Maria Hale

Margaret's mother, Mrs Hale is a clergyman's wife uprooted from the gentle south to the smoke and noise of industrial Milton. Frail and increasingly unwell, she longs for the vicarage garden she has left behind and struggles to make sense of a world that feels coarser, colder, and further from home than she can bear.

Lesley Manville plays homesickness as something almost physical, a woman wilting in real time under a climate and a class of people she cannot parse. It's a quiet, unglamorous role, but Manville finds the fear beneath the fretfulness, so her longing for Helstone becomes the story's clearest measure of everything the move has cost this family.