A born showgirl
Rather like Truman Capote’s heroine Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, life just seems to happen to the actress Keeley Hawes. The daughter of a London cabbie, Hawes grew up practically on top of Marylebone station, listening to the noise of the trains. Perhaps as an antidote to all this she enrolled at the Sylvia Young Stage School because she liked the “lovely noise” of childish activity wafting from the building next-door to her parents’ council flat, and trained alongside Denise Van Outen and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton. At 17 she was stopped in Oxford Street by a scout from the model agency Select, and so she became a model.
“It was fun but I was totally hopeless,” she says, “I lasted six months. It was the time when Tania Court and Kate Moss were the big models. The waif look was in and there was huge pressure to stay thin. All the girls looked like sticks, but I am afraid there is a lot of me that won’t go away. I hated go-sees where you traipse around London showing your book and trying to get jobs. It was miserable as hell really, I spent most of my time sitting in a pub in Dean Street to avoid them.”
Hawes is breezy and direct and very unlike most of her fellow actresses. She is pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way, and perhaps that is the secret of her appeal on television. She is a willowy 5ft 10in, but says this has always made her self-conscious; “I have an osteopath who is still trying to get me to stand up straight.”
She abandoned modelling and went to become a junior in the fashion department at Just Seventeen for £50 a week. “I flirted with it for a while but I didn’t have a clue about anything. I spent a lot of time drawing pretty things in boxes and phoning PRs. Then I moved to Cosmo, which is a lot raunchier, bitchier and fun, and one day I was sitting there and the phone went and it was Sylvia Young. A casting agent had seen a photo of me in Spotlight magazine and decided to call me in for Dennis Potter’s Karaoke. I didn’t even know who he was! You don’t learn much at stage school.”
Hawes gave a remarkably assured debut, in spite of the terror she says she felt at the time. “I was petrified, I was with Richard E Grant and Julie Christie and I had no experience as an adult. It was only through the director being so lovely that I got through it.”
During the past decade Keeley Hawes has rarely been off our television screens, playing everyone from Rachel Verinder, the ghostly heroine of Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone, the young Diana Dors in The Blonde Bombshell, and last year, Kitty in Tipping the Velvet. Now she is on our screens every Monday night in BBC1’s Spooks, playing a modern-day Mata Hari. Hawes is Zoe Reynolds, an icily cool, high-flying MI5 officer who finally gets a chance to balance her rather dangerous existence. “The director was saying how important it was to see the other side of Zoe. So she gets to have this wild Italian and she’s off to hotel rooms in her lunch breaks.
How do you research playing a spook when the role models are not exactly about to flaunt their escapades? “The answer is, you can’t really. Although we did get taken to a gentlemen’s club in Knightsbridge where they arranged for us to meet some former secret agents. They were all very big drinkers from what I could tell, and very amusing. I asked them why they did it, and one of them said, ‘it’s a sexual thing.’ The funny thing is, they were quite ordinary, except they could memorize chunks of books in seconds.”
She has spent the past six months working on Spooks and says even though she has enjoyed the experience she is ready to move on, but somehow there’s this inbuilt mechanism which tells you that you should be grateful for the work, because there’s so little out there, but filming six months of anything is hard. We’ve been doing six-day weeks from eight in the morning until eight at night and it’ll drive you batty. Don’t forget I take Tom home (Tom is Keeley’s co-star, Matthew MacFayden and her boyfriend). I wouldn’t wish anyone to do that, though of course he’s lovely because it’s a new relationship and we want to be together.”
Earlier, when the relationship began, they received unwelcome attention from the media, thanks to the success of Spooks, and when Hawes left Spencer McCallum, her partner of five months and the father of her child, after having fallen in love with her co-star. The two have just bought a cottage by the Thames, on the fringes of southwest London.
Over Sancerre and Welsh rarebit, Hawes smokes and quietly insists that, while she may seem to be on our television screens rather a lot, she has never been ambitious. “I suppose I have been lucky — it did kind of fall into my lap. I didn’t even have an agent when I first started out.”
Hawes is genuinely full of self-doubt about her achievements and that gives her a rare vulnerability and charm. “I have enormous doubts — but that is down to me and what people think about me, and that does have something to do with education. Matthew is very confident and I envy that. He went to Oakham and then to RADA. Sometimes, he will say, ‘Oh, I was at RADA a couple of years ago,’ and I am thinking I’ve been working for nine years while you were leaping around in a cat suit” I suppose that’s the point of somewhere like RADA, but there are times when I feel I’ve acquired my education in front of everybody.”
Hawes is really doing herself an injustice. She is one of the most accomplished actresses of her generation and she is still only 27. “I’d love to do something else when I can afford to take time off. I would also like to go travelling — but I have a little boy and so he will have to come too. Being a mum changes everything.”
At home, three-year-old Myles constantly runs up to the television and says “Mummy”. But there is one programme Hawes feels he is far too young to see — Tipping the Velvet, which became the subject of so much debate. “It just went bonkers,” Hawes says. “Men had a real thing about it. I remember reading the reviews and the one that stood out was that the journalists were not talking about the programme or the quality of the acting, it was all about the homosexuality. For me, it was a love story and that is why I did it, though it did upset my granny no end.”
What about your parents? “Oh, they were past being upset. We didn’t even speak about it. In fact, we are all very relaxed. I am so relaxed I had colonic irrigation on Saturday. Apparently, it is good if you smoke and drink and take prescription drugs.”
Most actresses in Hawes’s position would now be trying to develop a career in film, and yet she seems happy with the status quo. “I wouldn’t move to the States to achieve that.”
What do you think of Catherine Zeta-Jones? “I think the way she has dealt with her career has been extraordinary and it hasn’t made her popular, which is interesting.”
Would you like that kind of celebrity? “Well, I don’t want Michael Douglas! I just like doing what I am doing now. But I’d love to live even further out in the country — that’s the backlash from living on top of a railway station for 16 years.”
By Alison Jane Reid for The Times Magazine.
(Source: HILW Yahoo Group, transcript by keeley-hawes.co.uk)