Mike's brush with glamour and glory

The veteran director, Mike Leigh, faces a brush with glamour and glory at the Oscars.

Mike Leigh has spent three decades bringing the sometimes grim reality of British working class life to the silver screen, but now the veteran director faces a brush with glamour and glory at the Oscars.

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His gritty 1950s abortion drama Vera Drake has brought the 61-year-old a coveted Academy Award nomination, as well as a nod for best original screenplay for the film.

Despite a subject matter that many pundits originally considered perhaps too controversial for the Oscar decision-makers, the film has gathered three nominations in all, with Imelda Staunton also up for best actress.

Oscar night on February 27 will not be Leigh's first time at the event, although he has yet to win one of the statuettes.

Secrets and Lies from 1996 saw him nominated as best director, while both that film and 1999's Topsy-Turvy were on the shortlist for best original screenplay.

But while Leigh is one of Britain's most critically lauded directors, his background and film-making methods, as well as his choice of subject matter, could hardly be less Hollywood.

"First I'm a European filmmaker... I'm an independent filmmaker," he said in an interview with AFP.

"I don't cast megastars, I cast the actors I want to have. I have the final cut on the film."

Vera Drake, which is released in Germany on Thursday and February 9 in France, is the latest critically-lauded work in a near-30 film career that has also seen Leigh win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Secret and Lies in 1996 and the director's prize in 1993 for Naked.

"He has consistently pushed three generations of actors to give the performances of their lives," said Sam Mendes, the British film maker who won the 2000 best director Oscar for American Beauty.

"At least three masterpieces a decade for 35 years. Unbelievable," Mendes told the Guardian newspaper.

After dabbling in amateur dramatics during his youth, Leigh was accepted at Britain's most prestigious theatre school, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he studied and worked in theatre.

His film-making talents were first seen on British television, where he spent more than 15 years, making his first film for the cinema, Bleak Moments, in 1971.

Leigh soon developed a unique style of directing.

He only chooses the actors he likes, who are told everything about their own role but given minimal knowledge about other parts. The actors then spend several months working with virtually no narrative framework or dialogue, which come through improvisation.

As a result, Leigh, as a director, is not exportable to Hollywood despite his success, he said. "I make up my own films, I create my own materials, I don't adapt books or scripts. I don't have a script," he said. "Giving the money to a man with no script, who will do that?" Leigh joked.

Leigh's offices are on the first floor of a building which also houses a sex shop in London's lively Soho district.

Though the salt-and-pepper-bearded director habitually adopts a sullen and gruff air, many people wave to him and smile at him as he passes through the neighborhood. He nods back.

Leigh - son of a doctor of Russian Jewish origin who had a popular practice in Manchester, northern England - is mainly known for his bitter-sweet, realistic depictions of life among Britain's working classes, with classics such as the 1990's Life is Sweet and All or Nothing from 2002.

However, Leigh's palette is more broad, as shown by 1977 middle class comedy of manners Abigail's Party and Topsy-Turvy, a lavish historical epic about 19th century light opera composers Gilbert and Sullivan.

Many of Leigh's films were implicitly hostile to the long rule of the right-wing Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, but he says he is also disappointed by Tony Blair's Labour Party, in power since 1997.

"It's terribly difficult for people like me. People who were jubilant when they (Labour) were elected," he said.

"But it's very difficult because what they have achieved is very disappointing. But of course one doesn't wish to see any of the alternatives," Leigh sighed.

Relationships, often traumatic, between family members form the centre-piece of his work.

"I dealt continually in my work with families, having children, not having children, unwanted children, I dealt with infertility and I dealt quite often with unwanted pregnancies, and indeed abortion."

Leigh himself has two sons from actress Alison Steadman, whom he married in 1973. The pair separated in 1995 and divorced six years later.