There is a moment in Yorgos Lanthimos’s bawdy historical romp The Favourite when Olivia Colman’s frumpy Queen Anne, confined to a wheelchair with gout, watches Rachel Weisz’s Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, dancing with the rest of the court.
While the elegant favourite struts her stuff (and, this being a Lanthimos film, she does so in a fabulously anachronistic “all eyes on me” way), a range of emotions flit briefly across the tired queen’s face. Pride in the woman she secretly loves, joy at the way she moves, despair that she will never dance in that way, grief that she will never feel that free, and, most of all, a sad and desperate resignation at the fate that has made her an unloved queen and mother only to dead children.
It is a scene that few actors could pull off so seamlessly. Few actors, though, have Colman’s range.
If, as is increasingly speculated, Colman wins the 2019 Oscar for best actress in February, it will be the culmination of a remarkable few years of work for the 44-year-old, which have taken in everything from acclaimed TV dramas (Broadchurch, The Night Manager) to critically adored films (Tyrannosaur, The Lobster). The roles have helped transform Colman from comedy heroine to Hollywood star – and 2019 looks set to be her biggest year yet.
On Saturday night, she could be heard providing the voice of excitable rabbit Strawberry in the BBC’s starry new adaptation of Watership Down. Next Sunday will see the arrival of Andrew Davies’s take on Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s classic novel of love and revolution, in which Colman all but steals the show as the grubby, grotesque Madame Thénardier. Two days later, The Favourite opens in UK cinemas. That’s followed later in the year by her take on another, very different monarch when she replaces Claire Foy as the Queen in Netflix’s biggest drama, The Crown. Small wonder then that her Crown co-star, Charles Dance, recently called her “her generation’s Judi Dench”, adding that “like Judi, she has a wonderful sense of humour but also works incredibly hard and takes the job very seriously.”
Down-to-earth Colman might put it rather differently. An instinctive performer with little time for method-style intensity, telling an interviewer from the Telegraph in 2012 that “You can over-think things – if the script is good, everything you need is in there”, her interviews are peppered with self-deprecating references to how “uncool” and “unglamorous” and “ordinary” she is. A recent profile in the New York Times noted how uncomfortable she was with compliments before calling her the most “ordinary extraordinary person you have ever met”.
“From the moment I first met her in the Footlights panto in 1993, I was struck by how talented she was,” says David Mitchell, who has known the woman her closest friends call “Collie” since they were teenagers in Cambridge (he studied history at Peterhouse College; she was training to be a teacher at Homerton, a career path she abandoned for drama at the Bristol Old Vic). “She understands what makes something hilarious, yet she’s also very good at ensuring it doesn’t tip over and become too much. Lots of people are nice and normal and fun but that doesn’t necessarily come through in their acting but, with her, it does.”
Mitchell is not alone in admiring his old friend. It’s a remarkable testament to Colman’s personality and talent that people queue up to praise her, many of them making time despite busy workloads.
“There’s something about her that makes one relate to her,” says Nina Gold, who cast Colman in The Crown. “It’s very special. When we had to think about who would succeed Claire Foy, her name was the one that kept coming up. The more we talked about it, the more it seemed obvious because, while they don’t look alike, what they do share is a feeling that you can see into them and understand what they are like at their core.”
If her apparent ordinariness is at the heart of her appeal, it’s her ability to weep, seemingly on tap, in shows from Broadchurch to Who Do You Think You Are? that has cemented her place in the nation’s hearts. “Everything’s very close to the surface with Olivia,” her Broadchurch co-star David Tennant told Vanity Fair. “She laughs more heartily than anyone, and she cries more rawly than anyone … that’s part of the key to her brilliance.” Colman admits that she lacks an extra layer of skin, stating in the same piece: “I’m constantly on the verge of tears at the thought of anything sad, or happy – anything really” and noting she initially struggled with The Crown because “I emote [and] the Queen is not meant to”.
Beneath her emotional exterior lurks a ferocious work ethic, a fierce intelligence and an underrated ability to recognise the right scripts at the right time. When she first decided on acting as a career, her mother, a nurse, suggested she give it a year. She replied calmly that she would give it 10. When the career took its time to materialise she took jobs as a secretary and a cleaner before striking comedy gold alongside her old university friends Mitchell and Robert Webb in the scabrous Peep Show. When her agent suggested that she should be wary of being typecast in comedy, she switched to drama winning plaudits for her harrowing turn as an abused wife in Tyrannosaur. When Broadchurch and The Night Manager made her a bona fide drama star, she continued doing comedy, taking roles in everything from Fleabag to Flowers.
“Acting is incredibly important to Olivia. She loves it. She can’t imagine not doing it,” says Will Sharpe, adding that she was the first actor he thought of to play the frazzled wife trying to leave her suicidal husband in Flowers. “She’s a very courageous actor, an incredibly empathetic one, and a great team player.” For all that empathy, she’s never soppy and nor are the characters she plays. Lanthimos cast her as Queen Anne because he felt no other actor would not only understand the grief at the character’s core but also possess the ability to convey it. He was rewarded with a vanity-free performance which forces you to see beyond the unloved and often unlovely queen to the complex, capricious, careworn woman within.
“Whether it’s comedy or drama, she’s just fearless,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge who wrote the part of Fleabag’s thoroughly unpleasant godmother especially for Colman. “She will ‘go there’ without hesitation and you will always believe her. I remember sitting in the edit with Harry Bradbeer [the director of Fleabag] and we’d watched a string of incredible takes when Harry paused it, leaned back in his chair and, with a sigh of pure artistic joy, said: ‘She’s a fucking Ferrari’.”
Adeel Aktar, who plays her grasping husband in Les Misérables, agrees. “I think her secret is that, as an actor, she doesn’t hide. Actors sometimes hide behind a bit of makeup, a bit of a costume or an accent, but she never does. She’s a kind, generous, warm-hearted human, who loves a cup of tea and will have a gab even if you only have a few lines with her in a scene. That comes across in everything she does.” Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, her co-stars in The Favourite, have been similarly effusive with Stone stressing Colman’s commitment to making her feel comfortable on set as the only American in the cast.
Away from the camera, she struggles with fame’s glare, admitting that she is at her most comfortable curled up at home with her husband of 17 years, Ed Sinclair, and three children. That shunning of the spotlight shouldn’t, however, be confused with reserve: Colman apparently has a filthy sense of humour, with more than one person testifying to her ability to make them laugh until they cry. She is happy, too, to speak out on causes that are dear to her, recently becoming the patron of blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan and fronting Unicef’s TV ad campaigns to raise funds for refugee children in Yemen and Syria, not to mention talking honestly about her experience of post-natal depression.
“In real life she is without pretension, vanity or bullshittery and is outrageously funny,” says Waller-Bridge. “The key to why everyone loves her is that, as well as admiring her monumental talent, people can sense she’s about the real stuff.”
