It’s time to give Lesley Manville a damehood
It’s time to give Lesley Manville a damehood
Claire AllfreeMon, June 8, 2026 at 9:13 AM UTC
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Lesley Manville receives the prize for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the 2026 Tony Awards - John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images
Bravo to Lesley Manville, who has won a Tony award at the age of 70 for her role as Jocasta in the Broadway transfer of Robert Icke's Oedipus, for which she also won an Olivier in London. It's an outstanding performance – gutsy, effortlessly at ease, ultimately devastating – but also a hallmark of a career that gets more impressive with each passing year. In her seventh decade, Manville unquestionably now sits alongside Judi Dench and Helen Mirren as the cream of female British acting talent.
Manville has always brought brawn and brass to her roles in a way that puts one in mind of grand old American acting powerhouses such as Stockard Channing. She has a fleshy vitality about her that seems to grow more vibrant the more she ages. Her Jocasta is horribly damaged, and, in the play's final moments, agonising to watch, but she is also up for a quick ravishing from her husband (played by Mark Strong). She excelled earlier this year in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, her vampish Marquise de Merteuil icily formidable in her erotic demands even while betraying a terrifying awareness of her declining powers.
Gutsy, effortless, devastating: Manville as Jocasta in the Broadway transfer of Robert Icke's Oedipus - Manuel Harlan
She's conquered stage and screen and is prolific on both. It's impossible to separate her granular intelligence from her partnership with film director Mike Leigh, with whom she has collaborated on and off since the early 1970s and with whom she has delivered many of her most wrenching performances, among them the nervy, long-suffering Penny in 2002's All or Nothing. She was almost unbearably good in James Graham's true-crime drama Sherwood as a wife capsized by grief. Yet she revels too at the painfully monstrous. Her gin-addled Princess Margaret, beadily resentful of her sister Queen Elizabeth, was a highlight of the final two seasons of The Crown.
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Master of the stage: As Mrs Alving in Richard Eyre's revival of Ghost - Alastair Muir
It is the stage, though, that arguably elicits her most concentrated performances. She was magnificent as Mrs Alving in Richard Eyre's revival of Ghosts. She plays women in extremis but without grandstanding or resorting to histrionics. It's hard to think of an actress who combines such magnificent talent with so little actorly vanity.
Elsewhere, it was a disappointing night for Britain. Giant, which originated at the Royal Court, failed to win either best director or best play, although John Lithgow rightly took home the best actor gong for his compulsively complex performance as Roald Dahl.
Full Tonys winners list
No one was seriously expecting the plucky home-grown musical Two Strangers(Carry a Cake Across New York)to see off Schmigadoon! (a send up of golden-age Broadway) and The Lost Boys (an adaptation of the 1987 film) for Best Musical. In the event it was Schmigadoon!'s night. The other big success of the evening was Joe Mantello's minimalist revival of Death of a Salesman, which took home six awards, the highest number in the history of the Tonys, and, in this particular moment in history, testament to that play's enduring potency as a story of American decline.
Yet Manville is as worthy a winner as any this year. A damehood surely awaits.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
