When the producers of Pride and Prejudice offered the part of Mrs. Bennet to Alison Steadman, they had a pretty good idea of what they were going to get. Steadman is well known in Britain for her portrayals of loud, vulgar, over-the-top characters. The most famous of these is Beverly in Abigail’s Party, a TV film made in 1977 by her then-husband, Mike Leigh. “Snottily intrusive, monstrous and pathetic, patronizing to a degree that would legally justify a murderous rabbit-punch to the back of the neck,” Beverly epitomized the suburban snobbery, social ambition, and greed for material things that characterized the 1970s. So embedded in the British consciousness is this performance that when Steadman recreated the role at the National Theater twenty-two years later, in an abridged performance, the audience stood and cheered.

	Abigail’s Party

But Steadman’s gallery of grotesques is not universally appreciated. There are critics who find her work strident, excessive to the point of caricature, and judgmental. But she bristles at accusations of cruelty. “I set out to entertain, to amuse, and part of that becomes something that’s being said about our lives, and our society,” she said in a 1996 interview. “But I’m not setting out to be cruel and brutal, I’m setting out to reflect life, put a mirror to it, by creating characters and saying ‘look!’ . . . If we were all terribly wholesome, portraying people who are upright and safe, it would be so boring. You can make people laugh and move them and make them think, all at the same time.”

Entertaining Mr. Sloane

It was a talent for mimicry that made Steadman, the daughter of a Liverpool clerical supervisor, decide at age nine to become an actress. Her father wanted her to train as a secretary in order to have something to fall back on, so she took a job in a probation office. But at age 20 she sneaked off to audition for the East 15 drama school. The audition report said, “Worth training, will blossom.” At East 15, in Essex, she learned the Stanislavski “method” and met a young director named Mike Leigh. After several years of work in youth theater and repertory, she got a recurring role in the popular TV series Z Cars. A second meeting with Leigh resulted in a fruitful partnership, both personal (they were married in 1973 and have two sons—Toby, born in 1979, and Leo, born in 1981) and professional. They have made six films together, including Hard Labour (1973), Nuts in May (1976) and the famous Abigail’s Party (1977), which actually originated as a stage play. Steadman’s portrayal of Beverly at London’s Hampstead Theatre won her Best Actress awards from both the Evening Standard newspaper and Plays and Players magazine. “Mike opened the door for me," Steadman told an interviewer in 2004. “He told me that I wasn’t a dolly bird but a character actress. When I got my OBE, I told him that it was largely due to the work I’d done with him. The work was our joy, our life.”

	Uncle Vanya, with Ian Holm and Nigel Hawthorne

Abigail’s Party established her as one of the leading character actresses of her generation, and one who was willing to take risks. In the 1970s, she appeared nude on television and performed British TV’s first lesbian kiss. And then there were the films with Leigh, whose unorthodox working method keeps actors from seeing the entire script in advance and emphasizes improvisation. She is best known as a comedian, in TV series like Gone to the Dogs, No Bananas and Let Them Eat Cake, and plays such as Alan Bennett’s Kafka’s Dick (which won her Drama magazine’s Best Actress award) and Cinderella and Her Naughty Naughty Sisters, in which she played Widow Peahen. But she has also won acclaim in serious dramatic parts. In 1993 she played Bessie, “a selfless, dowdy Florida spinster who has devoted the last 20 years of her life to looking after her chronically ill father and a delightfully dotty aunt” in the British premiere of the off-Broadway hit Marvin’s Room. “Steadman can rarely have been as touching as she is here,” wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, “soldiering on in the face of exhaustion and refusing to give in to despair. It is hard to make simple goodness dramatically interesting but Steadman brilliantly succeeds in the task.” Her performance as Sonya opposite Nigel Hawthorne’s Uncle Vanya and Ian Holm’s Dr. Astrov in 1979 led John Barber in the Telegraph to write, “Alison Steadman, as the pathetic drudge who dotes on Astrov, plays with extraordinary truth. The interpretation is remarkably physical.” More recently (1998–99), she appeared in Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water in the West End (playing Julia Sawalha’s sister!), and John Gross wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, “Alison Steadman in particular achieves wonders in a long, progressively boozy aria—in whisky veritas (though the home truths she delivers aren’t all that truthful.)”

The creation of which she is proudest, however, is of the mother in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, for which she won the 1993 Olivier Award for best actress. She admits to being disappointed when the producers of the film version passed her over in favor of Brenda Blethyn. “When you are nominated for an Oscar, you get a Golden Globe, and are named Best Actress at Cannes, as Brenda was, you become sellable as a film actress,” she said in an interview with the Evening Standard in 1999. “It was very sad for me and I was very upset, but you have to get over these things. You can be sure I’ve done the same to someone else by usurping their part. Resentment is not what life is about. I’m a friend of Brenda’s, I’ve known her for 25 years, and you’re only as good as the last thing you’ve done. You can never say ’I’m famous now,’ you can’t live on your past achievements. It’s tomorrow that matters, not today.”

Losing Louis, with Brian Protheroe and Lynda Bellingham

Steadman and Leigh separated in 1995 when she moved in with the actor Michael Elwyn, who played her husband in the TV series No Bananas. She and Leigh divorced in 2001, though they remain friendly; she attended his 60th birthday party in 2003 with Elwyn and her sons (Toby is now an illustrator and Leo an aspiring filmmaker). An outspoken critic of Thatcherism and the Tory Party, she has also been active in the anti-fur farming movement. On New Year’s Day 2000 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen, and in 2003 an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex. In 2004 she and Crispin Bonham-Carter directed productions at her old drama school, East 15 Acting School. “It’s an age thing,” she says. “At my age, I’m looking at expanding things. I had always said I would never, ever direct because I never had the confidence in the past to even think I could do things like that; it’s only now I’m in my late fifties that I’ve begun to think in those terms. I was asked and asked to go back to my old drama school, East 15, to direct the students and I suddenly ran out of excuses, so I did three rehearsed readings of a one-act play and put it on with basic props. As soon as I did it I wondered, ’Why didn’t I do this before?’ I loved it, absolutely adored it, so I’m going back there to do some more directing in January. And now that I’ve got a taste for it, I would like to make a short film — and I’ve already got an idea for a documentary.”