August 27, 2026 — 6:00amIt’s such fun to be able to tell Imelda Staunton, who became famous as an actress quite late in life – when she was nearly 50 – that I first saw her on stage in 1986. She was playing the titular Fair Maid of the West in a revival by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite as wingmen; her character was an innkeeper of enormous energy, storming back and forth on a bare stage, pint-sized but hugely funny. Like many Australian tourists, we had just bought tickets for whatever was playing in Stratford that night. “I don’t know who she is,” my companion said afterwards, “but she’s fantastic.”Staunton’s fantastic talent stopped being a niche discovery in 2004, when she was awarded a BAFTA for her central performance as a backstreet abortionist in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. The film itself won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was then nominated for several awards, then was nominated for an Oscar. This, Staunton had never imagined. The film was rejected before it went to Venice by the Cannes festival, which convinced her that nobody would ever see it. Instead, she was scooted to a new level of celebrity.Imelda Staunton as the no-nonsense ex-wife to Bill Nighy’s drunken maestro in & Sons. Being Oscar-nominated opened the door to the world of Harry Potter, for which she was asked to play the repellent Dolores Umbridge, a sugar-frosted serpent of a woman always dressed in pink. So convincing was she in her malevolence, encapsulated by a high-pitched giggle that she made Umbridge’s catchphrase, that she became something of an internet hate figure.After which, of course, she played the Queen in The Crown. What she really admired in the Queen, she told Vogue in a long interview, was her commitment. “[She] was the last bastion of, ‘I’ve said I would do this’. That’s over now, that’s gone. Someone who would turn up, come rain or come shine … not in any way comparing, but if you agree to do eight shows a week, you do eight shows a week. I don’t care if you’re tired.” They were filming the series when Elizabeth II died; she was “inconsolable” with grief for the woman whose life she was inhabiting. Four years later, the real Elizabeth II and Staunton’s evocation of this uniquely Stoic figure have almost merged into one.Like her late Majesty, Staunton always seems to be working. We are on Zoom to discuss & Sons, in which she plays the no-nonsense ex-wife Isabel to Bill Nighy’s drunken, dilapidated maestro of the modern novel, holed up in his stately pile with a pantry full of whisky and a mysteriously omnipresent Czech housekeeper, Gerde (Anna Geislerová). Living with him, yearning to be free, is his youngest son Andy (Noah Jupe), reputedly the result of an affair that dealt the death blow to his marriage.Staunton and Nighy as ex-spouses in the feature film & Sons. He and Isabel already had two sons – now about 30 and floundering in life – when she left him. Richard (Johnny Flynn) is a sometime-screenwriter with a history of substance abuse, while Jamie (George MacKay) is a would-be documentary maker who has picked Dad as his obvious subject. Both are guiltily aware of leeching off Dad for a leg-up. They would prefer to keep their distance, but Dyer gathers all three sons to bid them farewell, convinced that he is close to death. Isabel also attempts to distance herself from this performance, but the elderly sparring partners still have one fight left in them: a clash of firecracker intensity described by one critic as “two black-belts each at the top of their game”.The plot hinges on a bizarre reveal, but this is possibly less important than the film’s reflections on family, parenthood, fame and failure. Legacy and inheritance weigh heavily on the Dyer boys. “Well, of course, it’s the male ego,” Staunton says. “Let’s face it, it’s called & Sons. It would have been interesting if there’d been a daughter in there.“But it touches on wanting to live your life over again as a better person, the fact that someone wants to recreate themselves in someone else, rather than letting that someone else be themselves. I think that in today’s society, a lot of people want to be like other people. We’re told: ‘be yourself, but plump up your lips, get your cheeks stuffed and look the same as everyone else’. For young people, I think, the pressure to look a certain way is unbearable.”Staunton, you feel, has never tried to look like anyone else. What for? She has five Olivier awards – the top awards in London theatre – to her credit. She has been married for more than 40 years to Jim Carter, who she met in 1982 when they were both cast in Guys and Dolls, their difference in height played for laughs. They were married the following year; the longest they have been apart was three weeks in 2008, when she was shooting Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock in the US. They both vowed that wouldn’t happen again. “We take our life more seriously than our jobs,” she told Vogue. “Of course, we both take [the job] very seriously. But you go, what’s the most important thing here? That I play another part? Or that we go on a very nice holiday, or that we have that time in the garden?”Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II in the final season of The Crown.NetflixTheir daughter, Bessie, is also an actor; she and her mother appeared together in a successful revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, playing mother and daughter. Clearly, the Carter-Staunton family hasn’t gone through the same mill of anxiety as the Dyers in & Sons, perhaps because they looked the issue squarely in the face. “It’s a difficult thing for the child of two actors to try and forge their own path,” Staunton says. “And we’ve talked about this, the three of us. When we did the play together, I sort of thought, ‘oh God, is this a good idea?’ And I still don’t know if it was. What I do know is that we had an amazing time doing it.”It is a plus, she says, that Bessie takes after her dad: she’s 175 centimetres tall. “I quite like that she looks nothing like me,” Staunton says. “She’s everything I could never be. And she’s got a bit of a producer’s hat – she’s very good at bringing people together – and she’s written a short film. So she does other things. I’m very glad she’s more of her own person than I thought she might be.” She just had to hold back from checking during rehearsals that Bessie had brought her lunch. “I thought: ‘No, back off Imelda. She can do her own lunch’. But doing the acting together was wonderful.”Five decades of treading Britain’s boards means there is actually a lot of family out there; Staunton has a longstanding friendship with Bill Nighy and appeared in three previous films with him. “Of course, I’ve known him for 400 years. I just think he’s wonderful, as we all do,” she says. “But also, the joy of this job is that you also work with people you’ve just met. And they’re 23 and you go: ‘God, they’re brilliant!’”“It’s like being a vampire. I think, ‘I’ll use some of your blood to make me whole again’. But that’s what I like about the job – that you meet all different ages and respect them all, in equal measure.” Neither she nor Jim Carter has any intention of retiring. Acting, she says, is such “a tremendous privilege”. It’s a job, as she says, but it’s easily the best job in the world.& Sons opens nationally on August 27.Want more movies?His movie was a disaster. His movie about making it is a delight‘Grief never stops’: Jacki Weaver on love, loss and the antidote to sadnessHow Alexander Skarsgard became a total basket caseGillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in a lurid slasher filmStephanie Bunbury is a film and culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners