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How did listening to Lowry's original tapes shape your understanding of him beyond his public persona?

L.S. Lowry has throughout my lifetime, I think, been the most popular painter in the United Kingdom. So, it's natural that people should be interested in the man as well as his considerable body of work. But he didn't give many interviews and those that he did on-record are rather stilted, in that he seems to have worked out his answers in advance.

I think the main impression [in these unheard interviews] we get is of a man who is happy to be answering questions. He doesn't feel that Angela is intrusive in any way. In fact, he clearly likes being in her company and only occasionally is he wrong-footed as she delves a bit closer into matters that he perhaps hasn't sorted out, in his own mind.

I think what I've found as an actor, trying to match the sound of his words to my face and body, is that he was very much enjoying being in her company

What are the things that you think are most striking about his character?

Well, I'm attracted to a northerner who liked living in the north. Across the Pennines, David Hockney couldn't wait to get out of Yorkshire and discover the bright lights of the world elsewhere.

Lowry traveled a great deal in the United Kingdom and painted different aspects of it, but he never went abroad. Not interested. Well, there's a lot to be interested in in Manchester!

Topographically, all the stuff he painted - he painted often empty scenes as well as busy streets and busy urban life. So, he was interested in things beyond his immediate surroundings, but it was the north that he seemed to enjoy most.

He appeals to me as an actor because he clearly loved the theatre, we know that from his reports of his life and he liked the ballet, he liked pantomime. And I think that's reflected more than people perhaps realise in the paintings and drawings.

You see characters half on and half off the canvases as if they're hurrying in from the wings or hurrying back to backstage away from the glare of the lights and the attention of the painter. And many of his paintings are drawn from the aspect of someone sitting above the action, as you might be if you were in the dress circle of a theater. He's look looking down, always an observer. Never part of the paintings.

But you're drawn into the paintings because invariably there's a character, I would call them characters, as you get in a play, who are looking out of the canvas at Mr. Lowry. ‘What's that man doing over there?’ He is their audience. But he's the director as well as the playwright and it's all coming out of his imagination, but in a very theatrical way.

Perhaps some people think that he had a rather empty life, except in the middle of the night when he was painting, [perhaps they] have got it wrong and that like many of us he found enormous satisfaction of other people’s lives.

What is the most challenging aspect of lip-syncing Lowry’s real voice?

I'm surprised to discover the most challenging aspect of lip syncing is making your mouth fit the recorded words. And I've had great help from Ms. Pugh and Dickie Beau - a friend whose lip syncing is well noted, and I thought I would benefit from the advice of both of them, and indeed I have. It ain't easy. I don't find it easy, and I'm amazed at Annabel Smith's ability.

Because you record a sentence at a time until you've got an exact match. I'd be very interested to see what it looks like and I know what it sounds like, but am I doing enough with my face, am I doing too little? I don't know. It's a skill which I don't think you conquer just on one attempt.

But I wanted to do it not just because of my interest in Lowry, but because I thought it would be fun, rather late in my career to have a new ability.

Has there been a moment when you've been recording where you’ve felt close to him as a person?

He says of himself that he's an old gas bag. And perhaps he feels sometimes he talks too much and reveals something about himself that he'd rather have kept private. The intensity of his feelings for his parents, particularly his mother in her latter years, for example. He's very coy about having had a paid job [other than as an artist].

The image of Lowry, which he must have I think encouraged, is of someone who's reticent and private. The simple man. Well just as his paintings are a great deal more sophisticated than at first glance - bewildering to the art establishment, I think, but not to the ordinary viewer - and his popularity is astonishing.

And that it remains long after his death is something that I think would have appealed to him no end. But you hear in these tapes he does gossip on, he chatters. You don't have to draw him out really. You press a button and off he goes. And I think he must have been good company. I know people who knew him well and remark on his rectitude, his politeness, he was a gentleman, someone you would want to call Mr. Lowry.

Why do you think hearing from Lowry in his own words and his own voice at the end of his life is important?

Well important, I don't know, of enormous interest. But you can tell an awful lot from someone's voice. Well, when the actor adds the body and the face, then the presentation is complete.

I mean I wish I had sound recordings of my long-dead family, for example, and I would love to hear my mother’s voice and my father's. Not just to take me back, but because a voice reveals an awful lot about a person and would tell me things that I didn't get a chance to understand while they were alive. Well, I think the same's true with hearing these tapes.

What do you hope viewers will understand about Lowry from this, watching this film?

Well, I would hope no more than that that they've been intrigued by the man behind the paintings and will take them back to the paintings because in the end, that's his prime interest.

I think what's revealed from these tapes is that he did very much to his work, his paintings. He was a great artist.

And if you want proof of that, you just have to look at a Lowry painting of a crowd, and thereafter you will never see a crowd in real life in the same way. You will say, ‘oh look, that's a Lowry in real life’. Well, Samuel Beckett made the world realise that life is very much about waiting for God or for Christmas or for happiness or for death. And Lowry reveals a way of looking at people which we all do, but until he put it on the canvas, none of us realised what we were looking at. Well that's why I'm very interested in Lowry as a person.

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