“The Crown” star Lesley Manville was 'hungry' to give Princess Margaret a proper send-off in final season

The actress portrays the decline of Queen Elizabeth's sister in the episode "Ritz."

Lesley Manville tells EW that she was concerned the death of Princess Margaret, the British royal she plays on The Crown, might be dealt with "fleetingly" on the sixth and final season of the show. The actress had reason to be worried. Creator Peter Morgan needed to cover a lot of ground in the last 10 episodes, from the death of Princess Diana, to the romance between Prince William and Kate MIddleton, to the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. In the end, Manville was delighted to discover that Morgan had given over an entire episode, titled "Ritz," to the final days of Margaret, who passed away in 2002 after a series of strokes.

"I was really, really thrilled," says Manville, an Oscar nominee for her role in 2017's Phantom Thread. "I knew that the series would deal with Margaret’s death, of course, but it could have been fleeting. The Crown has a lot of characters. As the family grew, you kind of thought, well, how much air space am I gonna get? To have that whole episode — well, I was hungry for it, I can’t deny that. I was very, very hungry to have a good episode that would really be putting the microscope on Margaret."

Manville was also pleased to discover that the episode would further explore the relationship between Margaret and the Queen, played by Imelda Staunton. The actress says it was "an absolute bonus that, at the heart of it, [it was] not just her stroke, the life that she can no longer have, but the wonderful relationship that she had with her sister. Imelda and I are very old friends, and we do love each other dearly, and so all of that was bubbling away underneath. It’s brilliant when you work with an actor, and you don’t have to say too much, because it’s just all there. And, of course, I've got nothing but huge admiration for her as an actress. It was the highlight of the whole series for me, unquestionably."

Prior to shooting the episode, Manville visited with people who had suffered strokes and learned that "everyone’s stroke is a bit different from the next person’s. Some of them had had quite mild strokes, and they talked about how it affected their speech, but then their speech recovered. Then I sadly met people who had really catastrophic strokes. That was a different ball game altogether. Ultimately, I had to fulfill the writing and make it so that the audience could understand what I was saying. So it was a delicate balance."

While Manville's Margaret becomes reduced physically through the episode, she maintains a sense of humor, declaring at one point that she would "rather die than do exercise."

"I know, I know, she was fabulous to the last, wasn’t she?" Manville says with a laugh. "I can forgive anybody a lot of things if they’ve got that twinkle and spark of dry ironic humor. I’m sure she was in many other ways a difficult woman but, boy oh boy, you’d quite like spending an evening with her because it would just be great fun."

The sequences featuring Manville are intercut with footage set in 1945 on Victory in Europe Day. These sequences find young versions of Margaret and Elizabeth, played by Beau Gadsdon and Viola Prettejohn, sneaking away to celebrate by dancing at London hotel The Ritz. The actress says she found the back-and-forth between different timelines to be "lovely. I thought it was a really good, dramatic device, because it explained why Margaret’s got this obsession with The Ritz, and going to The Ritz for her birthday, because of that evening when they were young."

Manville will soon be seen in a very different project, director Sam Taylor-Johnson's Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (out May 10), in which she plays the grandmother of Marisa Abela's late singer. The Crown star explains that Winehouse had "a very very close and loving relationship with her grandmother, who was another really sparky, terrific woman to play. Marisa is such an exceptional actress and I think she is going to blow people away."

The sixth and final season of The Crown is now streaming on Netflix.

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