Brenda Blethyn
Brenda Blethyn is an actor, born 1946.
Blethyn spent her twenties in an office. She did not enrol at the Guildford School of Acting until her early thirties, after her marriage ended in 1973, and the stage came a long way before any of the screen work: the Royal National Theatre, Troilus and Cressida in 1976, Mysteries in 1979, and a first wave of real notices for Steaming in 1981.
What she does better than almost anyone is play an ordinary woman at the exact moment her composure fails. Cynthia Rose Purley in Secrets & Lies (1996) is the definitive version, a performance built out of flinching, apologising and talking far too much, which is much harder than it looks and is why that part carried her from British television into film leads. She holds a Golden Globe, a BAFTA for a leading role and a Cannes best actress prize, with two Academy Award nominations behind them, and she was appointed OBE for services to drama in 2003.
The years after that made her the most reliable supporting presence in British costume drama and comedy: Mrs Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005), Grace Turner in Atonement, Mrs. Maclean in A River Runs Through It, Mari Hoff in Little Voice (1998), Mrs Jenkins in The Witches. She has never been snobbish about the work either, which is how the same CV holds a comic lead in Saving Grace and a voice part as Mama Heffalump.
Since 2011 she has been DCI Vera Stanhope, and she has now lived in that character longer than in any other.
Movies (27)
- Pride & Prejudice (2005)
- Atonement (2007)
- A River Runs Through It (1992)
- The Witches (1990)
- Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005)
- Piccadilly Jim (2004)
- The Sleeping Dictionary (2003)
- The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002)
- Secrets & Lies (1996)
- Saving Grace (2000)
- Lovely & Amazing (2002)
- Little Voice (1998)
- Beyond the Sea (2004)
- RKO 281 (1999)
- Daddy and Them (2001)
- London River (2009)
- Dragonfly (2025)
- Ethel & Ernest (2016)
- Music from Another Room (1998)
- Mary and Martha (2013)
- Sonny (2002)
- Pumpkin (2002)
- Two Men in Town (2014)
- Undertaking Betty (2002)
- Blizzard (2003)
- Dead Man Running (2009)
- Tigger & Pooh and a Musical Too (2009)
TV (11)
Where to start with Brenda Blethyn
Secrets & Lies is the one to see first, and not because of the awards: it is the clearest look at what she actually does, an hour and a half of a woman failing to hold herself together in real time, with nowhere to hide.
After that, Little Voice for the opposite gear, Mari Hoff being loud, cruel and very funny, and Saving Grace if you want to see her carry a comedy on her own. The costume work is where most viewers met her, so Pride & Prejudice and Atonement both earn an evening, though the Bennet mother gives her far more to play with than the second one does.
Then settle in with Vera, which is the least ambitious thing on this list and by some distance the most watchable: procedural comfort food that works entirely because of her.