Brenda Blethyn makes fretful, difficult women funny without asking us to excuse their behaviour. We value her most when she has room to be unreasonable, and someone beside her whose quieter performance can hold its own.
Fi1m perspective
Cynthia’s fussing in Secrets & Lies (1996) is funny until we begin to hear how much distress there is in it. Brenda Blethyn gives her an exhausting nervous energy, and allows her exasperation with her daughter Roxanne to be unfair. We laughed at Cynthia’s fussing, then regretted our impatience with her, because Blethyn made the hurt beneath it impossible to dismiss. Blethyn does not tidy the woman up to make her easier company. This is the performance to start with: funny, wearing and worth the attention it demands.
Blethyn’s screen debut was in Mike Leigh’s television film Grown-Ups (1980); Secrets & Lies later brought her film breakthrough. Her subsequent parts allowed for less sympathetic company, including the domineering mother Mari Hoff in Little Voice (1998). There was lighter work as Grace Trevethyn in Saving Grace (2000), then comedy as Mrs Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005). The lead as DCI Vera Stanhope in Vera (2011–2025) gave the later career a sustained television role.
In Secrets & Lies, Leigh gets something crucial right by giving Blethyn actors who can resist her. Claire Rushbrook’s Roxanne has enough force to challenge Cynthia’s account of their difficulties, while Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense listens without seeming to have less at stake. We need that steadiness beside Blethyn’s agitation, otherwise the most distressed person could too easily become the only one who matters. Her performance works because the film lets us question Cynthia as well as feel for her.
Jon Gregory’s patient editing gives these conversations time, though some continue after their point is clear. Andrew Dickson’s music adds tenderness that Blethyn has often supplied already, and Leigh’s writing occasionally explains feelings she has made plain. We could do with less encouragement to sympathise with Cynthia when Blethyn has made her unhappiness so hard to ignore. Start with Secrets & Lies, and give as much attention to the people listening to her as to Blethyn herself.
Biography
Brenda Blethyn is an English actress who has worked in theatre, television and film. Born Brenda Anne Bottle on 20 February 1946 in Ramsgate, Kent, she trained at the Guildford School of Acting after an earlier career in administration. She joined the Royal National Theatre in the mid-1970s and received critical acclaim for her stage work, including in Steaming (1981).
Blethyn made her television debut in Mike Leigh's Grown-Ups (1980). Her breakthrough film role came as Cynthia Rose Purley in Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1996), for which she received a BAFTA Film Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress and an Academy Award nomination. Subsequent film credits include Pride & Prejudice (2005) as Mrs Bennet, Atonement (2007) and Saving Grace (2000). She was appointed OBE for services to drama in 2003.
