Lindsay Duncan looks super-chic as she enjoys a spot of lunch with Jim Broadbent. Wearing a black buttoned-up dress, black pumps and with her hair scraped back, she looks graceful yet strong.
The pair play a married couple in their late fifties who have decided to spend the weekend of their 30th wedding anniversary in Paris, in their latest film Le Week-End.
From the start, it’s clear that Meg (Duncan) feels unfulfilled and finds her husband Nick (Broadbent) irritating, despite a few tender moments of affection. “She’s just a little bit angry,” says Duncan, 62. “She’s wanting more and wondering how much time is left. She still feels like a woman with appetites and she wants her husband to keep up.” Though Meg is only human, a free-spirited but frustrated woman who knows her own mind, she’s also quite a hard character to like. Duncan agrees. “I do stand by her though,” she says. “I think she’s real, and I’m very lucky to play such a complex woman who I completely believe in.” While the subject matter might not be particularly joyful, the movie is charming, touching and sharp (as well as funny.
This is the second time Duncan has played Broadbent’s wife. The first was in the TV film Longford, in which Broadbent played Labour peer Lord Longford, who spent years campaigning for the parole of Moors murderer Myra Hindley. Duncan played Lady Longford.
Relationships in the later stages of life have been the subject matter for a string of films and TV shows in recent years (think The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and TV’s recent Love And Marriage). It’s a theme that’s interested Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell, writer and director of Le Week-End respectively, for some time. Duncan believes there’s a simple explanation for the increased demand for relationships of a more mature nature on screen.
“There are a lot of us [grown-ups] about,” she notes. “And we go to the cinema and still have quite high expectations for our lives, we’re that generation.”
An increase in the number of older faces on screen can only be a good thing for an actress aged 62. But it will probably make little difference to Duncan’s working life. She has referred to her film career as a sideline because she’s better known for her stage work, for which she’s won many awards, and her TV roles.
Notable stage roles have included the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Amanda Prynne in Private Lives with Alan Rickman, and many collaborations with Harold Pinter.
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