Lesley Manville still vividly remembers the moment, in the spring of 2006, that precipitated her mother’s diagnosis and subsequent rapid decline with Alzheimer’s.

She, her three sisters and mum Jean, then aged 83, had just returned from a trip to Italy. Arriving at Manville’s then home in Sussex, Jean collapsed on the doorstep. “All three of us watched in shock as she crumpled to the ground,” says Manville.

It was the first time the former ballet dancer, who had been happily married to Manville’s father until his death 10 years prior, had shown any signs of her age.

“Her life had quietened down a bit, but she was physically active and capable. There had been no deterioration in her lifestyle in any way,” says Manville, who, some 15 years on, still finds what happened next shocking.

“From there, things escalated very quickly. By the summer, she very rapidly went downhill. It kind of happened over two days.”

Manville’s eldest sister Brenda, who has since died, had been to see her and reported to their middle sister Diana that something wasn’t right.

“Thank God Diana went up to see her, because that evening, Mum thought the person on the television news was talking to her personally, calling her by name. She thought there was a massive hole in the hallway floor, and she couldn’t get to her bedroom because she would fall down it. And then she started berating my sister and calling her a prostitute and asking what she was doing bringing all these men back,” recalls Manville.

“The next day, Diana called the doctor and Mum was taken to the hospital. She was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and that was it. She never went home again.”

Manville and her sisters had no personal experience of Alzheimer’s in their family. “It was really new territory for us all,” she says. “The three of us were taken aback by what a minefield it really is.”

She wishes now that she had known what support was available from Alzheimer’s Society. The actress best known for her roles in Mike Leigh films such as Another Year and Vera Drake, as well as her Oscar-nominated performance in Phantom Thread, has recently taken over as Princess Margaret in The Crown. But it is her role as an ambassador for Alzheimer’s Society – one of the four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal – that she is proud to talk about today.

“The pandemic has been brutal for people with Alzheimer’s. Not being able to have a hug from your family and maybe not being able to understand why you can’t see them or touch them, or why people are wearing masks.”

All of which, she says, makes what Alzheimer’s Society does so extraordinary. “They help you to see that the glass isn’t always half empty. I urge anyone who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s or caring for someone with it to get in touch with them because there is so much support available. They are working hard to demystify the illness and take away some of the stigma that is attached to it.”

One of the things Manville and her family struggled most with was finding a care home that understood the needs of those with Alzheimer’s. “She went to a wonderful one to begin with, it was perfectly lovely and gorgeous but they didn’t really know how to deal with Alzheimer’s patients and Mum’s sudden turns in behaviour. She could go from being very passive and sweet to being quite aggressive. There often simply wasn’t enough staff to look after everyone.”

There were little things as well. “They would do things like give my mother a cup of tea and fill it to the brim. But she was very shaky. She would also fall out of bed. They didn’t seem to have the right equipment.”

Manville shares a statistic from the charity, which says as many as 70 per cent of care home patients have Alzheimer’s. “Which makes the need for care homes that can deal with this disease so important.”

Jean died in 2010, aged 87 and surrounded by her daughters, but Manville thought often during the pandemic about how the enforced isolation of the past 18 months for those in care homes would have affected her: “If my mother had been in her home during the pandemic, with an illness that is about confusion anyway, it would have been really terrible.”

Particularly, she feels, had it happened early on in her diagnosis: “When she was still relatively ‘normal’, for want of a better word, and her bad episodes were less frequent. That would have been really painful.”

While Manville visited regularly from London, it fell to her siblings who lived in Brighton to be more day-to-day hands-on.

“I don’t know what my mother would have done without them. I got down as often as I could but it was nowhere as frequent as them. I was working away or on stage so it just wasn’t as easy for me to get down to her.”

Talking about the past became Jean’s focus, in particular her responsibilities as a child; cooking for her siblings and helping her mother.

“She talked about her time as a child. So we went with it. You realise very quickly there’s no point saying: ‘But your mother’s dead now…’ And what would it achieve? It makes you antagonistic and makes her frustrated because she thinks what she’s saying is not believed.”

Reflecting on the four years of her mother’s illness, she says it feels longer than it actually was. “The very last six months of her life were the worst, really. They weren’t pleasant for anybody, least of all my mother.”

Jean’s condition deteriorated rapidly, to the point where she stopped eating and became very thin. At the time, Manville had been told she would need to have her dog put down because of a brain tumour. “It was hard seeing the juxtaposition of my mother having to suffer while I was able to put my dog out of her misery. But we couldn’t do anything for my mother; we just had to watch her.”

More than a decade after her mother’s death, Manville says the experience means she does think about her own risk of developing it. “Of course I think about it. I know that, in theory, the more we can keep our mental and physical health, the more we can hopefully stave off Alzheimer’s. But it’s not a 100 per cent guarantee, by any means. We know there are people who get Alzheimer’s who have the most brilliant brains, so I do what I can.”

Which, as an actress, most commonly means memorising large swathes of text. In 2018, she starred in Long Day’s Journey into Night opposite Jeremy Irons – “one of the longest plays in the American canon” – and during the pandemic filmed a 45-minute monologue for a new series of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. “If I can still learn my lines and not have a problem with those, that is my brain working out.”

“Keeping your mind fizzing over and challenging yourself; it’s all any of us can do,” she says.

At 65, Manville is still very much in her acting prime. On December 15, she will take part in Alzheimer’s Society’s carol concert at London’s Southwark Cathedral, with fellow ambassador Jonathan Pryce: “You’ll get two cast members of The Crown giving a reading that evening,” she says.

Manville is passionate about the Society’s work, and pointedly is grateful to Telegraph readers for supporting the charity this year.

“So much of what happened with my mother was beyond our control, and you do feel very emotional and powerless,” she says. “If I had known about Alzheimer’s Society at the time, I could have reached out and had some support. The three of us might not have felt quite so angst-ridden.”

---

Alzheimer’s Society is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Dogs Trust, Maggie’s and The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. To donate, visit or call 0151 284 1927

For details of the Alzheimer’s Society carol concert at Southwark Cathedral, go to