Phil Davis

Stan, the husband in Vera Drake (2004), sits at the family table and says almost nothing. The rest of the household talks, and Phil Davis listens, and what he does while listening tells us more about the marriage than a page of dialogue could. That has been the method for close to fifty years. He is cast as the disreputable, the working-class and the scheming, and now and then as the gentle, and he plays all of them the same way: from the inside, thoroughly, without an accent to hide behind.

He began on stage in the mid-1970s, took the lead in Barrie Keeffe's Gotcha in 1977, and was Chalky, one of the mods, in Quadrophenia (1979). For a decade after that he was the tough or the streetwise one, the actor directors reached for when they needed a man who might hit you, and Yeti in Alan Clarke's The Firm (1989), opposite Gary Oldman, is the best of that line. Mike Leigh saw something else. Their work together runs from the late 1970s across six films, and in High Hopes (1988) Leigh made him Cyril, a gentle socialist motorcycle courier, about as far from Yeti as an actor can travel in a year.

The Leigh films are where he is most himself, because Leigh builds a character through improvisation and Davis wants the time. "I love his way of working; you have the opportunity to explore a character in as much detail as possible," he has said. Vera Drake belongs to Imelda Staunton, who has the busier part, but the family scenes hold because Davis is so still beside her, and we were moved by him more than we were prepared for: not by anything he says, but by the care with which he attends to his wife, and by how little he needs to do to make the marriage believable. Another Year (2010), in which he is Jack, is a smaller part in a film we count among Leigh's best; he does not stand out from the ensemble, and in a Leigh film that is the job.

Television has had a different use for him since. Smallweed, the moneylender in Bleak House (2005), Jeff the murderous cab driver in the first episode of Sherlock (2010), Jud Paynter, the drunken and unreliable servant in Poldark (2015): rogues and grotesques, each grounded in enough plain detail that they stay people rather than turns. Our reservation is with the parts rather than the playing. A face this useful for villainy gets asked for it again and again, and the early typecasting never quite let go; it moved up a class and into costume. He has directed too, the feature I.D. (1995) and episodes of Prime Suspect in 1996, from the later, patchier years of a series we still rate highly.

Start with Vera Drake and watch the husband rather than the wife for a stretch. Then find The Firm and check that it is the same man.