In 1987, Ms. Manville married Gary Oldman, and they split shortly after their son, Alfie, was born. Mr. Oldman went off to become an American movie star, and she raised Alfie on her own. “It makes me anxious and neurotic and hell to live with,” Mr. Oldman has said of his acting process. Not so for Ms. Manville. She departed from her parents’ traditional path, but her mother’s example of how to look after a family stuck. “Even when I was working, I would make sure there was something home-cooked in the fridge,” she said.

Alfie is grown now, but she’s still calibrated to single motherhood. “The problem is that I’ve always done everything, so now I can’t stop doing everything,” she said. “I don’t like being driven — I like to drive. I don’t like people doing my hair. I don’t like people doing my makeup. I’m not good with people doing things for me.” To be clear: “It’s not because I don’t want someone to cook my dinner. It’s that nobody ever really has. So I just cook it myself.”

Taking care of the business of life is an artistic choice as well as a personal one. Many of the details she builds into characters “I’m getting for nothing,” she said. “That’s just what having a life brings you. I have an inherent understanding of someone who’s lost a husband, or someone who isn’t married, or someone who’s lonely.” Or someone who is not lonely at all. For Cyril, who eschews marriage and instead pair-bonds with her brother in the “quiet, anal, hermetic world” of the House of Woodcock, “control is almost a kind of sex,” she said. If she identifies with Cyril, it’s in this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time happily on my own. I’m very sure of who I am.”

IN MS. MANVILLE’S RECENT WORK, a theme has emerged — of women who contend with towering male artists and reveal their shortcomings. There’s “Long Day’s Journey,” of course, in which Mary’s life is constructed (and deconstructed) around her husband, the matinee idol James Tyrone, played here by Jeremy Irons.

“She’s had what looks like a quite glamorous life,” Ms. Manville said of Mary. “I make sure I deliver with great clarity and emotion when she speaks about what her life actually has been like” — following her husband around the country, waiting alone in cheap hotels as he goes out to the theater each day and comes home drunk each night.

Image Ms. Manville, seen here in “Another Year,” has collaborated with the filmmaker Mike Leigh more than any other actor, and from him she learned to maneuver easily in and out of character. Credit... Simon Mein/Sony Pictures Classics

James speaks of Mary’s love lighting a fire beneath his ambition, but he extinguished hers. She dreamed of being a concert pianist, before she married. Through morphine, she can escape to her memories, to a time, Ms. Manville said, “when she was Mary, instead of just Mrs. Tyrone.”