She found fame as an irrepressibly perky girl about town in Happy-Go-Lucky, but her latest role as Maud Lewis, an artist with a severe disability, is perhaps her most striking performance yet

If it’s true that you can’t please all the people all the time, then the perky, bright-eyed British actor Sally Hawkins comes closer than most. Nine years on from Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, in which she was Poppy, the irrepressible schoolteacher whose approach to life is not so much “glass half full” as “milkshakes all round”, the 41-year-old has reached an enviable stage in her career.

She has a Golden Globe and a Silver Bear award from the Berlin film festival, both for Happy-Go-Lucky. She has worked three times with Leigh and twice with Woody Allen, first in his unloved thriller Cassandra’s Dream and then in Blue Jasmine, a loose update of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she was Oscar-nominated for her lively, funny turn as Ginger (the Stella role). Now she is starring in three new films that between them provide a good indication of the breadth of her appeal.

First up is Maudie, Aisling Walsh’s low-key drama about the late Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, who painted rural tableaux on walls, household objects and whatever came to hand.

Hers is a sensitive and finely detailed performance that rejects the sort of easy appeals to sentimentality made in other areas of the film. “I showed up a week before filming,” says Ethan Hawke, who plays Lewis’s gruff, grunting husband, Everett. “Sally was painting three to four hours a day. She had a dance teacher, a body movement person, who helped her study juvenile arthritis. She was perfecting her Canadian accent. It became clear to me that I was working with someone who was working on perfection, a high level of excellence.”

After Maudie, Hawkins will next be seen in The Shape of Water, which premieres this month at the Venice film festival. In this visually striking fantasy from Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, she plays a young mute woman who finds an unlikely soulmate: the strange aquatic creature held in captivity at the laboratory where she works. Hawkins had a supporting role in Godzilla (and is currently shooting that picture’s follow-up) but this will be altogether weirder: early footage from del Toro’s film gives the strong impression that Amélie has wandered into The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Finally, at the end of this year, she will reprise her role as Mrs Brown from Paddington in the eagerly awaited sequel to that idiosyncratic and likable surprise hit. So that’s arthouse drama, fantasy blockbuster and family favourite all sewn up. Throw in the BBC period pieces that first made her name (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky), as well as her increasingly rare but highly regarded stage work and it would be difficult to say that Hawkins doesn’t have all bases covered.

There seems at first glance not to be much of an overlap between her and the woman she plays in Maudie. Maud Lewis was racked throughout her life with the debilitating effects of juvenile arthritis; she was offloaded from a thoughtless brother to a domineering aunt before marrying the fish pedlar who employed her as a live-in housekeeper in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. None of which overlaps with Hawkins’s idyllic upbringing in south London, in what she has described as a National Trust-protected “gingerbread house” designed by Patrick Gwynne. But like Lewis, whose mother encouraged her as a child to paint Christmas cards, Hawkins grew up steeped in art.

Her parents, Jacqui and Colin, are a writer-and-illustrator team responsible for hundreds of children’s books, some of which owe their existence partly to Hawkins herself. When she came home from school one day, bursting to tell her father about a playground game of “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?”, he imagined it instantly as a pop-up book; within a week, he and his wife had sold the finished article to their publisher. On another occasion, she and her mother drew witches together each day after playgroup: witches shopping, witches cooking. These, too, ended up in a book.

“They were always drawing and it was incredibly creative to be around that,” says Hawkins. “I was encouraged to draw and paint and express myself and create things. And I wasn’t pushed academically; I could just be what I wanted to be. My parents have a strong work ethic, but their attitude to life, their philosophy, is: whatever makes you happy.”

Drawing and play-acting dominated her childhood; an early acting influence came from her father, who would perform the parts of characters in his books as he worked on them. Eventually, she was diagnosed as dyslexic, a subject she says she is reluctant to discuss, only for fear of sounding like a cliche: “There are so many actors who are dyslexic. Drama schools are absolutely stuffed with them.” For her, she says, “[It] can be quite bad sometimes. I flip lines and sight-reading is terrifying.”

Given her competing passions, it was likely that she would end up either as an actress or an artist. Her delight in crafting scenes and sketches for herself and her friends to play tipped her toward the former and she ended up at Rada. Following her graduation in 1998, her friend Maxine Peake organised CVs for both of them. Hawkins wrote to the casting director Nina Gold, who then introduced her to Mike Leigh. In his gruelling 2002 film, All or Nothing, she played an abrasive, unemployed teenager marooned on a dilapidated council estate. Among her co-stars was James Corden, long before his showbizzy, chatshow days; the pair of them made a pact that if they weren’t hitched to other people by the age of 35, they would marry each other. (Corden is now married; Hawkins isn’t.)

She amassed a steady stream of credits, such as the British gangster thriller Layer Cake with a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig, and worked for Leigh again on Vera Drake. It was another small part, this time as a rich girl in 1950s London who has an abortion after being raped.

After those two downbeat roles, she deserved a laugh. She certainly got it in Happy-Go-Lucky. Leigh set out to make a determinedly optimistic film, cramming the widescreen frame with colour and pizzazz and putting Hawkins slap-bang in the centre. How viewers feel about the film depends largely on their response to Poppy, who appears in every scene. Her demeanour is established during the opening credits, when she cycles through London waving at passers-by, doing everything short of conversing with Mr Bluebird on her shoulder.

She dresses like an explosion in a Dulux factory and wears so many bangles that when she moves it sounds like a riot in a cutlery drawer. Inconvenience and difficulty only kindle her cheeriness. When her bicycle is stolen, she chuckles: “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye!” Just when you think she can’t be any bouncier, she starts attending trampoline classes. “People either loved Poppy or found her vastly irritating,” Hawkins observed. “I’m just pleased she got a reaction.”

Not since Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves had a British actor enjoyed such an eyecatching breakthrough performance. Following its success, there was a period during which Hollywood felt it should do something with Hawkins, only it wasn’t quite sure what. A Bruce Willis thriller was mooted: “That was the last thing I wanted to do – and I can’t imagine Bruce would ever have wanted to appear opposite me either,” she said.

Fortunately, she stuck to her parents’ advice and did only what made her happy. She turned up in literary adaptations (Never Let Me Go, An Education, Great Expectations), oddball curiosities (Submarine and The Double, both directed by Richard Ayoade) and machine-tooled crowd-pleasers (Made in Dagenham) and looked equally comfortable in each of them.

She appeared at the Royal Court with Rafe Spall in the stripped-down, widely admired love story Constellations. Writing in this paper, Susannah Clapp called her performance “delicate and fiery” and said: “She moves round the stage like a light-footed schoolgirl, but drops a wisecrack like a miniature Mae West.”

Success hasn’t made Hawkins any more comfortable with the attention that comes with it. An interview with her is not complete until she has confessed to being a bag of nerves. Off-screen, she prefers simply not to be seen.

“Because I’m small, I can hide in a big coat and I’ve got lots of hair which I use as a kind of a helmet. I’m still thrown when I am recognised. But when it happens, I find it really lovely. At least people don’t throw things or shout at me.”

THE HAWKINS FILE

Born Sally Cecilia Hawkins in London on 27 April 1976. Her parents, Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, have written and illustrated hundreds of children’s books together.

Best of times In 2008, she took home the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical for Happy-Go-Lucky, one of 10 awards that she won for that film.

Worst of times Her 2010 Broadway debut alongside Adam Driver in Mrs Warren’s Profession was savaged by Ben Brantley in the New York Times, who said that the “talented but miscast” performer “comes across here as a small, wiry figure, of anxious mien and spasmodic speech. She often seems on the verge of hysterics… If [her character, Vivie] is the future of Britain, woe betide that once mighty nation.”

What she says “You only do good work when you’re taking risks and pushing yourself and failing really badly.”

What they say “Sally is very special. Very funny. We communicate, we have a rapport. She’s a highly imaginative, creative person… she has this kind of openness and humorous-but-serious take on things.” Mike Leigh