Award-winning actress Alison Steadman tellsLaura Davis why she owes her career to Liverpool

ALISON STEADMAN doesn’t sound like herself. Or at least she doesn’t sound like Beverly Moss, from Abigail’s Party, or Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet, or any of the other Alison Steadmans we know.

She is posher than Pam in Gavin and Stacey, and for that matter than Wendy in Life is Sweet, the film she will be answering questions about during a special screening at FACT next week.

Being different to the characters she plays is something Liverpool-born Steadman cherishes.

“I like it when people meet me and say ‘you’re so different to what I expected’,” she reveals.

“I have never found it fun playing a version of myself.”

The 63-year-old actress chose Life is Sweet to be screened in aid of Liverpool-based youth film project Clapperboard for two reasons – she had good memories of of shooting the 1991 Mike Leigh-directed hit, and she couldn’t get hold of Nuts in May.

“I’ve done a few films and I’m not very proud of any of them really,” she announces.

“When you’ve been acting for 40 years, by the law of averages there’s bound to be a few things you look back on and think ‘Mmm, I didn’t really enjoy that’ or ‘I didn’t like the product’ and those things you tend to leave out of your biography.

“But I am proud of these two and Nuts in May is far enough away to be able to look at it with an objective eye.

“It was made in 1976 and, when you’re 63, it’s quite fun to see yourself young. It’s like watching someone else.”

She is also proud that the film is still relevant today and, since a TV screening a few months ago, has attracted a younger audience.

Life is Sweet, which centres on a family’s struggle with anorexia, is just as timeless. Made in 1991, it starred an impressive cast of Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Timothy Spall and Jane Horrocks.

Steadman plays Horrocks’s mum, Wendy, a caring shop assistant who is holding everyone together she loves.

“We were like a family,” she says.

“Life is Sweet was based on improvisation over a number of weeks, so it was a very creative process.

“We had this house that had been decorated and furnished to our desire and, when filming was over and we left, it felt as though we were leaving a real home.”

At the time, Steadman was married to the film’s director, Mike Leigh.

They later separated, but remain good friends and have two sons together.

She has also remained in touch with other members of the cast.

“Jane is so full of fun and humour that we still laugh get together and reminisce about those days and what it was like.

“I played Jane’s mum in Life is Sweet and again in the Rise and Fall of Little Voice, and on the opening night she said to me “I miss Wendy” because she was such a lovely character.”

Both Life is Sweet and the earlier Abigail’s Party, also directed by Leigh, involved improvisation by the cast.

This, Steadman says, is why the characters appear so well-rounded.

“When you work in that way and you are so much more involved, it’s quite an adventure,” she continues.

“At the start, you have no idea where you are going to go, but you end up with the character’s whole life history.”

She first learned this technique at Liverpool Youth Theatre, an organisation set up by a group of teachers at a time “when there was nothing else like it in Liverpool”.

“It was just great,” says Steadman, who left Merseyside at the age of 16 after a spell working as a secretary in the Liverpool Probation Service.

“It played a very big part in my becoming a professional actress.”

While she remembers with enthusiasm acting in William Berney’s and Howard Richardson’s Dark of the Moon and Dylan Thomas’s The Doctor and the Devils, at the age of 15, she says the great thing about the youth theatre, which met in Anfield Road School, was that it did not put on many shows.