“I would make an appalling spy”
At 27, Keeley Hawes’s acting career is on an upward spiral — and she is getting on famously with her co-stars. Maureen Paton meets her.
Few people could live up to Kingsley Amis’s description of Lucky Jim’s dream girl in the way that Keeley Hawes can. The misogynistic old devil paid Christine Callaghan a rather barbed compliment by calling her “unmanningly pretty” — but as played by Keeley, she is nearer to heart-stoppingly gorgeous.
Hawes found other actors’ ‘public-school confidence’ intimidating.
It is not often that you come across anyone as naturally beautiful as this London cabbie’s daughter, who became a real-life Eliza Doolittle after she took a course of elocution lessons as a child. French cinema, not to mention Hollywood, would go mad for such sweet-faced soubrette looks, and yet the really attractive thing about Hawes is that she also exudes a kind of Monroe-like vulnerability.
When she trained alongside Denise Van Outen and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton at the Sylvia Young drama school, Keeley was the one who, according to Van Outen, showed the most obvious acting talent from the beginning. Her range is remarkable and should ensure the kind of career longevity rarely granted to really good-looking actresses, who usually have to retire when their bloom fades.
She began her television career in Karaoke as another of Dennis Potter’s dream-girl sex objects. Then, after heroically munching her way through mountains of fishcakes and chips to play a plump young Diana Dors in the ITV drama Blonde Bombshell, her turn as a bisexual heartbreaker in the BBC’s sapphic costume shocker Tipping The Velvet made her a lesbian heroine. And yet, she also managed to make Victorian virtue utterly compelling in a BBC dramatisation of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. So far, she seems to have covered the entire waterfront of womanhood between Madonna and whore — and she is still only 27.
All should therefore be going swimmingly for such a golden girl, were it not for a slight complication on the personal front. At our first meeting, last June, I found her 5ft 10in frame hunched on a sofa in a classic posture of defence as she puffed away on a Silk Cut. Under the circumstances, her discomfort was understandable: last April, she left her husband of just five months for actor Matthew Macfadyen, her co-star in the BBC spy drama Spooks.
Had the show not been such a hit, with another series on the way, their relationship might have escaped the attention of the tabloid press. But what made the situation particularly tricky was the fact that Keeley and her husband, a cartoonist called Spencer McCallum, had a little boy called Myles — a conflation of “My Les”, the nickname of the child’s paternal grandfather – who will be three years old in August.
One can’t help thinking of how Kate Winslet fell in love with Sam Mendes after divorcing the father of her child, but Hawes is already looking agonised enough without me blundering in with such unhelpful comparisons. Her life has been turned inside-out, but at least Myles is now a happy, walking, talking toddler who divides his time more or less equally between his parents.
There is nothing, it seems, that his doting mother won’t do for him: she has even put off what many would see as the next logical career step — trying her luck in Hollywood — “because he’s still quite little”. Not every actress would make such a sacrifice.
As for the affair with Macfadyen, she admitted to me last year that she was “kind of relieved, really, that it’s all out in the open. There’s nothing worse than hiding round corners. It’s not a nice existence for anybody and the endless secrets all became a bit much.
“Matthew is lovely, but it’s been a difficult time. Coming from the sort of family I come from, where everyone is married and where my parents have been together for 35 years, you sort of aspire to that. I’m the only one in the family that it hasn’t worked out for; you just don’t expect it to happen to you.”
Despite all the difficulties, the romance with Macfadyen has lasted, although Keeley is still living on her own in a bachelor girl flat in St John’s Wood, north London, while Spencer remains in the former marital home in Esher. When I catch up with her again in Bethnal Green, where she and Macfadyen are filming the second series of Spooks, she confesses that she found working with a partner “a bit nerve-racking at first. You think all eyes are on you. But six months down the line, it’s all very relaxed.
“I haven’t moved into Matthew’s flat, but we’re very much together now. But God, no, there are no plans to get married yet — I’m still married to Spencer.”
Further questions about Matthew only make her frantically burrow deeper. “I don’t want to go into this because I’ll get in trouble with my husband,” she says, loading the final syllable with self-conscious emphasis. Little wonder that she admits later, with an artless giggle: “I would make an appalling spy in real life.”
Despite her career success so far, she claims to have been slightly intimidated by the “public-school confidence” she has encountered in the business.
“You feel, sometimes, that you should be like that, too; you should have come from something,” she says. “But if you let it get to you, you’d never do anything, would you? And some of our most successful actors have come from exactly the same background as mine.”
The delicious-looking Macfadyen just happens, as it turns out, to be a public schoolboy with all the usual trappings of confidence and fluency. Yet Hawes has the actor’s ability to rise above her circumstances and blend into any environment; and she is now sufficiently assured to maintain that she is “quite proud of my background, to be honest”.
She is the only person in her family to have gone into show business, and describes herself as having “a rogue gene”. Her down-to-earth parents, she says, rooted out any diva tendencies in her at an early age. “I have met some monsters, and that’s always a good reason not to become one — but I’m sure I have my moments. People use this business as an excuse to behave badly, but it’s so boring and tedious when people aren’t nice.”
So supportive are her mother, Brenda, and father, Tony — who chauffeured the Jackson Five and Faye Dunaway around London in the Sixties and Seventies – that they even liked the erotic photo shoot she did for GQ magazine eight years ago, when she was 19. Recently reprinted by Loaded magazine, the pictures were then helpfully brought to the attention of millions by the ever-vigilant News of the World.
It’s bizarre to see Hawes, with that Bambi’s mother look of hers, showing off a pert, bare bottom in what looks like an upmarket bondage session, but she insists that she likes the pictures and wasn’t at all shy.
“I did them just after filming Karaoke. It was a brilliant photographer, but as soon as they are in something like Loaded, they just look cheap.”
Students of anatomy may be disappointed by Jack Rosenthal’s adroit dramatisation of Lucky Jim, because there are no sex scenes. However, Hawes breathlessly claims to have been swept away by the embrace of her co-star Stephen Tompkinson in a scene where Jim conclusively proves that he’s NSIT (“not safe in taxis”).
“Stephen is a good kisser,” she says. “He’s very big — huge — which was great for me because, normally, men are smaller than me so I have to stoop. It’s been quite a treat to have all these big boys looming over me.”
Presumably, she means the 6ft Macfadyen, too, as well as her recent A Is For Acid co-star Martin Clunes.
“I’ve been very game, oh yes,” she giggles. “Sex scenes are part of the job. But you have to be prepared to go a little bit further. “I started my career in Karaoke,” she adds, with the air of a veteran. “And after that, anything goes. And then, after something like Tipping The Velvet, there are no holds barred.”
Quite. Despite those deceptively fragile looks, I suspect that Keeley Hawes will be equal to all the challenges ahead. And not just on the screen.
Lucky Jim begins tomorrow on ITV1 at 8.30pm. The second series of Spooks will be shown on BBC1 this summer.
By Maureen Paton for The Telegraph.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)