Vera, in the moment

When speaking of award-winning roles, actors often describe a dramatic moment of early epiphany, when the beauty of a script or the complexity of a character moved them to say: “Yes, yes, I’ll do this one next.”

Imelda Staunton has had many transcendent moments associated with her much-lauded lead performance in “Vera Drake” -- including a best actress nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- but she never got that one. In the first place, she is a no-nonsense London-based Brit who has worked as an actor for far too long to give way to such dramatic moments. And in the second place, until she said “yes,” there was no Vera Drake. In fact, two years ago, when her agent initially told Staunton that director Mike Leigh wanted to meet with her, she said “no.”

“This is what Mike does,” she said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “He meets with a bunch of actors just to see who’s out there. He’d seen me years before and it had come to nothing, so I told my agent, ‘There’s no point.’ ”

Staunton was recently in town for the obligatory pre-Oscar whirl. Saturday it was the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Monday the academy nominee luncheon, where she gathered with both her competition -- Annette Bening, Kate Winslet, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Hilary Swank -- and her compatriots -- Leigh was nominated for best director and best original screenplay.

Her agent fortunately thought otherwise. “She rang me back up and said, ‘I think you really should meet with him. He wants you to do some improvisation,’ ” Staunton continued. “So I thought, ‘Oh, well, all right. Improvisation -- at least that will be interesting.’ ”

Improvisation is what Mike Leigh is famous for. With the basic plot, characters and mood in mind, Leigh works with actors one character, one scene at a time; the script emerges from endless rehearsal, research and one-on-one consultations.

When Staunton finally met with Leigh, he asked her to improvise an introverted person. There were no lines, no direction, she said. “I just had to be this very inward-turning person for about a half an hour.”

She thought it went fairly well and when they next spoke he told her he was planning to do a film about a back-street abortionist in the 1950s and did that sound like something she could handle? “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” And that was that.

At 5-foot-nothing, Staunton is a very definite sort of person. She has bright blue eyes, a wide, friendly smile and a curly mop of hair done all streaky blondish and piled on top of her head. She bears only the vaguest resemblance to the sweet but dreary Drake. (Fine Line recently changed the film’s ads to include an image of Staunton resplendent at the SAG Awards next to the quiet portrait of Drake’s face to make this point, albeit in a strange way.)

Staunton, 49, has been an actor most of her life, and if she wasn’t a household name in the U.S. before her nomination this year, she is well-known in the U.K. for roles in film, television and theater. Plenty of her friends have worked with Leigh, so she knew what the process would be like -- long days, unpredictable plot twists and a chance to act under the eye of one of the most respected directors around. “Everyone who works with Mike just loves him,” she said. “I had utter faith.”

Knowing nothing more about the character or plot, Staunton began reading up on back-alley abortionists: “My big shock was how many of them were mothers and grandmothers. I thought they would all be evil, but a lot of them were just women trying to help other women.”

Meanwhile, Leigh began casting other actors. When he had who he wanted, he called a meeting at which he revealed they would be making a movie set in 1950s London.

And that was all. “The rule was you were not to talk to the other actors about their parts,” said Staunton. “Not then, not during filming, not ever.”

The actors weren’t even allowed to talk about the film to their families. And if you think Staunton’s now going to explain any of the more ambiguous portions of the plot -- it is implied that Vera was an unwanted child and that she herself had an abortion -- then you don’t know Mike Leigh.

“Oh, no,” Staunton said when asked to clarify. “I can’t. Mike says the audience has too do a bit of work, you know. Can’t have everything explained.”

While busy creating her character by reading through court documents and narratives, Staunton began meeting with Leigh and some members of the cast, in order of appearance in her character’s life. So first was Sandra Voe, who plays Vera’s mother. The three discussed Voe’s character, the circumstances of her pregnancy, even what she named her daughter -- which turned out to be Vera Drake.

So months into the process, the film’s title character finally was born. For weeks after, Leigh and Staunton created Vera’s life and character, from childhood onward. When they had taken Vera to about 17, Staunton met with Phil Davis, who plays her husband. They improvised the circumstance of their meeting, their courtship, their early marriage. Next came Alex Kelly and Daniel Mays, who play her children, and more improvisation of the early days of motherhood, up through the war years.

During all of this time, no one but Staunton and Leigh knew that the movie was about an abortionist. And Staunton only knew that; she had no idea what roles some of the other actors were to play -- had no idea that some were, for instance, police officers.

“We were working in an unused hospital,” she said, “because Mike needs big spaces. He has to have a lot of rooms because there’s so much secrecy. So he’d meet for a few hours with, say, me and Phil and then run off and meet for hours with other actors.”

As the meetings and improvisation continued, Staunton learned that Vera was a cheerful domestic who had neighbors and in-laws, that she had a friend who gave her names of women “to help out.” She learned there was a young man she would invite to tea who might take a liking to her daughter, then she learned they were engaged and she would throw them a party.

“So we have a lovely long improvisation of this party,” said Staunton. “Everyone’s happy and things are rolling right along and then there’s a knock on the door. Phil answers it. He comes back in and says, with this look on his face, ‘It’s the police.’ ”

Here she opens her blue eyes wide and pulls her both hands to her chest, and leans forward as if it happened yesterday. “I had no idea, you understand and, oh, my God, I felt ... I can’t even describe how I felt, like the whole world was dropping away. Like this woman’s life was completely falling away and I thought, ‘She will never survive this.’ I told Mike later I had this terrific pain in my chest, literally like a heart attack.”

The improvisation followed the plot through the police’s interrogation of Vera, the family’s utter ignorance of the situation, and ended with Vera alone in the police cell, having had to confess to her husband the nature of her crime.

“Everyone sort of crept home, and the next day, Mike sat down with me to deconstruct what had happened,” Staunton said. “How Vera felt, how she dealt with the police, what was going on in her mind.”

Actors in the dark

Staunton wants to be clear that although the process is collaborative, the final word is Leigh’s. When asked if she decided to keep a certain look, she said sharply: “Me? Christ, no, I didn’t decide anything. We talked; Mike decides.”

Then, laughing, she recounted what happened when they were going over the scene in which Vera is first interrogated by the police. “I said, ‘Well, the police were very nice, weren’t they? That surprised me.’ And Mike looks at me and says, ‘That’s none of your business.’ ” She laughed again. “And it isn’t, is it? It’s none of my affair how another actor interprets his role.”

After that day of improvisation, those sorts of rehearsals ended. Then the actors were each given a shooting script -- basic direction for scenes dealing only with each performer’s character. “So I’d get: ‘Vera goes out cleaning. She walks down street.’ I didn’t know who I was going to meet when I walked down the street until I met them.”

The dialogue evolved as the scenes were rehearsed, but the actors never received anything resembling a script.

But it was far from an actor-driven, chatty free-for-all. “As the scene progressed, Mike fine-tuned every line,” she said. “Down to, ‘Do you think you need that “but” there? Do you need to say that out loud?’ ”

The days lasted 12 to 14 hours. Like most films, “Vera Drake” was shot out of sequence, although the scenes involving the police were all done in one week. Because these scenes are the most emotionally wrenching for Vera -- she spends much of the time in tears -- it was a difficult week for Staunton.

“I had a terrible headache, and I thought my nose would never not be red again. And then Mike says to me, ‘Well, I guess we have to find out what happens to Vera after she’s arrested.’ I thought, ‘omygod.’ ”

But none of it mattered, she said -- not the long days when, after nine hours of improvising, Leigh would say, ‘Right, let’s go do some work now;’ not the camera in her face constantly while her nose was running and her eyes swelled, not the difficulty of staying perpetually emotionally agile.

Because, she said, there were so many moments when magic would happen, when characters would reveal themselves with a look or a few words, or a scene would open itself up and become something else again. “Phil and I would look at each other after some scene and say, ‘Well, this is why we do this job, isn’t it? For the privilege of working on something like this.’ ”

They certainly weren’t doing it for the money. Leigh just barely scraped together the under-$10-million budget -- in the middle of shooting, he ran out of money, had to send the crew home while he pried more cash out of the financers, many of whom were concerned about the dark nature of the film, particularly its ending.

“At one point, the money men said, ‘Now, does she really have to go to prison?’ ” Staunton said, laughing. “And Mike said, ‘Oh, come on.’ ”

For a minute or two after the film was done, it seemed like such concerns were legitimate -- “Vera Drake” did not make the cut for the Cannes Film Festival.

“I thought, ‘Oh, well, there’s a year’s work gone,’ ” she said. “But it was worth it; what an adventure.” And she had come to a place in her career where she was beyond thinking of the big break. “The year before I did a few days on this film, a few days on that and I thought, ‘So that’s my career now, not so bad.’ ”

But days after the Cannes rejection, the Venice Film Festival snatched the film up. “Then,” she said, “Cannes called right back and said, ‘Right, we’ve changed our minds, we’ll have it,’ and Mike said, ‘Sorry, too late.’ ”

The rest is indie history. The film swept Venice, winning best picture and best actress, and Leigh and Staunton have spent much of the past year traveling around the world collecting awards; she recently won best actress from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, with Leigh taking best director and the film best picture.

The Oscar nominations were particularly gratifying, though, she said, especially the one for best screenplay: “Mike was very pleased with that,” she said, “because, he said, it was an honor for the whole cast.”

While her life has been a lovely maelstrom of interviews and awards ceremonies, Staunton is very aware of the brevity of such a moment.

She has roles in two films due out next year: “Nanny McPhee” (Emma Thompson plays a magical governess) and “Fingersmith” (a TV movie in which Staunton plays “mother” to a brood of petty thieves in Victorian England). Although she has been receiving a lot of scripts lately, there’s not much lined up.

“It’s all going to be over in 15 minutes, isn’t it?” she said.

“And I really need to get a job pretty soon.”