DB7

Phil Davis
by James Christopher
Phil Davis used to play scary thugs. Until Vera Drake


HE HAS a face as familiar as a well-worn doormat and one of the most enviable collections of villains assembled by a British actor. Phil Davis and I have crossed paths before. In fact I’ve spent several of my most formative moments trying to forget we ever met. Davis was a grisly borstal boy in Scum; a psychotic mod in Quadrophenia; a hair-raising football hooligan in The Firm; and in North Square the Machiavellian legal clerk who tortured barristers.
This week Davis comes of age as Stan in Mike Leigh’s period film Vera Drake, a postwar slice of East End life about a chirpy matriarch with a charitable sideline in back-street abortions. It won the Golden Lion in Venice last September, and Imelda Staunton, the title heroine and Stan’s beloved wife, is arguably our best shot at landing an Oscar. None of this would have been possible without Davis’s Stan, who appears as shocked as you or I when the police come knocking on Christmas Eve.

Stan is the finest big-screen performance of Davis’s career, and it’s been well worth the wait. There’s a rare vulnerability about his performance that oils the unspeakable trauma of a father torn between the love of his life and the chilly reactions of his grown-up children and gossipy neighbours.



Now that Davis has passed 50, there are parts opening up for him that used to be closed doors. “Being a romantic lead was never on the cards,” he says. “But as I’ve got older I’ve got increasingly excited by the variety. As a youngster the stark choice was a toss-up between the romantic lead and the bad guy, and I always landed the bad guy. But some of them were great roles, so what the hell?”

Indeed. Davis is one of the gang of 1970s rude mechanicals who made British drama a dangerous and interesting place. His peers are Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. What’s always distinguished Davis is a blinding ability to sink into a part so deeply that it’s almost impossible to find the seam between the actor and character. Is the real Phil completely different from all his parts? “I’m afraid you’d have to ask my wife. She’d probably say no, and that I’m exactly the same as all of them.”

It’s a skill that may have cost him a lucrative feature-film profile, but he has few regrets about working with Mike Leigh. Vera Drake is the fifth Leigh film he has done.

“I was slightly nervous because I hadn’t worked with Mike for 15 years. I thought, ‘Blimey, I don’t know if I could go through all that again’, but it was tremendous fun. You laugh with Mike more than you do with any other director. Ironic, considering how devastating the material is, but there’s nothing precious about it. What’s so fascinating is the amount of detail you create. I started working on Stan in April, and we didn’t start shooting until November. The amount of preparation is fantastic. I can tell you the history of Stan’s life, and none of it is in the picture. That he was orphaned at 12 and too old to go into care. That he had to scrape a living from the streets and board in lodging houses. When you have that wealth of experience in your head you’re less scared of dialogue.

“The real drama, as an actor on a Mike Leigh film, is that you only know what you know. I didn’t know what the subject of Vera Drake was until the police walked through the door to arrest my wife. There are 60-odd characters in the film that I didn’t know anything about until I saw them on screen.”

You’re kidding me.

“No, I’m not. Which is why Mike Leigh is not only a magical director, but a very good writer. People talk about the improvisation, but there’s nothing improvised about his films. They’re well structured, and very carefully distilled. When someone else tries to do it, it’s a mess. It’s his instincts as a dramatist that makes this process work.

“My one great regret is that I wish my mum could have seen it. (She died last year.) Of all the stuff I’ve done, I think Stan is the one person she would have known.”

Having directed several films of his own, Davis is only too aware how special Vera Drake is. The last one Davis made, Hold Back the Night (1999) — about three ill-matched souls on the run — “went down the tubes. It should have been a television film really,” Davis admits. “I can’t do what Mike does. You need tremendous confidence. I think it survived a week in cinemas. And I don’t think I’ll ever go through that again unless I’ve got a burning desire to see a script made. I never planned to become a director. I’m not in the same league as Mike Leigh or Shane Meadows, but I can speak in tongues as an actor.”

I doubt Davis has much time to indulge his Renaissance talents in any case. He’s booked up in acting roles until late next year. His latest film – a small part in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova, starring Heath Ledger — hasn’t exactly whetted his appetite for Hollywood. He spent four months in Venice and as many minutes on set. “A pain in the arse. I’ve got no interest in religious art, and after that it’s gift shops and gondolas. Outside the film festival it’s a ghost town.”

The current project is far juicier. Davis has a lead part in a Kevin Elyot screen version of Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. It’s a three-part television piece with Sally Hawkins as his co-star. Nick Hornby recently dubbed the book the missing piece of motorway between Dickens and Martin Amis. “I know what he means,” Davis says. “But I would have said Pinter rather than Amis. It’s a forensic examination of the inconsequentiality of ordinary speech. I play Ernest Eccles, a pompous, crusty boor in his fifties who stalks a barmaid in Euston. I’ve never played anyone from Chiswick.”