Brenda Blethyn as Vera (Image: ITV)
Doughty Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope has been solving grisly murders in and around the north-east of England since 2011.
But after 56 episodes, Brenda Blethyn, 78, the actress who breathed three-dimensional life into the Northumbrian detective created by best-selling author Ann Cleeves, is walking away from the popular ITV series.
When asked if ITV prompted this decision, she says: “Not a bit of it. It was me who called a halt to Vera. ITV would have carried on ad infinitum.”
Brenda adds: “Although I regard the whole Vera family as my family, I’ve got another family at home in Ramsgate and I was missing them a little bit. And I hadn’t had a summer for 14 years.”
Vera’s a bit of a bag lady but not the actress who plays her. We meet on London’s South Bank and she’s the picture of understated elegance, her cropped black jacket and trousers matched with a red-and-white gingham shirt.
Brenda Blethyn as Vera (Image: ITV)
She’s also a mistress of self-deprecation and laughs when saying: “When I think I’m looking nice and smart, people stop me and say: ‘Oh, are you Vera?’ So, that brings me down to earth.”
Then there was the occasion when she was staying in a hotel recently: “I had my dog, a Cockapoo, with me,” she says. “I was approached by a man. Please could he take a photograph?
“So, I stood up and he knelt down. Well, I couldn’t think what he was doing. And then he took a photo of the dog. He said: ‘My wife loves Cockapoos.’ Not much chance of getting big-headed, is there?”
Perhaps not but she’d have every right. Vera is now shown in 180 territories worldwide, recently knocking Poirot off the top spot in Japan.
Ask her what she’ll miss about the Vera experience that occupied five months of her year and she doesn’t hesitate: “The support of the local people and particularly since it was announced that the series was coming to an end.
“They’d bring chairs out and watch us filming all day. They were forever offering me a drink but I always said no because I had to drive the Land Rover in every episode.”
She won’t easily forget filming in Redcar last summer. “It was a beautiful hot day and we attracted a big crowd. At one point, I saw a huddle over the other side of the road and a medic running towards it. It transpired that an elderly lady had fainted but she wouldn’t go home because she didn’t want to miss any of the filming.”
Four or five hours later, more medics were gathered around the woman. “I decided I wanted to check on her myself. So, I pushed through the crowd to reach her. Well, she nearly passed out again when I appeared. But she said she was fine.
“Then when I got back that night and switched on the telly, it was on the local news. The next day, there was another item and they were actually in the woman’s house with her talking about her experience.”
What else will she miss? “The landscape. I always maintain the terrain is a character in its own right. I’d never been to that part of the world before Vera. The seascape and the moors are so beautiful.”
If she met her no-nonsense creation in real life, would she like her? “Yes, I would but I might feel a little intimidated. She’s cleverer than I am although she might join me in trying to solve a cryptic puzzle. I’m addicted to them.
“She’s good at her job. I love talented people who care about what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter if it’s cracking crime or putting lead on a roof. For me, doing something properly is sexy.”
Nothing in her upbringing suggested she would one day end up as an Oscar-nominated actress. Brenda Bottle was the youngest of nine children born to Bill, a corporation bus driver in Ramsgate and his wife, Lou.
Lou was incredibly strong-willed: “But it was a hard life and occasionally it got too much for her. She’d take to the drink and I’d be sent away to stay with my married sister, Pam. But, in time, mum always got herself back on track.
“She was dead proud of me when I started getting work as an actress but I don’t think she quite understood my life. She said to me once, ‘Bren, you know you do your acting all day? So, when do you earn your money?’
“She loved seeing me on the telly. If we were on a bus, she’d let me walk to the back and then she’d call out, ‘Is it the , love, or the ITV you’re on tonight’?”
Her family did not own a television: “But we didn’t care. I once asked mum if we were poor. ‘No, love,’ she said. ‘It’s just that we haven’t got any money.’ But we had something money can’t buy. We had love.”
There’s been an echo in her own life. She and husband Michael Mayhew, a retired art director, have been with each other for the better part of 40 years but only married in 2010. And yes, she says, it was for inheritance reasons.
“But anyone who tells you it’s just a piece of paper is wrong. I was quite surprised to find that it’s brought us even closer together. We love each other – and now it’s official!
“He’s the great love of my love, without a doubt. I don’t want to be with anyone else – and I know Michael feels the same.”
Where would she place Vera in the whole body of her work? “Oh, she’d be at the top alongside some theatre work – Ibsen’s Doll House, for instance – and some films like Little Voice and Pride and Prejudice.”