Lesley Manville on whodunnit Magpie Murders & starring as Princess Margaret in The Crown

Virgin Radio

7 Feb 2022, 12:08

The Vera actress joined the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose to talk about her latest TV role.

She told Graham: “I play Susan Ryeland who's a publisher… if you read the book, it's in two halves. You get the 1950’s murder mystery and then you read the section that's in present day and it's my character who writes the books about a famous detective called Atticus Pund who's a detective in the 1950s.

"What [novelist and screenwriter] Antony Horowitz has really brilliantly done is he's merged the two timeframes and merged the characters so that while my character, the publisher, there's a murder and she gets involved with finding out how the murders happened, but the clues of the murder are in the book that’s set in the 50s. So there's quite a few actors who play two parts because the author bases his characters in his books on people that he knows.

“The last chapter of the book is missing and that's one of the key plot points and she knows that the clue to who has murdered him is in the last chapter. Also she needs to find the last chapter in order to publish so there's all of these things going on. She's a publisher, but she becomes a little bit of a detective."

On the filming location, she said: “We actually shot a lot of it in Dublin because it's meant to be London, and Suffolk, but you get lots of tax incentives for shooting in Ireland - and who doesn't love Dublin?"

Starting her career in showbusiness as a teen, she shared: “I said 'bye bye school' aged 15 and I lived in Brighton and I took myself off to the Italia Conti stage school in Clapham in London and in theory continued my general education but spent the afternoons tap dancing, singing, acting and they were my agents as well. 

“My parents were very encouraging but the whole idea of the scheme came from me, but the brilliant thing then was my parents were not wealthy at all. I got a 100 per cent grant from Brighton and Hove council to go there. They gave me a rail pass, it cost me nothing to go there.

"My dad used to give me £1 every day so that I could buy my tea and toast on the train in the morning from Brighton to Victoria and it bought my lunch and got me home again and it usually lasted a couple of days.”

On her other iconic role in The Crown, she said: "I'm playing Princess Margaret. We haven't wrapped on season five yet and then we have a bit of a break, and then we go back later in the year and start the sixth and final season.”

Watch on Britbox from 10 February.

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