Life Is Sweet (film) - Cast

Cast

• Alison Steadman as Wendy. She works in a baby clothing shop and teaches a dance class to young children. She is the emotional core of the family and talks continually, keeping up an amused running commentary on everything around her, but concerned about the welfare of her family, especially her troubled daughter Nicola. She loves her husband, but recognises that he lacks entrepreneurial spirit; she describes him as having "two speeds, slow and stop".
• Jim Broadbent as Andy, Wendy's husband and a professional head cook in an industrial kitchen. Andy is presented as a loving but slightly ineffectual husband and father, fond of tinkering in his shed and buying broken things which he plans to get around to fixing at some unspecified future date. By contrast, the scenes depicting Andy at work show him as a highly competent executive chef.
• Claire Skinner as Andy and Wendy's daughter Natalie, a plumber who spends her leisure time playing pool and drinking with her male workmates. She never shows any interest in dating or romance, but reads travel brochures about the USA in her room at night. Natalie is described by her mother as "happy", but she is the only principal character in the film who never smiles.
• Jane Horrocks as Nicola, Natalie's twin sister. Nicola is unemployed, extremely thin, smokes continually, eats her meals separately from the others and criticises the behaviour of everyone around her, largely on the grounds of a superficial kind of political correctness. Her favourite expression is "Bollocks!" It is revealed early on that Nicola is bulimic; she keeps a locked suitcase full of snacks and sweets under her bed, and late at night she binges on them and then makes herself vomit.
• Timothy Spall as Aubrey, an old friend of the family. Aubrey is nervous, fidgety and has poor impulse control, often randomly destroying nearby objects; the other way he vents his tensions is by playing the drums very badly. He considers himself a culinary "genius", but his cooking is eccentric to the point of inedible, and he lacks many basic social skills; early in the film he visits Wendy on the pretext of giving her a pineapple which he suspects to be "on the turn", all the while pummelling it between his hands as if it were an American football. " Aubrey is like a disc jockey, with a phoney transatlantic air about him and a misconception of his own image that has spiralled into grotesque parody. He comes from St Albans but he sounds like Kid Jensen." He appears to harbour unrequited lusts for both Wendy and Nicola.