In a career spanning four decades, Patricia Clarkson’s won three Emmys, a Golden Globe and Oscar and Tony Award nominations.

With “Lilly” she channels Alabama factory worker Lilly Ledbetter’s remarkable fight for something that seems so simple, so obvious: Equal pay for women.

Ledbetter was among the few women who worked the factory floor at Alabama’s Goodyear tire plant from the late 1970s to 1990s. She endured sexual harassment and discrimination, only to discover for her many years there she earned half what the men were paid.

Her struggle against pay disparity went to the Supreme Court where Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg outlined her case. It ultimately led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act signed into law in 2009 by President Barack Obama.

To play, Clarkson, 65, said in a Zoom interview, “A real, true American hero” was an honor.

“Only as political as it became, she was not a political person. At the core of this, yes, great Democrats (in Congress) stood up for her, but this was a woman who was fighting an injustice.

“And injustice doesn’t have a race, degree or color. Or a political identity. Injustice is injustice — and she fought this grave injustice to the best of her ability. And was defeated repeatedly.

“She gave up so much time with her family and her children to fight this. To fight for women all across this great nation — and we are all standing on her shoulders today.

“We’re still making 78 cents to the dollar,” she added of the continuing pay disparity. “Men are not. So the battle is still ongoing. But it’s much better because of the Fair Pay Act which, of course, happened because of her and because of Barack Obama, the president.”

Clarkson never met Ledbetter, who died just days after the film’s world premiere last October at the Hamptons Film Festival.

The challenge in playing this bright, committed parent, ballroom dancer, resilient worker and supportive wife?

“The challenge was to make her whole. To make her a real, true person. Not to try to play her as if on a pedestal. I had to play her from the ground up, taking on her emotional life and her strife.

“Making sure women across the nation see this movie and say, ‘That’s me. I have suffered this.’ Because it’s not just equal pay. It’s sexism.

“I want people to not think of me as a character, but just as this ordinary woman. Which she was: an ordinary woman from Possum Trot, Alabama, who entered the fray. She stepped into the ring with nothing, and she lost.

“She was defeated quite often in this journey. I wanted people to see how a woman got back up repeatedly, which women across this country do, repeatedly.”

“Lilly” is in theaters May 9