A coup in midcareer

Tell Imelda Staunton she is fast becoming a front-runner for this year’s best actress Academy Award on the strength of her performance in “Vera Drake,” and the British theater veteran immediately turns the compliment toward the movie itself.

“People say, ‘You might have an Oscar nomination,’ and I say, ‘Well, look, OK, if it happens, it happens,’ ” says the diminutive actress, who is as animated and voluble a real-life presence as her screen character, Vera, is movingly indrawn and quiet. “The point is, I’ve had my prize; I’ve got it: I’ve got the film. I’ve had that year of extraordinary work.”

Seated in the London office of the movie’s publicist, Staunton, age 48 and a far cheekier, even sexier presence than Vera might suggest, takes a refreshingly brisk, no-nonsense approach to the sort of trophy prognostications that often leaves Hollywood sounding breathy.

“That isn’t serious, the serious work has been done; the film has been done,” she says of Mike Leigh’s latest film, opening Friday in Los Angeles. “It would be stupid of me to invest a lot of energy and angst into the possibility of getting a prize.”

Or, in the case of the movie, multiple prizes: “Vera Drake” was named best film and Staunton best actress at last month’s Venice Film Festival.

Indeed, one sympathizes with Staunton when she speaks of “the deep decline” she almost went into this year after finishing “Vera Drake,” in which she plays the sweet-natured, working-class Londoner of the title, a cleaner who doubles as a back-street abortionist.

Vera, her kindly countenance locked into a smile gone all too grim-faced by the end of the movie, is one of those roles that virtually guarantees a leap into prominence for the performer lucky enough to play her -- and talented enough to do her justice.

By way of comparison, one could point to Charlize Theron’s breakout portrayal of Aileen Wuornos last year in “Monster.” Or, perhaps more to the point, Cynthia, the beleaguered mother in “Secrets & Lies,” Leigh’s 1996 film that gave an enormous career boost to another English theater actress, Brenda Blethyn, who was all but unknown on screen before then.

As it happens, Staunton and Blethyn were rehearsing the Alan Bennett play “Habeas Corpus” at London’s Donmar Warehouse theater when Blethyn was called away to the Cannes Film Festival, where she went on to take that year’s prize for best actress; an Oscar nomination followed. Now, one could argue that writer-director Leigh is doing eight years later for Staunton what he did for Blethyn.

“In a way, it is similar,” Leigh acknowledges, “but this feels different, as well; we’ve moved on in lots of ways.”

What remains, he says, is an interest in the sort of unvarnished integrity that Staunton’s classical training cannot buy. “The whole point about the kind of quality of performance you get from Imelda is that it means the audience has got a totally real person with the unexplained complexities of a real person.”

A craft well honed

And what kind of a person is Staunton? “She’s great,” Leigh says without hesitation. “Imelda is a tough cookie but also a hugely open and accessible and caring person.”

Perhaps best of all, Staunton never coarsens the largely unspoken feelings of a character whose fate could be played for cheap pathos.

“One of the great strengths she brings to it,” says her director, “apart from her acting and great humanity, is that Imelda’s totally unsentimental; there’s no wallowing in emotion.”

Just as there isn’t in conversation with a performer who understands that the best way to embody compassion -- which Vera unmistakably does -- is by refusing to go all gooey. To that extent, this kindly woman is a piece of a family that, explains Staunton, isn’t full of “goody-goody people; they’re just working-class people who get on with their lives and who don’t happen to have an attitude or an agenda.”

That explains the seismic jolt that occurs when Vera’s secret “occupation” -- helping terminate the pregnancies of women who would be unable to otherwise -- is laid bare to her family.

“Everything crushes in,” Staunton says. “Vera knows she is in the eyes of the law guilty, and she’s destroyed for her family; she’s distraught about what this has done to them.”

Besides Staunton, the Drake clan includes Phil Davis as her supportive if not always comprehending husband, Stan, and Daniel Mays and Alex Kelly as their grown children, Sid and Ethel. Oscar winner Jim Broadbent (“Iris”), a friend of Staunton’s and a veteran of such Leigh movies as “Topsy-Turvy,” appears in a cameo as a judge.

“Vera Drake” is clearly the film role of Staunton’s career, but she is no newcomer. She may be best known for her role as Hugh Laurie’s wife over a decade ago in “Peter’s Friends.” In “Shakespeare in Love,” she plays the nurse. “I was just standing next to Gwyneth [Paltrow],” Staunton recalls with a smile, “so that was hardly transforming.”

In the 1993 film version of “Much Ado About Nothing,” starring Staunton’s good friend and fellow Londoner, Emma Thompson, Staunton had a virtually wordless part as one of Hero’s gentlewomen.

“That was the best job of my life,” Staunton said. “Seven weeks in Tuscany ... it was marvelous.”

Earlier this year, she popped up as the prime minister’s wife in “Bright Young Things,” director Stephen Fry’s adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

But as was true of Blethyn, who had only one major film role on her resume (“A River Runs Through It”) before “Secrets & Lies” sent her soaring, Staunton has long been an exceedingly welcome presence on the London stage. In 1985, she won the Olivier Award -- London’s equivalent of the Tony -- for her supporting turns in two plays: Alan Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval” and a revival of the Emlyn Williams warhorse “The Corn Is Green.” A notable singer as well as actress, she got her second Olivier in 1991 for playing the baker’s wife in the short-lived West End premiere of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical “Into the Woods.” Staunton’s only American stage appearance was a New York cabaret stint in 1999.

A different road traveled

“Our history is theater; Americans’ history is film,” Staunton says, explaining a career trajectory that, in Britain, is by no means unusual. Nor is the way in which acting lifted her out of the Irish, working-class background into which she was born in north London. Her mother was a hairdresser, and her father worked on building sites.

As an only child, she recalls, “I was sort of in a world of my own a lot of the time, inventing things and people.”

So Staunton listened when a teacher urged her to audition for drama schools. She didn’t get into two of the three places to which she applied but was accepted by the third, the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, or RADA.

After RADA, she paid her dues in regional repertory performing plays from Genet (“The Maids”) to Sophocles (“Electra”) and parts as diverse as Hortense, the haughty maid in the Sandy Wilson musical “The Boyfriend,” and the distaff lead in the Jerry Herman musical “Mack & Mabel.”

“I’d been given enormous responsibility early on but without enormous exposure,” she said, sounding grateful and comparing her experience to that of performers who “leave drama school and go straight into a huge movie, which everyone sees ... [while] I was spending six years being bad, mediocre, good, bad again, better -- just practicing my craft.”

And all of that was before making her London stage debut at the National Theatre in 1982, performing three shows in repertory.

One of them was the classic American musical, “Guys and Dolls,” in which Staunton began as a Hot Box girl, eventually graduating to the Miss Adelaide of any theatergoer’s dreams -- adenoidal, plaintive and utterly adorable. It was in that production where Staunton met the actor Jim Carter, who is now her husband; the couple have a 10-year-old daughter, Bess.

So you believe Staunton when she says, “I’ve always wanted a long career, and in my mind, I’m in the middle of that.”

But you also believe it when she relates that remark to “Vera Drake”: “It’s going to be very hard to top a film like this; I’ve done the job of my life, and this is it.”

Matt Wolf is London theater critic for Variety and author of “Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping Into Freedom.”