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She's met the Queen, been twice nominated for an Oscar and eats sandwiches at the Savoy, but actress Brenda Blethyn is happiest when making her own cup of tea and settling down with a good crossword
Brenda Blethyn is sitting opposite me, spreading butter onto her toast. But she's not happy. "I hate it when they cut the crusts off," she sniffs. "They're the best bits."
We're breakfasting in the lavish tea room of London's Savoy hotel. Beneath an ornate, pleated ceiling hang vast trompe l'oeil paintings of rural scenes. Penguin-suited waiters scamper about. Blethyn, the much-loved British actress who shot to fame in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies in 1997 and lit up the screen as the redoubtable Mrs Bennet in the more recent Keira Knightley-starring version of Pride and Prejudice, must have stayed in several posh hotels in her time. But posh hotels, she explains, can rub her up the wrong way. For instance, such was Blethyn's horror at the wildly inflated cost of the laundry service at one hotel (the Four Seasons in Los Angeles) that she insisted on being driven to a local launderette to wash her clothes. That's even when she wasn't picking up the hotel bill. Her limousine driver was, understandably, baffled. This little vignette, included in her recently published memoir Mixed Fancies, seems a fitting thing to bring up as Blethyn chews her crustless morsels. She chuckles at the memory: "I don't want my t-shirt to come back gift-wrapped in tissue paper. I just want it clean!"
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