of her low-cut tops, slings her fishnet-clad legs over the sofa, and is appalling in her bid to nab low-life promoter Ray Day (Michael Caine).
He is not so interested until he hears LV sing: she does pitch-perfect renditions of Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, among others. Ray sees a showbiz future in LV, while Mari sees a future in him. It all goes awry in the North England town of Scarborough when LV prefers a future with pigeon-fancier Ewan McGregor.
'Mari has an appalling relationship with her daughter,' says 53-year-old former stage actress Blethyn. 'She says the most unsympathetic and dreadful things. When we see them, in the film, something's happened to Mari - she thinks she's found herself a boyfriend, it's all exciting for her so she's talking more than normal.
'But the most horrible thing she does is kick LV's record player. It's an unforgivable thing to kick that record player and scratch the record. But she's had a drink. The biggest villain in the film is probably alcohol.' As for the clothes Mari wears: 'Which particular items are you after?' Blethyn laughs. 'I'll put a word in for you. Aren't they just awful? It's not me at all, I'm very Harvey Nichols. But they were perfect for Mari. If you went to Scarborough now, to some of the clubs at night, the women would be wearing clothes like that.
'They were not extraordinary garments at all. It's just the way she wears them. But you've to be objective, stand back from it. That's why I have no vanity about watching Mari on the screen, who is dishevelled, an embarrassment, loud and unattractive. I find her quite revolting at times. But she's not me.' The last time Blethyn put on her glad rags for the Academy Awards ceremony was two years ago, when Secrets And Lies catapulted her out of a quiet stage career in Britain and into the international spotlight (previously, her biggest movie role had been as Brad Pitt's mother in the Robert Redford-directed A River Runs Through It).