I am a Cockney cabbie’s girl but learning to talk like the Queen has turned me into a star
The right accent, according to psychologists, can affect everything from your career to romance. Most of us don’t think twice about the way we talk, yet for actress Keeley Hawes, 22, the decision to have elocution lessons transformed her life and propelled her towards stardom.
Keeley, who is single and lives in Soho in a two-bedroom flat, played Diana Dors in ITV’s The Blonde Bombshell and has recently finished filming The Last September, which is a British entry at Cannes this year.
Here she talks to Juliette Dominguez.
My working-class background is at odds with the cut-glass accent people associate with me now. My father is a Cockney black-cab driver and my mum is a housewife who brought up me and my three siblings, Jan, James and Nick, in Marylebone, central London.
When I was nine, my path to fame really began. That was when I won a place at Sylvia Young’s stage school. I was in the same class as two members of the All Saints pop group, and Emma Bunton (Baby Spice).
I had my first elocution lesson the next year and, when I began, I had little idea how drastically it would change my life. I certainly didn’t set out thinking: ‘If I speak better, I’ll do better.’ I remember how my elocution teacher, Jackie Stoker, used to get a pencil and stick it in of my mouth so I would make a perfect ‘O’. Then she’d make me go ‘Ohh, ohh, ohh’ until I got the sound just right.
She taught me for ten years, and it was a very gradual process before I had a ‘perfect’ Cockneyless accent.
As a child, it was odd grasping this new alien way of talking, as my background wasn’t even middle-class. I come from a typically working-class background, which is quite bizarre when you hear me talk. If you sat here with my father and me, you’d never imagine we were related.
He always found it hilarious when I stood in the middle of the kitchen, practising loudly ‘Jane bakes a cake’ or ‘The rain in Spain. . .’ with perfect received pronunciation. But he never put me down; he was always very supportive, as were all my family.
On the whole, now that I’m an adult, they are a bit bored by the whole thing. It was amusing at first, but not any more.
Both my younger brothers are cab drivers and speak with normal ‘London’ accents. They don’t treat me differently in any way. What’s hysterical is that my young nieces and nephews keep pulling the rest of my family up. If my father says ‘Wot?’ and drops the ‘t’, they’ll correct him and say: ‘It’s what!’ The way I speak hasn’t altered my personal tastes. Nor has it has changed me as a person — only the way others perceive me. I still hang out with the same friends that I made at school.
THE vast majority of my friends don’t speak the same way as me. They have stuck with their various regional accents, and I just sound more and more like the Queen. But I’d never put on airs and graces.
When I tell people about my background, they can’t quite believe that I speak the way I do and assume I must slip into my ‘old ways’ when I’m back at home.
But I can’t do that any more. It was as if all those years ago I learnt another language and, as time went on, I dreamed and thought in it, too. It’s second nature now.
I wouldn’t say my accent is any sort of facade or con, because I have been speaking like this for more than 14 years and it has very much become a part of me.
I have to make a concerted effort now to return to my old accent.
The elocution lessons started making a huge difference to my life after I left school at 16, although it wasn’t my personal life so much as my working life.
At least half the parts I got, especially the upper-class costume dramas, would not have been offered if I hadn’t spoken with received pronunciation.
And it’s not something you can just pick up as you go along — you really have to be taught it.
Being able to speak like that fills me with confidence and even strengthens my resolve. People have come across in the media, television and film industry don’t have a clue what my real background is, because of the way speak.
It empowers you because people treat you differently, and it is extraordinary how it changes people’s perceptions of you.
Those I have met in television or newspapers don’t tend to come from a working-class background; they are mostly educated and middle class, and they assume I’m the same — when we are, in reality, worlds apart.
They also assume I’m as — or more — intelligent. But although may sound more educated because of the way I speak, it doesn’t make me any more educated.
I know if I spoke with my natural voice, I wouldn’t be treated the same way, which is a shame. People are such snobs a lot of the time.
Sometimes when I’m being interviewed for a part, I can feel daunted if the person speaks in a very posh accent. It’s like they are looking down on you from an entirely different social level. But if you can reply with the same accent, it does your confidence no end of good.
It annoys me occasionally that people try to assess you in a few seconds just from the way you speak.
But no one can assess me — know they can’t — because they have no idea where I’ve come from, and when I really put it on you’d never guess in a million years that I’m a cabbie’s daughter.
By Juliette Dominguez for The Daily Mail.
(Source: The Free Library)