Interview - Intimately Imelda

Imelda Staunton does three things that convince me she is a thoroughly good egg. Number one, when I shake her hand and introduce myself she says instantly, smiling, "The Scotsman. Hurrah."

"Really?" I ask.

"I love Scotland," she beams. "That's where I'd live if I didn't live here. I had a great holiday there in the 1980s – we did the whole West Coast right up to Port Appin. Wonderful. And I did the Edinburgh Festival in 1989. It's a great place, great humour. You're away hame fur yer tea." The accent for this final flourish is part Stanley Baxter, part Miss Jean Brodie.

Number two, having known me for less than an hour, she offers me a dunk in her hot drink. I'll explain. As we talk, Staunton works her way through a rock bun and a latte. She's already done an interview on GMTV so she's hungry. The oval plate of cheap biscuits on the table beside us is left untouched. Interview over, I can't resist a custard cream. "Want to dunk?" she asks, pushing her half-drunk coffee towards me. I decline, but I am charmed.

Number three, and here is the clincher, she can take a joke. I tell her that sometimes, when researching someone's career for an interview, there's a real surprise. With Staunton, it was such a shock it actually made me laugh out loud but I don't get as far as that before she lets out a kind of high-pitched "eugh".

"I know what you're going to say," she squeals.

"Well, go on," I prompt.

"George ..."

I look blank.

"No?" she asks, a little disappointed. Suddenly it feels like Christmas Day charades. "No, it's that I discovered you made a film with Steven ..."

"Seagal!" she shouts, "that's who I meant. I meant Steven Seagal."

It's true. Imelda Staunton, the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning actor who single-handedly elevated the last Harry Potter film to something more than the sum of its computer-generated parts via her turn as the terrifyingly twin-setted Dolores Umbridge, once made a film with Steven Seagal, a man whose acting ability is knocked into a cocked hat by his hair dye. How the hell did that happen?

"Well, I can only agree with you," she says, with mock earnestness.

"I'm glad you're not offended," I offer, too late.

"Don't be ridiculous, no. I haven't seen it," she says. (It's called Shadow Man and the tagline on the poster was: "If you're not with him – you're dead.") She wrinkles her face in a funny frown. "Yip, I think that about sums it up. I was on my way to Greece, actually, to do My Family and Other Animals (the Gerald Durrell memoir for the BBC]. It was two days' work. It gave me a chance to do an American accent, which I hadn't done, and they were going to pay me a good load of money and I think that is absolutely the last time I'll ever, ever, ever do anything for money."

On this, I absolutely believe her.

Waiting for Staunton to arrive at the anonymous London office to which she was being driven from GMTV, I'd been wondering what to expect. She's 52, her career has spanned more than 30 years. And it's been quite the career – she's picked up awards and accolades for both stage and screen. What she's also managed to do, somehow, is keep a relatively low profile. The focus always stays on the job, on the acting, of which there's plenty. On stage (most recently in Frank McGuinness's There Came a Gypsy Riding at the Almeida last year), on TV (Mrs Sucksby in Fingersmith, gossiping Miss Pole in Cranford), and on film (as the nurse in Shakespeare in Love, with that boy wizard and, of course, as Vera Drake, the title role in Mike Leigh's drama about a 1950s backstreet abortionist for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.)

It's no exaggeration to say that working with Leigh, whose approach to film is legendary – he works with his actors to create the characters they'll play, writing the script as they go – was a defining moment for Staunton. It may have come relatively late in her career but it utterly changed how she is perceived. No longer just the quirky, funny one, or erroneously perceived to be one of the Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh Cambridge Footlights mob, Staunton was suddenly recognised as the powerhouse actor she is.

"I always thought I was pretty concentrated before working with Mike," she says. "I was very serious, worked really hard. It seemed like I'd been going down this road here," she points over my shoulder, "which was very solid and then suddenly with Mike," another gasp, "it suddenly went into Sensurround."

It might be the way that Staunton so inhabited the role of Drake, a dowdy, hard-working, post-war housewife, that makes me so surprised by how she looks today. Tiny, and wearing a calf-length, sheepskin coat and boots, her clothes have a kind of mismatching boho chic to them – all patterns and textures. She's sparky and everything about her is quick – the way she moves and speaks and her wit. Her short, curly hair has glints of gold and grey in it and her eyes are blue, sharp and inquiring. She's much cheekier than I had imagined.

We're meeting to talk about A Bunch of Amateurs, Staunton's latest film in which she stars alongside Sir Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond and, believe it or not, Burt Reynolds. Reynolds plays an ageing action hero who comes to England to star in what he thinks is a run of King Lear in Stratford-upon-Avon. It turns out he is, in fact, booked to play with an am-dram society in Stratford St John, Suffolk. Staunton found the premise funny. Reynolds is good at sending himself up, but he's also said that he wanted a chance to do some Shakespeare. So was he any good? "Well," she lets air out between her lips, sounding like a balloon let go before the knot's tied, "well sort of ... yes." She waves her hand towards my Dictaphone – she knows what she should say about Burt and the Bard. She's just a bit too mischievous to say it. "Yes. But no. Actually there isn't that much of that. And actually it's all very well thinking about Burt but how much Shakespeare have I done? You're worried because you're standing there next to Derek Jacobi, who's done everything. Derek and Samantha Bond have done a lot more than I've done." Magnanimous, modest and cheeky.

Staunton did have a stint with the RSC in a career that started at RADA when she was 18, was followed by rep, and has taken in musicals, cabaret, radio plays and all that TV and film. "I started working when you could just get another job," she says. "I got into rep, did six years of that. Got into London, did that. I'm fairly pragmatic – you can be at home or you can go and work and I do like working. I thrive on it."

She proves her point by telling me that she starts rehearsing a play, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, in a few days. That means she's with me to talk about one movie, she's been in America for three months doing Taking Woodstock, another film with Ang Lee and "since I got home in October, I've done a bit of radio and a little animated thing. Just little things." Some might call her schedule hectic.

"Actually, I now recognise that it's dangerous for me to just be at home," she says breezily. "I mean, I love being at home and I want to be at home, but actually I'm so rubbish at anything else. I like baking, I cook, I do all that kind of thing, but I'm not one of those people who says, right I'm going to do a class in that, then I'll do this. I'm a person who thinks, well, actually what I do is this, so really I'd just like to go to work."

Staunton's husband, Jim Carter, is an actor too (they met in Guys and Dolls at the National) and even her 15-year-old daughter, Bessie, had a small part in one scene in Cranford and has just got into the National Youth Theatre. Would Staunton be happy for Bessie to follow her parents into acting?

"Fine, yeah. Fine," she says, popping lumps of rock bun into her mouth. "I suppose the only difficulty will be if she's doing it and not working. Touch wood, Jim and I have worked fairly constantly but there are better actors than us, there are worse actors than us. I think my advice to anyone is: just take the job."

Staunton's mother was a hairdresser, her father worked on the roads. They moved to London from Ireland just before their only child was born in 1956. It was a teacher at Staunton's convent school who spotted her talent and nurtured it. So did her parents get behind their daughter's ambition?

"They were encouraged by the fact that I had this wonderful teacher who got me into drama school," she says. "Those were the days when you listened to what the teacher said and you trusted that she knew what she was doing. And I did get into the drama school so it did work. But even then, I didn't know what you did after drama school. None of us knew so, in a way, we were blissfully ignorant."

What is it that appealed about acting?

"I always liked being someone else," she says. "But then you think, well, does that mean you're dissatisfied with who you are? But I don't think so. I like looking into other people's lives. I like empathising with someone else's feelings, trying to feel that. When I was younger, I used to love parts where I could really shout because I don't really have a temper myself."

Staunton has reached a stage in her career where some people come to her because they're seeking an "Imelda-type". That's exactly what the producer and director of A Bunch of Amateurs wanted. I wonder if it's flattering? "I don't know what it means."

I think she's not in the slightest bit interested in understanding what they mean. Acting for Staunton is about being challenged, about trying something new, becoming somebody different. It's not about finding a type and sticking with it.

"I do choose carefully in terms of the roles I do, but only in as much as I think, well I've done that, I don't want to do it again," she says. "I was asked about a thing recently which for my money was a watered-down Dolores Umbridge and I just thought, well I've done that."

That happens a lot to actors, doesn't it?

"Of course it does," she shoots back. "What a lack of imagination, I think, on their part. But it's up to me, and can only be up to me, to chop and change."

Staunton says she got more and more nervous as the Taking Woodstock shoot with Ang Lee went on, but it's clear that she enjoyed it. It's the second time she's worked with the director (she was in Sense and Sensibility) she says is "extraordinary" but still, for Staunton, it's Leigh she comes back to. "It totally changed the way I think about work, the way I approach it," she says. "You think, blimey I'm really glad that it happened to me, you know, late on in the career that I could have such a shift.

"Having done Mike's film and having done two days with Steven Seagal, you think, right-oh, how do I apply what I did there?" For Staunton, though, there are lessons. And not only for film.

"With Mike, you learn how to keep your own counsel. So when things around you go slightly pear-shaped, you just keep absolutely focused on what you are doing. You just do what you do. And I think that's a great lesson in life."

A Bunch of Amateurs is in cinemas now.