Vera icon Brenda Blethyn talks new drama’s explosive finale: "Trump them all. Sorry to use that word..."

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

There’s a barnstorming finale to Brenda Blethyn’s new series, A Woman of Substance. Octogenarian tycoon Emma Harte, frocked in immaculate royal-purple and a heavy gold necklace, confronts her family with deadly calm.

"There’s a fatal flaw in your scheme – you underestimated me!" Think of a female version of Brian Cox in Succession. "I really get my teeth into that scene," she says. "Trump them all. Sorry to use that word..." Even more fun is the final twist that follows, with a masterclass in close-up face-acting.

Breezy, friendly, full of life and only a few days off her 80th birthday, Blethyn loved the story based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s novel. “It’s so rich, it’s luscious.” It’s the ultimate rolling, readable popular saga: a 1900s Yorkshire kitchen maid, pregnant and abandoned by the young master, whose gift for dressmaking and commercial acuity builds, by the 1960s, to a global business and a troublesome dynasty.

Channel 4’s 1984 adaptation had Deborah Kerr as the old Emma and Jenny Seagrove as her young self. This sprawling, spectacular new version has Blethyn as matriarch and boss, looking back on her life as she stalks through her New York HQ to challenge her boardroom.

She smoulders with grand old-lady fury, a touch of Margaret Thatcher as she deals with ungrateful offspring and rekindles the furious feud with the rich Fairley family whose maid she once was. The story is a ferocious one about revenge and the brutalities of an early-20th-century class struggle.

She also loved watching the moorland scenes with Jessica Reynolds playing Emma’s younger self. “She’s great. Look,” she says, pulling out a photo. “I found some old pictures of me and at her age I do actually look like her – the eyes. The producers hadn’t even seen those photos, but must have thought it worked.

“Did you notice that they shot the New York locations in Liverpool,” she adds gleefully. “The Cunard Building is the same both sides of the Atlantic! At one point, I got there and saw this huge department store and thought, ‘Ooh, might do some shopping, but of course it was part of our set! New York in the 1960s, yellow cabs, sound effects, the lot.”

The 1960s upmarket mature-couture (“But not shoulder pads, thank goodness,” she laughs) was a nice change, too. Having delighted the nation for 14 years as Vera, the dishevelled but brilliant chief inspector in Northumbria, “the glamour in this was wonderful. Our designer made these terrific clothes. Actually, yesterday I was in Newcastle as Vera, back in the costume. The poster headline was ‘Lewis Capaldi, Brenda Blethyn and Sting’. It was for a charity, Sunday for Sammy, for young people who want a profession in the arts. So there I was in the old mac, hat and boots, but probably anybody could have been inside.”

She has relished being the triumphant Vera, and now Emma Harte. Before that, “I’d always tended to be cast as put-upon people.” But both Vera and Emma Harte have to depict an acute intelligence. How does she approach that? “I don’t have to show the thinking, I just think. And actually, I do love solving problems. I’m a member of the Times Crossword Club. My brother races me every day to do the cryptic puzzle first. He won the other day. As kids we didn’t have a TV and sometimes not the radio – no money.” (The radio licence was only abolished in 1971.) “But Dad set us brainteasers and puzzles to do, all the time.”

Her own parents were not so distant from fictional Emma: her mother was a kitchen maid who worked up to lady’s maid, who met Blethyn’s father when he was a chauffeur for the same family. “Hard, long hours, working all the time, polishing grates, the silver, scrubbing.”

Once her parents were married and living in Ramsgate in Kent, where Blethyn was later born and raised, the pair left “service” and found other work. “Mum had several jobs, morning and afternoon. She was a cleaner, cleaned the council offices. Dad drove for the Corporation. She’d take the housekeeping out of his pay packet, three pounds a week or something. There were nine of us. I was the youngest but the oldest ones had moved on by then.”

In the series, Emma’s mother urges her to “Get out, and get on!” Did Blethyn’s mother do the same? “Yes! They both said, ‘You can do anything you want to do if you work for it. You’re as good as anybody else.’ So we’ve all worked hard.”

Did she have books and stories, the stimulus an actor needs from childhood? “They both told us stories. My dad would talk about being in India in the Royal Artillery, walk about telling stories, acting them out. Perhaps about the desert, adventures, people in delirium. One of his duties was driving the dustcart, and he’d collect periodicals, books and comics that people threw out… he loved the Reader’s Digest. Mam would also tell us about her first job, collecting acorns for a pig farmer... is that right?” Yes, I tell her, captivated at this postcard from the 1930s. Acorns would have been used to make food that pigs love.

Her father also taught her how to express herself – she suddenly cites a remembered string of long words he quoted mockingly: “Promulgating esoteric cogitations, beware of ponderous cogency... No, just say what you want to say in your words, don’t be pompous!”

By this time I half wish I could time-travel and give both her long-gone parents OBEs. But instead, we move on to Blethyn’s actual career. She trained as a stenographer with Pitman’s shorthand – “I can still do it, useful when you’re on the phone” – then various office jobs, eventually ending up in the British Rail freight marketing department. “On the train today, one of the trolley ladies asked, did they let you keep your pass? No... but I did have one then, travelled everywhere! One day a lady came in, said she was from the Euston Players and they were doing a competition, a one-act play, and someone was sick. I said no, but she said, ‘Oh, it’s only one line.’ ”

What, I ask, was the line? Blethyn promptly does it, word perfect, with expression. “It’s a real dirty old night. Evans the post says the mist is right down to the path.”

She was enthralled with theatre from that moment. “I think we came last in the competition. But oh, the different skills – someone making the frocks, someone doing the lights, the set, someone selling tickets. And the more you do, the better you get. People said I should try going professional. I had no clue I’d ever be in television or film. I didn’t tell my parents until I knew it was the right thing.”

We veer off in wonderment at how much harder it would be today for a young aspiring actress to go from an office desk to studying at drama school for a year (“I had a grant!” Blethyn remembers) and then head almost straight onto the National Theatre stage. “I just don’t understand the lack of investment in theatre and arts. And all the students, they’re stuck with loans and these huge interest rates.”

She is still a great champion of am-dram. “I’m a patron of the Enfield Players in Derby where my brother lives. No matter what your profession, theatre training is good. All the different skills and punctuality – ‘Don’t be late, you’re relying on other people, they’re relying on you.’ ”

She remembers she once brought her parents to the National Theatre. “I took them along the miles of corridors and Dad said, ‘This must have cost a million pounds!’ He had that old twangy accent, born in 1894. And when I was offered a film job in America, A River Runs Through It, my mum was in hospital. So I said don’t worry, I won’t go. But she said no, do go! Because it was directed by Robert Redford and she loved him. He sent her a photo saying, ‘Love to Louisa’.”

So which does she prefer now, stage or screen? “I do love the stage, it’s the luxury of rehearsal and playing the part chronologically, not like in film or TV doing scenes in the wrong order, always having to remember what you don’t know. And I love an audience: that warmth, it’s like scoring a goal. But it’s hard to commit far ahead at my age. If it was, ‘Ooh, next week could you step in?’, I probably would.”

Does she go to the theatre? “There was a time my niece came to stay and we had a whole week, matinees and evenings. I’m planning on doing that again.”

As for the beautifully dressed, ferocious role of Emma in A Woman of Substance, who knows? After that final twist, what is she showing in that close-up? “Oh, she’ll be thinking of a way out.” After all, this is just the first of a seven-book series, and the next one – Hold the Dream – also features the old battleaxe. If it does get made, you may rest assured there’s still plenty of go in Brenda Blethyn, OBE.

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A Woman of Substance begins on Wednesday 11 March on Channel 4.

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