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One reason the cafe scene is so poignant is that Blethyn did not know before she played it that the actress cast as Cynthia's daughter would be black. "I had seen Marianne Jean-Baptiste's name on the cast list," says Blethyn, a top stage and TV actress who played Brad Pitt's mother in A River Runs Through It, "but I'd never met her. I went to the station that day, saw Marianne and knew she was not the right one. When she said, 'Are you Cynthia?' I really thought she was on the crew! So when Cynthia says there has been some mistake, that was my honest reaction. It wasn't acting."
That might seem like a naughty prank, but for the director it is part of the method that makes his films unique and, when they work as well as Secrets & Lies does, uniquely potent. "I create these films in a very intuitive, subjective, instinctive and emotional way," says Leigh, 53. "It's very much about going out and making up a film." The tactic is improvisation, a months-long process during which Leigh's actors help create the lives of their characters.
"Instead of writing a script and casting it in the usual way," Leigh says, "I gather a group of actors together, and they work for a long period before the shoot--five months in the case of Secrets & Lies. I've got all kinds of notions on the go but haven't committed myself to anything. The job is to create the palette for the film, create the characters, create the relationships, the back story, the whole world of the characters. Then I can go on location with the cast and crew and, in a sophisticated sort of way, make up the film as we go along--working from improvisations through to the very precise, structured, distilled material that is on the screen."
The material is indeed distilled. It doesn't meander, waiting for behavioral inspiration to strike. To be sure, there are wildly eccentric turns in a Leigh film, especially the early TV work; with all the belching and farting, you often feel you've been locked in the Museum of Rude Mannerisms. When Blethyn, as a grasping, pathetic maiden sister in the 1980 Grown-Ups, comes out of a bathroom after her mad scene, snot drips instructively from her nose as a residue of her hysteria.
But this is a case of an actor--through her gaudy and acute performance--serving the work, not the other way around. As Leigh actors should, for they are being true to characters they in part created. It is a symbiosis between Leigh and his actors, who have included some of Britain's finest and most daring: Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Leslie Manville, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Su Elliott, Stephen Rea, Jim Broadbent, Jane Horrocks and pre-eminently Alison Steadman, who has played all manner of agreeable or manic women in five Leigh pictures and who married the director in 1973. (The couple, recently separated, have two sons.)
Leigh's films fall roughly into two attitudinal groups. The early TV pieces (eight of them are available on video from Water Bearer Films) are harsher in tone, so scabrous that some critics have been able to embrace them only as ghastly farces. This is a 200-proof, antiromantic vision of Britain. The scepter'd isle has devolved into a nation of pasty, mottled, overweight slugs who stew in boredom, then explode into violence: a fight (Nuts in May), a heart attack (Abigail's Party), a nervous breakdown (Grown-Ups), an unmasked double adultery (Home Sweet Home).