hospital; aided by Natalie she makes him comfortable, and then goes to see Nicola, still in her room. Mother and daughter reconcile. The film ends with Natalie and Nicola sitting peacefully in the evening sunshine in the back garden. Natalie observes that Nicola must own up to her parents about her bulimia. She then asks Nicola "D'you want some money?" and Nicola accepts gratefully, the first time in the film where she has accepted an offer of help. Cast Alison Steadman as Wendy. Jim Broadbent as Andy, Wendy's husband and a professional head cook in an industrial kitchen. Claire Skinner as Natalie, a plumber and Andy and Wendy's daughter. Jane Horrocks as Nicola, Natalie's twin sister. Timothy Spall as Aubrey, an old friend of the family. Stephen Rea as Patsy David Thewlis as Nicola's lover Production The film was a co-production between British Screen Productions, Channel Four Films and Thin Man Films, a production company created by Mike Leigh and producer Simon Channing-Williams. This was the first release by Thin Man, who have produced all Leigh's films since Life Is Sweet. The script was developed by Leigh and the cast, employing his established practice of collectively improvising and rehearsing for several weeks before shooting. For example, Aubrey's bizarre recipes were devised by Leigh and Timothy Spall over the course of an evening, and then checked for plausibility with a professional chef, who advised them about which ones were technically impossible to prepare; all the ones that appear in the film are, as Leigh put it, "all feasible, gross as it sounds." David Thewlis, who played Nicola's anonymous lover, was disappointed at being given such a small role. Leigh promised him that the next time he considered Thewlis for a role in a film "he'd be given a fair slice of the pie." Thewlis' next role in a Leigh film was his award-winning performance as the lead character Johnny in Naked. The film was shot entirely on location in Enfield, UK and used local people as extras, including an Enfield-based dance school for the opening title sequence. Alison Chitty found the house in Enfield for Life Is Sweet and fell in love with it because of its garden shed. She also found the old mobile snack-bar, which Rea's Patsy sells on to Broadbent's Andy as a pig in a poke in Northampton and painted it. Life is Sweet’s bright, primary-coloured production