Costume Drama Queen
Keeley Hawes stars in another period piece, but the taxi driver’s daughter is more than happy to keep pulling on the corsets, she tells Ben Atherton.
Sunday night is shaping up to be Battle of the Costume Dramas night. While ITV weighs in with Alan Bleasdale’s convention-busting Oliver Twist, the BBC is fighting its corner with a lavish adaptation of a previously overlooked work — Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters.
It’s a big gamble for both channels, but BBC bosses are confident Wives and Daughters has what it takes to edge Fagin and company out in the pre-Christmas ratings wars.
Wives and Daughters is written by Andrew Davies, previously responsible for adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Vanity Fair. Davies has had to furnish the tale of the lives and loves of two step-sisters with a new ending – Mrs Gaskell died before she could complete the original novel.
Playing the sisters in the $4 million adaptation are up-and-coming stars Keeley Hawes and Justine Waddell.
Hawes plays the rich, spoiled and beautiful Cynthia, whose mother (Francesca Annis) marries a doctor who already has a modest and sensible grown-up daughter (Waddell).
For Hawes its just one more role in a hectic year which has seen her appearing as a young Diana Dors in Blonde Bombshell, a movie called Last September set in 1920s Ireland and a forthcoming adaptation of Iain Bank’s novel Complicity.
And the taxi driver’s daughter admits her hectic schedule means she feels constantly tired and run-down — and in need of a break as soon as she has finished promoting Wives and Daughters.
“I look at my career and see how I have just rushed from one thing to another,” she sighs. “I have carried on working and working because it is easier to throw yourself into that to keep your mind on something.
“But now I look five years down the line and I would like to be in my own home, with my own bits around me instead of rushing from place to place with a bunch of carrier bags.
“I would like to have a baby and all those family things. My brothers and sisters are married and all quite cosy and my parents have been married for 40 years. That kind of stable family is really important to me.
“I am not one of these girls who is into weighing seven stones and going off to parties every night.”
The urge for domesticity is something that Hawes has been putting on hold for a while. Now, with a little more time on her hands, she is determined to track down the perfect house and begin a new life.
“While I was making Wives and Daughters down in Bath I was travelling down from Glasgow for rehearsals because I was still working up there on Complicity,” she explains. “It was very tiring and something I shouldn’t have done.
“I do have high energy levels and it is something I have always done, skipping from one thing to another. But you learn from your mistakes.
“All through that I have been trying to move house, which is something I really should have set aside some time to do. I don’t have that many sections of a brain to share out,” she laughs. “But I have cut things right down now.
“I would love to be able to do the decorating and the gardening — I find all that quite therapeutic.”
One other event had a profound effect on her life – the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando. She recalls: “I had spent months working on playing the young Diana Dors in Blonde Bombshell (inset, left). I had put so much thought and worry into it, then it was aired on the night of Jill Dando’s murder.
“I just sat and watched the news -I was stunned, like everyone else. Next day someone said that Blonde Bombshell had got seven million viewers and the news had got 12 million. I suddenly thought, what on earth does it matter? What has that got to do with anything after that?
“It soured it for me. If people watched Blonde Bombshell and enjoyed it, then I’m glad. But that event gave me a whole different take on it, I felt totally different towards it. It made me put my life into a different focus with new priorities.
“At the end of the day, what I do is just entertainment.”
Hawes has a working class background as the daughter of a London taxi driver. She attended the famous Sylvia Young stage school and first made her mark in Dennis Potter’s controversial final drama, Karaoke.
Since then it seems she has rarely been out of a corset, starring in period dramas The Moonstone, Our Mutual Friend, The Inspector Pitt Mysteries and now Wives and Daughters.
“I don’t ever worry about doing another one,” she insists. “I will do them as long as I can possibly do them because the scripts are so good. They are stories that will be around forever and are such good quality television.”
Wives and Daughters concentrates on the strain of taking a new step-mother and her daughter into a family home – and Hawes says it’s a theme she can understand.
“It must be so difficult when you take another family into your home and then have to play happy families,” she says. “It creates a lot of tension and that is something that people today are much more aware of because of the number of divorces.
“At school friends were constantly running to the toilet or bursting into tears in the classroom because of their parents splitting up. At the end there was only myself and another girl with two parents left. It was just incredible.”
Hawes obviously doesn’t want to see herself among those statistics and hankers after her own family. And despite her huge success she insists she wants to be ordinary.
“I haven’t courted publicity,” she points out. “I like going to Tesco’s and just floating around. I don’t want that celebrity lifestyle. I love my family and they have always been a great support. My dad even helps me learn my lines. They help me keep focused.”
Wives and Daughters is on BBC1 at 9pm from tomorrow. Omnibus: Who The Dickens Is Mrs Gaskell? is on BBC1 on Monday at 10.40 pm.
By Ben Atherton for The Evening News.
(Source: keeley-hawes.co.uk)