Chic couture, bio-terror and a whole load of Mike Leigh: Lesley Manville’s finest films – ranked!

Chic couture, bio-terror and a whole load of Mike Leigh: Lesley Manville’s finest films – ranked! With her 70th birthday around the corner, we assess the greatest screen outings by the indisputable doyenne of dour British drama – and plenty more asides 10. Queer (2024) Among the bold choices in Luca Guadagnino’s feverish film of William S Burroughs’ novel are the late 20th-century pop and alternative soundtrack (Nirvana, Prince, New Order) for a 1950s story, and the casting of an unrecognisable, orc-like Manville in a trumped-up cameo as the shaman Dr Cotter, who was male in the original book. 9. Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022) In a vision of the French capital that makes Amélie look like La Haine, Manville plays a 1950s cockney cleaner and war widow, who resolves to blow a windfall on a couture frock. The movie is mush but there’s pleasure to be had from seeing Manville square off against a cartoonishly snooty Isabelle Huppert, and bring gor-blimey cheek and pluck to the stuffed corsets at Dior. It all plays like the sunny, below-stairs flipside of Phantom Thread. 8. Sparkle (2007) This unjustly forgotten romcom features a plum role for Manville, as the pub singer who rides the coattails of her restless son (Shaun Evans) when he moves from Liverpool to London. She specialises in cover versions that seem to comment on the plot: particularly Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime and Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. These, along with Manville’s endearing scenes with the not-so-secret admirer played by an adorably low-key Bob Hoskins, give the film an extra shot of charm. 7. Cold Storage (2026) Within the first 10 minutes of this horror comedy, scripted by David Koepp (who wrote the 1993 Jurassic Park screenplay), Manville is wearing a hazmat suit and wrestling a colleague infected by a killer fungus. Not at all the sort of thing Mike Leigh ever asks her to do, and more’s the pity. Reunited with Liam Neeson, her screen husband from Ordinary Love, she plays a bio-terror exper...