Lesley Manville TV Shows & Roles

About Lesley Manville

Lesley Manville is a highly acclaimed English actress with a career spanning five decades, celebrated for her long-running collaborations with director Mike Leigh and for television roles including Mum, Harlots, World on Fire, and Cranford, alongside an extensive stage career recognised with a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She plays Susan Ryeland across both Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, bringing her considerable dramatic range to a character who must balance amateur detective work with genuine emotional complexity.

Lesley Manville is also the narrator for Richard Osmon’s Cozy Crime books

The Thursday Murder Club
The Man Who Died Twice: Thursday Murder Club, Book 2

and Anthony Horowitz

Moonflower Murders: Magpie Murders, Book 2 and Marble Hall Murders

Lesley Manville TV shows

Moonflower Murders

as Susan Ryeland

2024 · 1 season · BBC

Moonflower Murders follows Susan Ryeland, a former London book editor now running a struggling small hotel in Crete with her Greek partner Andreas, who is drawn back to England when a wealthy couple offers her a substantial sum to find their missing daughter.

Magpie Murders

as Susan Ryeland

2022 · 1 season · BBC

When book editor Susan Ryeland receives the unfinished manuscript of bestselling author Alan Conway's latest Atticus Pünd mystery, she discovers the final chapter is missing and Conway is dead. As Susan searches for the missing pages, she realises that Conway's 1950s whodunit contains thinly veiled caricatures of real people in his life, and that his apparent suicide may actually be murder.

About Lesley Manville