Actor Lia Williams on playing Paula Vennells: ‘I think she’s more shallow than malicious. She created her own set of truths’

The actor on starring in a new play about sexual harassment, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, and the playwright closest to her heart

Lia Williams, 59, is an exceptional actor of questing intelligence and warmth whose award-winning performances on stage and screen have a way of staying in the mind. Her 1993 interpretation of a student accusing her professor of harassment, in David Mamet’s Oleanna, was one such role. Now, 30 years on, she is about to play a professor, in Alma Mater at the Almeida by Kendall Feaver, a tremendous new play that returns to the subject of sexual misconduct.

It seems you’ve always been drawn to political drama.
I’ve worked with Harold Pinter – who directed Oleanna – and he used to say, about his own work, that he was never consciously political yet a political strain ran through everything he wrote. I’m now beginning to wonder – I’ve been doing this job for 40 years – if there might be something similar in me. While not overtly political – I’m an idealist and eclectic in my tastes – I keep getting drawn to new writing that discusses complex issues but also has heart.

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