Brenda Blethyn, Introducing the Dwights

Brenda Blethyn is a completely un-Hollywood star - as a mature woman and not an ingenue, in British social dramas and not costume or biopics - and owes her primary Hollywood renown to the 1996 Academy Award-nominated acclaim for her work as a mother who discovers a daughter, a black daughter, she'd never known, in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. Now in Cherie Nowlan's truly compelling dysfunctional family drama Introducing the Dwights (called Clubland in its native Australia), Blethyn offers another definitive portrait. As Jean, a stand-up comedienne whom time has passed by, who won't give up her hopes of a career, who won't let one son leave the nest without a fight, whose other son is a special needs youngster also approaching adulthood, Blethyn nails the lacquered toughness, the generosity alongside the self-centeredness that makes show folk ideal dramatic specimens. Scary, funny and impossible to turn away onscreen, Blethyn is a charmer in person, candid, serious and, yes, fun.

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