"I was onstage in London last night, closing Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Lesley Manville told reporters on the Radio City Music Hall carpet, then added plainly: "I flew this morning." The 70-year-old arrived in New York on June 7 and stood on the red carpet a few hours after finishing a West End run, describing a schedule that read like a theatrical sprint.
Manville was in New York for the 79th Tony Awards as a first-time nominee for her performance as Jocasta in Oedipus, a production that picked up seven Tony nominations. Oedipus opened on November 13, 2025, and concluded its limited engagement on February 8; the ceremony that night was hosted by Pink.
Her London work was no small sideshow. Les Liaisons Dangereuses concluded performances at the Lyttelton Theatre on Saturday, June 6; Manville said she had been onstage opposite Aidan Turner in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation and that the run closed the night before she boarded a transatlantic flight. Marianne Elliott directed the Lyttelton production.
The timing sharpened what felt like two simultaneous celebrations. Manville celebrated a first Tony nomination on the same weekend she was finishing a West End engagement, and she did it with the blunt chronology that made the strain visible: "It’s 11 at night [right now in London], and I’ve been up since 4," she said, folding the overnight travel into the story of the evening. She flew on the morning of June 7 and was on the awards carpet that night.
On the carpet, Manville kept returning to how unexpected the Broadway run felt. "I’m very excited. It was my first Broadway show. To get a Tony nomination for it — thrilling. Thrilling!" she said. She described her Broadway debut in Oedipus as "something I never imagined," adding, "I thought, ‘Well maybe I won’t ever play Broadway,’" and then recounting the odd luck of the opportunity: "And then you suddenly get the chance to. So you kind of say yeah, okay… Broadway!"
This is a narrow story of timing as much as achievement: a veteran actor completing one high-profile run in London and turning up in New York on the same day to join a ceremony that was recognizing her work across the Atlantic. The facts underline the scale of the effort — closing Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Lyttelton on June 6, flying June 7, then appearing at the 79th Tony Awards that evening — and they explain why Manville’s mood mixed fatigue with exhilaration.
What comes next beyond the Tony night is not listed among the public details offered here; Manville’s immediate public itinerary in this account ends with her appearance on the night of the awards. For now, the image that lingers is exact and human: a 70-year-old actor who had been up since 4 a.m., stepping off a plane and onto the Tony carpet to accept, at least in the moment, the rare collision of two theatre worlds.
