Lesley Manville and Gary Oldman in 1986, the year before they married
Tomorrow night they will sweep in by limo from different parts of the city to walk the red carpet at the Oscars.
Gary Oldman will arrive from his colonial-style home in the exclusive Los Feliz district of Los Angeles with fifth wife Gisele Schmidt.
The 59-year-old actor is hot favourite to be named best actor for his barnstorming performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Meanwhile his first wife Lesley Manville, nominated as best supporting actress, will take a shorter trip from the five-star Four Seasons hotel having flown in from London where she is starring in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Her date for the night will be Alfie, her 29-year-old son with Oldman.
It is an extraordinary combination of circumstances: Two British actors, who were once husband and wife, nominated for an Oscar in the same year.
Not only that but Miss Manville, 61, is nominated for her role in Phantom Thread – for which Daniel Day-Lewis is up for best actor against Oldman.
‘I doubt there will be fisticuffs on the red carpet,’ Miss Manville has said jokingly of the clash with Oldman’s movie. ‘They’re both pretty marvellous films, in very different ways.’
She said that when the nominations were revealed Alfie, a cameraman who lives with his girlfriend and two-month-old son Ozzy in Sussex, rang his father.
Gary Oldman is hot favourite to be named best actor for his barnstorming performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour
‘The announcement came out at 5.30am in LA – lunchtime here. My son woke up Gary and said, “Hey, Dad, you’ve got a nomination and – guess what? – so has Mum!”
‘Alfie thought it was hilarious. It’s a win-win for the family really. It’s pretty big for him.’ A happy family story, then, but one tinged with a legacy of bitterness for the woman Oldman walked out on shortly after Alfie was born.
They had met in 1984 in a play at London’s Royal Court. Oldman was the son of an alcoholic welder from South-East London while Miss Manville, who had spent two years in ITV soap Emmerdale, was a taxi driver’s daughter from Hove, East Sussex.
They married in 1987 and were soon seen as the ‘first couple’ of a new wave of British theatre.
Lesley Manville will take their son Alfie, 29 as her date to the Oscars
But Oldman was also making a name for himself on screen, first with his visceral performance as drug-addicted Sex Pistol Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy in 1985, and then as gay playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears the following year. In an interview at the time, Oldman confessed that role in particular had strained their relationship.
‘I went off sex and Lesley and I didn’t make love,’ he said, adding that he had ‘became very camp’ for the role.
The relationship deteriorated even further as Oldman was wooed by Hollywood while his wife’s great successes revolved around British theatre.
There was also the issue of Oldman’s wild drinking, something he did not conquer until 1997 after a stint in rehab.
When Alfie was three months old, Oldman left their home. He conceded after their divorce that his tendency to become ‘emotionally overloaded’ from his roles made him impossible to live with.
‘As an actor you can cry in front of 500 people, or scream, or rape someone, and it releases things in you,’ he said.
‘But it makes me anxious and neurotic and hell to live with. I’ve done a lot of work on myself.’
Another factor was Oldman’s romance with Uma Thurman, then 20, who had made her name in the sexually explicit film Henry And June in 1990.
Miss Manville, 61, is nominated for her role in Phantom Thread – for which Daniel Day-Lewis is up for best actor against Oldman
Oldman and Miss Thurman moved in together in New York and married as soon as his divorce from Miss Manville came through.
That marriage, too, was short-lived. He went on to marry model Donya Fiorentino, with whom he had two sons, Charlie and Gulliver. He was later married to singer Alexandra Edenborough, and now art curator Gisele Schmidt.
‘He’s been through a few wives since me,’ Miss Manville has observed drily.
There is no question that she felt abandoned by Oldman and has described the loneliness she felt, breastfeeding her son backstage during performances, in the months following their divorce.
Oldman and Uma Thurman moved in together in New York and married as soon as his divorce from Miss Manville came through
Although she pursued new relationships, she raised Alfie very much as a single parent in Brentford, West London – while Oldman wowed Hollywood in hits such as JFK and Dracula and pursued liaisons with female stars.
In a 1994 interview she said: ‘He plays a small part [in Alfie’s life], with the accent on the small.’
She is rightly proud of what she has coped with and achieved – rave reviews and award nominations – in her career.
‘I brought up a child virtually on my own, I ran a house and I kept my career going, which is no mean feat,’ she has said.
In 2000 she married actor Joe Dixon, but they divorced four years later. She is, she says, now happily single: ‘The times in my life when I’ve been single have been more formative and crucial than I could have imagined.’
She has also managed to forgive Oldman, and the former couple are polite and warm about each other in interviews.
He has congratulated her on her Oscar nomination, but she is philosophical about tomorrow night.
‘My feeling is that I’ve got absolutely no chance of winning,’ she said. ‘But I will always be an “Academy Award nominee” and they can’t take that away from me.’