From a gun-toting momma in her latest film to a style-obsessed 1950s cleaning lady, Lesley Manville is going from strength to strength. But whatever you do, don’t say she’s a late-bloomer She’s a bad, bad momma. The matriarch of this bad family. A controlling, violent, violent woman…” says Lesley Manville, who has turned out to be spectacularly good at playing bad. She’s talking about her latest film, Let Him Go , in which she plays Blanche Weboy, a heroically evil, gun-toting mama with an immaculate blow-dry and a gift for one-liners. It is one of those grand Hollywood films, a western-slash-thriller, the kind of movie that meant Manville was offered a stunt double. After spending an hour in her company, it isn’t a surprise to discover she opted to do the stunts herself, surrounded, she says delightedly, by four Canadian firemen, who hid just off-camera. “I’d never picked up a gun in my life,” she says, with a hint of fabulous theatre. “And of course Kevin [Costner, her co-star] is...