Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996).
The woman in the black suit and gem earrings first appears as one among dozens of intoning faces captured from afar. Her calm eyes are fastened on a program, voice blended in hymn at the gravesite of the unidentified deceased. But as “How Great Thou Art” continues, she ceases to sing. Instead, she fixes on the middle distance, tears trickling down her cheeks. Hers is a private grief that cannot be readily and consistently integrated into the congregation’s lament. Surely she has her reasons.
***
Black British life had seldom factored into the everyday dramas of Mike Leigh before 1996’s Secrets & Lies. Leigh’s film, among the most commercially and critically successful of his career,is driven by the dogged efforts of Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young, Black, introverted optometrist, to uncover and make contact with her birth mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a blowzy, woebegone factory worker who is also, much to Hortense’s amazement, white. In the wake of her adoptive mother’s off-screen death, Hortense finds herself increasingly and willingly pulled into Cynthia’s lonely life and chaotic family, which includes another illegitimate adult daughter (Claire Rushbrook), whom Cynthia has raised and alienated, and an unfailingly altruistic brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), whose wife (Phyllis Logan) is infertile and resentful of her sister-in-law. Other revelations are dragged into the light over the course of the film but it is the unknown existence and racial identity of Hortense that most pivotally determine the narrative of Secrets & Lies, providing the film with its reason for being.
In Leigh’s cinema, characters belong as much to the actors playing them as to the director himself. As the filmmaker himself has made clear, his rigorous, much-mythologized method famously enlists “the actor as a contributing artist, not merely an interpreter.” His films, like those of his closest forebear John Cassavetes, have frequently been misconstrued as taped improvisations, warped by the whims of its performers. It is true that, for most of Leigh’s projects, actors conceive their characters from scratch, sometimes drawing from a list of people that they have known or encountered in their own lives. But the actors then work separately and with Leigh for months to refine personalities, professions, habits, and pasts down to the most humdrum detail, until they can confidently claim to know this fictive person from the inside out. Once this incubation period is over, the actor begins collaborating with other actors enmeshed in the same process to create relationships, deepen dynamics, and braid together their histories. Through extended and unrecorded improvisations, on-site rehearsals, and Leigh’s own external plotting, a story gradually crystallizes, though a proper screenplay tends to be put on paper only after the film is completed. Leigh’s actors shape, influence, and—in the truest, most organic sense—co-author their characters but, once on set, the actions these characters take and the choices they make are negotiated between the performers and Leigh, whose “decision-making and interventions inform every film, right across the board.”1 The result is a work molded by many minds, a film equally scavenged and structured, its freewheeling characters held within narrative and relational parameters imposed by Leigh.
After studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Leigh decisively turned to directing and derived his filmic practice from his experiences helming productions on the London stage, a foundation felt in the vivid, often volatile intensity of his actors’ efforts. As Leigh puts it, “To get everything right for that one moment on film, that’s what interests me. You want the spontaneity of the theater to happen at that white-hot moment when the camera is rolling.”2 Although Leigh’s films have one foot planted in the quotidian realm of kitchen-sink drama, the majority of his actors have retained a relatively heightened manner of performance, an anti-naturalism, that tends to exceed our slippery frame of cinematic realism, awing some critics—Ian Buruma aptly described Leigh’s climaxes as “theater, but with the dangerous edge of reality”—and repelling others, who have accused Leigh of condescending to his lower-class characters, vis-à-vis his actors and their warts-and-all portrayals. Called on repeatedly to defend his approach, Leigh can occasionally undersell the tension he generates by unleashing his restive, larger-than-life players into existing places and letting their bursts of behavior transform the physical world into a proscenium. His characters are “real people, like you and me,” he has claimed, but this doesn’t remotely get at the ferment and volubility of his actors and all that is delightfully, maddeningly, and diversely too much about the people who tend to populate his ever-expanding Britannia.
How, then, does the presence of a Black protagonist complicate the notion of a typical Mike Leigh character, as symbolized in the slovenly, spluttering form of David Thewlis’s Johnny, the irate white man stripped of charm and armed with a serrated, mile-a-minute wit in Naked, the 1993 film released directly before Secrets & Lies? And if a Mike Leigh performance is synonymous with vigorous, uninhibited expression, what might the reserve of a performer in a Mike Leigh film consequently signify about her character’s subjectivity?
Given everything known about Leigh’s working methods, Hortense must be regarded as the creation of both the director and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the RADA-trained actress who first imagined and invented her and whose muted yet emotionally variegated performance does not function as nor conform to our expectations of a typical Mike Leigh performance. Hortense’s blackness discernibly sets her apart from the film’s other main characters; as Jean-Baptiste notes, “She’s the subject [of the film] but is in the subtext” of all that is conveyed and concealed among its other denizens, her birth family. Yet Jean-Baptiste personifies and expands on the character’s difference in more artful ways, refusing to exceptionalize or oversimplify her. The performance instead hinges on modes of quiet and opacity that distinguish Jean-Baptiste from her fellow actors in the film and those of Leigh’s filmography. “The theory of difference is invaluable,” wrote Édouard Glissant in his appeal for the right to opacity, which doubles as an assertion of autonomy, on behalf of minorities. “But difference can still contrive to reduce things to the Transparent.” In Secrets & Lies, Hortense fosters an unmistakable connection to the viewer yet eludes psychological transparency and refrains from complete knowability. It is Jean-Baptiste who, through subtle performance style and primary authorship of the character, carefully sets the terms by which Hortense will and will not be legible to those who surround her and those in the audience who are nonetheless magnetized to the actress’ every delicate move.
***
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996).
The casting of the dark-skinned Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the mixed-race daughter of a white woman drew vocal dissension upon the release of Secrets & Lies. “She didn’t look right,” wrote Karen Alexander in a decade-capping overview of Black British cinema in the 1990s, recognizing Jean-Baptiste’s significant talents but deeming her “phenotypically unconvincing” in the part. The performance anticipates this critique early on: when a too-kindly social worker (Lesley Manville) tells Hortense that it is perfectly feasible for her birth mother to be white, her reaction is halfway between a baffled scowl and a soundless scoff. Believing Jean-Baptiste as the daughter of Brenda Blethyn may require a suspension of disbelief for audiences seeking frictionless fidelity from Leigh’s film—not an altogether unreasonable expectation for a filmmaker who has resolutely stressed the verisimilitude of the social worlds he has chronicled. And yet this fidelity claim might be easier to overlook for those who are immediately in thrall to Jean-Baptiste’s mellow certitude in the role and her palpable, lived-in devotion to the character; the actress is not merely an inhabitant of Hortense’s reality but one of its chief architects. “People keep talking about the script, asking what attracted me to the role,” Jean-Baptiste said in 1996. “There was no role—what you’re attracted to is the process.”
Jean-Baptiste’s preparation for Secrets & Lies involved attending university several times a week for three months in order to fully understand Hortense’s optometry practice. The actress gravitated to the hidden minutiae of Leigh’s method, not just selecting the character’s professional, monochromatic wardrobe but also storing those clothes and intermittently residing in the apartment that would double as Hortense’s, finding herself able to account for all of the items in her trash. Through improvisations, she fleshed out conjoined backstories with fellow actors Michele Austin, who momentarily appears as Hortense’s friend, and Brian Bovell and Trevor Laird, whose roles as Hortense’s brothers were truncated after a subplot about the sale of their childhood home was excised from the final cut. Jean-Baptiste found possessing extensive knowledge about the character “liberating” in the sense that it “frees you up to just be” before the camera. This ease is discernible across Secrets & Lies, where Jean-Baptiste is an unforced and self-effacing presence, her performance closer in spirit to the attentive if agonized reserve of Spall than the frenzied mannerisms of Blethyn, Rushbrook, and others. Then again, it is Spall’s Maurice whose torment is the focal point of the film’s purgative climax, in which he apoplectically brandishes the film’s title like a cudgel against his loved ones.
Hortense is granted no such catharsis yet remains all the more fascinating for keeping her feelings and motivations so close to the vest. Jean-Baptiste reveals various shades of the character: her affability with her patients; her weary disinterest in her brothers’ briefly glimpsed squabbles; her rueful disappointment at mother’s sudden passing. But Hortense is mostly captured in contemplation, though the precise content of these musings is scarcely explicated. Quiet, something of a rare trait in Leigh’s films, is paramount to Jean-Baptiste’s power in the part. Hortense’s default manner evokes Kevin Quashie’s notion of quiet as an untapped form of expressivity within Black culture, one not synonymous with “silence or stillness,” but rather “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.” Quashie continues:
The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior. This shift can feel like a kind of heresy if the interior is thought of as apolitical or inexpressive, which it is not: one’s inner life is raucous and full of expression, especially if we distinguish the term “expressive” from the notion of public. Indeed the interior could be understood as the source of human action—that anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and capacities of our inner life.
Jean-Baptiste’s quiet facade embodies thought without clarifying its subject matter, suggesting the restless inquisitiveness that propels Hortense forward, in search of Cynthia. But what compels Hortense to continually entertain Cynthia’s company past the point of their excruciating introduction and to develop and nurture a bond with a woman who, despite their shared DNA, is Hortense’s polar opposite in innumerable ways? The loss of Hortense’s adoptive mother, with whom she attests to having a normal, loving relationship but whom she claims to never really have known, is too simplistic an explanation. Both Leigh and Jean-Baptiste avoid rationalizing Hortense along these lines; there are no expository monologues about the derangement of grief nor the loneliness of the adopted child. Ashley Clark argues that “the film doesn’t really explore how Hortense processes the monumental upending of her own identity, how she reacts to the newly complicated nature of her own blackness in relation to her existing family and community.” And yet this lack of exploration arguably befits a fundamentally ambivalent character. What informs Hortense’s desire to not just find but know her white mother is ungraspable and obscure, opaque in that it is a choice deprived of a single dramatically-expedient reason.
An emblematic moment of the performance occurs in a car as Hortense drives Cynthia home following their first meeting. Hortense reveals to Cynthia that she has known about her adoption since childhood, when her late mother revealed it to her on a flight home from Barbados. “Were you upset?” Cynthia asks Hortense. The latter responds, in a tone at once evasive and matter-of-fact that she “just looked out at the clouds,” an elision that refuses to dictate the tenor of this pivotal moment in the character’s life and preserves the privacy of young Hortense’s response. Cynthia does not press the inquiry further and, even by the film’s end, we never totally grasp what being adopted might mean—or have once meant—to Hortense, how this knowledge (and the years spent holding this knowledge in the front or back of one’s mind) informs her search to locate Cynthia. This is neither the first or the last time she will elude apprehension. What matters to Hortense—and to Jean-Baptiste—is her quest to know, rather than be known. Per Glissant, “For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.”
***
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996).
It was Jean-Baptiste’s decision to sit beside Blethyn during Hortense and Cynthia’s first meeting in an empty Central London tearoom, an awkward arrangement that gives Secrets & Lies its centerpiece scene and one of its signature images, that of Black daughter and white mother elbow-to-elbow in a booth, faces forward, acutely alone in their shock and chagrin. Jean-Baptiste intuited that it would be easier for Hortense to show Cynthia the paperwork proving her parentage if the two were seated alongside each other. But the blocking would also spare Hortense the embarrassment of having to look at her disbelieving mother throughout the eight-minute conversation, shot in one unbroken take. A study in contrasts emerges during this extended two-shot, a divergence not solely of fictitious dispositions but of acting styles; it is the prototypical Mike Leigh performance sitting next to its inverse. Blethyn’s wide-eyed recollection of the repressed encounter that produced Hortense dominates the scene but the eye keeps shifting leftward to Jean-Baptiste and the nuanced portrait of bemused discomfort that she sketches here with her patient waiting, gentle prodding, and downward stares. The lachrymose fervor of Blethyn’s style is recognizably discordant with her costar’s equanimity and the stunning incompatibility of this pair does not augur a genuine connection between mother and daughter.
Hortense’s solitude is keenest in the company of others. The clear exception is an outlying scene that is one of the film’s most beloved, a dialogue between Hortense and another Black Londoner, her longtime friend, Austin’s Dionne. Over dinner and wine, the duo discuss their sexual pursuits, their mothers, and the discontents of their upbringings, complete with Hortense’s comical impersonation of a Caribbean neighbor. Their banter is fast, free, and relaxed; at one point, the scrunching-up of lips is all they require to understand one another. This is a different Hortense—not necessarily a “realer” or more “authentic” one, but a looser and funnier, more unfiltered and meditative one. We will seldom see this side of Hortense again—except when she is with Cynthia.
Once Hortense starts socializing with her mother, Jean-Baptiste complicates our assumptions about where—and with whom—the character can find comfort. Hortense’s characteristic reticence remains strikingly dissimilar from Cynthia’s too-muchness, but she is not only reticent. There is a girlish giddiness to their handful of outings, even a sense of delight that Jean-Baptiste conveys as she pulls faces, imitates Sylvester Stallone, and giggles at a hungry Cynthia’s malapropic declaration that “I’m ravishing!” What exactly is Hortense doing here? Feeding an outsider’s curiosity about this white woman and her working-class world? Enjoying the flattery that Cynthia doles out about Hortense’s beauty and professional success? Honoring a personal imperative to relate to the only one of her mothers still living? Leigh and Jean-Baptiste never resolve this query, which is why the growing geniality of the scenes between Hortense and Cynthia comes as such a surprise. And yet for all of their merriment, they are still women adjusting to implausible roles, and the self-conscious strain of their pauses say as much as their gasps of laughter. “Human behaviors are fractal in nature,” Glissant observed. Recall, too, Hortense’s complicated reaction when Cynthia finally identifies herself as her mother in that tearoom, the mixture of appreciation and unease that sifts through Jean-Baptiste’s face without settling into something straightforward. Her response is unfixed, as is her nature.
***
The climax of Secrets & Lies unfolds over the course of an explosive 21st birthday party for Cynthia’s daughter Roxanne, held at Maurice’s home. Hortense, pretending to be a workmate of Cynthia’s, attempts to use her politesse as a shield but only recedes further into herself, her discomfiture resembling a kind of nausea. (Notice that the gems hanging prominently from her ears are the same ones worn to her mother’s funeral.) When Cynthia, without warning, drops the bombshell about her newfound daughter, Hortense is forced to disclose her real identity. The character is not central to the recriminations and rapprochements that follow but becomes a silent, steely bystander to the threatened breakdown of her maternal family. Hortense noticeably chooses not to participate, an observer to the eruptions. At one point, she apathetically shrugs away Maurice’s concerned pats on the arm. It is only when Cynthia reveals to Roxane the long-withheld identity of her father, by her account “a nice man” studying abroad from America, that Hortense intervenes, coldly asking her mother, “Was my father a nice man?” The intentionally barbed question does its damage. But Hortense takes Cynthia in her arms, the embrace a mercy. She takes the path forward.
Leigh’s film ends with Hortense welcomed into the family, testing the waters with Roxane in the backyard of the terraced house she shares with Cynthia. The pair admit to the weirdness of this arrangement but the mood between them remains light and airy as they opt to believe that something worthwhile and sustainable may be fostered between them. Cynthia’s reckless reveal and the pain subsequently restrained by Hortense are only minutes in the past. But Hortense, at least, is willing to see this experiment through.
Hortense is not so much an enigma as an explorer, one whose motives are entirely her own, a seeker of connection who evades absolutes and declines to explain herself. Jean-Baptiste, never once raising her voice and hardly ever losing her composure, markedly expands our preconceptions about what a Mike Leigh performance might look and sound like. Other Leigh stalwarts (Ruth Sheen, Imelda Staunton) share Jean-Baptiste’s knack for unfurling a pause with currents of thought and feeling, but I can’t say that I wonder about their characters in the way I do Hortense. (I want to believe that she’d hit it off with Sally Hawkins’s Poppy, a zestier character but one who sends out similar rays of decency in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky.) Jean-Baptiste’s performance is a balancing act between actorly charisma and all too human ambiguity, between narratively-ordained blackness and a refusal to represent the Blackness of this particular British woman as innate, predetermined, monolithic. At all times, Jean-Baptiste protects and preserves the introversion, modesty, and quiet of the character she brought into being.
In 1997, Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Secrets & Lies. (Although Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste share virtually equal screen time, the latter was campaigned as a supporting actress.3) That same year, the thirty-year-old actress was excluded from an all-white delegation of young actors invited by the organization British Screen to attend the Cannes Film Festival, where Leigh’s film had won the Palme d’Or the year prior. Jean-Baptiste did not let the slight go quietly, telling The Guardian, “It is a shame on Britain. I see myself as British and I want to be celebrated by Britain.” Despite the historic recognition, this slight and the subsequent paucity of substantial opportunities for Jean-Baptiste in the decades since her breakthrough are testaments to how habitually disregarded Black interiority remains onscreen. She has found heftier parts on the London stage, including a recent triumph in an Ivo Van Hove revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. But the British film industry and Hollywood, which has kept the actress in workaday rotation since her move to the States in the 2000s, have failed to plumb her greater depths.
The exception to this trajectory was facilitated through the director whom the actress has said she would pay to hire her. Almost 30 years after Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste reunited with Leigh for Hard Truths (2024), an unshakable showcase for the actress, whose middle-class housewife, the inaptly named Pansy, carries anger like a glove that has been superglued to the hand. Searching for a skirmish with strangers and loved ones alike, Pansy cannot help but pucker her lips in disgust at the faintest sign of contentment in a society that has, for reasons beyond her control, denied her all its comforts and joys. Jean-Baptiste badgers and bellows with a fury first hilarious then haunting, rattling the cage that a lifetime of dashed hopes has raised around Pansy. (She also rekindles and spikes the rapport first sparked with her Secrets & Lies bestie Michele Austin, majestic as Pansy’s forbearing and magnanimous sister.) Operating light years away from the self-containment of her breakthrough role, Jean-Baptiste sets a new criterion in Leigh’s canon of modern misanthropes and delivers the sort of performance around which acting careers are immortalized.
Still, it is Hortense that feels like the rarer feat, the figure easier to neglect or underestimate. Jean-Baptiste looks largely unaffected by the templates of her costars and predecessors in Leigh’s ensembles. But she also seems impervious to the straitjacketing expectations of cinematic relatability that have narrowed our tolerance for those who are not instantly apprehensible, whose lives are not mirrors reflecting back our own existence with crystal clarity. The actress ensures that Hortense remains irreducible, a character who rivets less for what she reveals than for the promise that beneath her quiet reserve spins a world unto itself.
1. Mike Leigh, “Interview with Mike Leigh,” Mike Leigh, by Sean O’Sullivan (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 150.
2. Ian Buruma, “The Way They Live Now: Mike Leigh,” Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War (New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2014 [1994]), 249.
3. One might also question why the jury led by Francis Ford Coppola at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival awarded the Best Actress prize to Blethyn alone, despite bestowing a joint Best Actor prize to Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne for The Eighth Day.