The latest Upstairs Downstairs ES Magazine is posted here!
One Step Ahead
Actress Keeley Hawes left her husband of four months for her Spooks co-star. Now happily in love and with a new series about to start, she tells Lydia Slater why a scandal won’t hold her back.
Keeley Hawes looks somewhat helplessly around the all-white, utterly minimalist house where the photo shoot is to take place. ‘Where can I put this?’ she asks plaintively, flapping the skin of the banana she’s just eaten. ‘Ooh, it’s a bit scary here, isn’t it? Thank God I didn’t bring the baby with me.’ She points at an ecru floor cushion. ‘Do you think we’re allowed to sit on it?’ she hisses. ‘Or is it just for decoration?’
Keeley may be famous, and a ubiquitous presence on our screens, most recently as Zoe in the BBC spy drama series Spooks, but she seems charmingly unaffected. She arrives on foot, the picture of laid-back, hippie glamour in skinny jeans, flip-flops and a beaded muslin top, her face scrubbed bare of makeup, her blonde-brown hair pulled back from her forehead in a messy knot. ‘I’ve just washed it,’ she explains, ‘because I bought this dye at the weekend to tone down the colour a bit and my hair went aubergine.
And then I was lying in bed with Myles, and he was laughing so much that he was sick over the back of my head.’ She roars with laughter; the girl who’s about to style her hair smiles wanly.
Myles, three, is Keeley’s son from her marriage to a cartoonist called Spencer McCallum and the central character in a rather scandalous episode in her life. She and Spencer had been together for four years and had had Myles before they married in December 2001. After just a few months, and amid a flurry of tabloid interest, Keeley was photographed in a clinch with her dishy Spooks co-star, Matthew MacFadyen and moved out of the marital home.
She and Matthew are still together and have just bought themselves a cottage in Twickenham. ‘He’s away now for ten weeks’ filming which is really depressing,’ she says feelingly.
The veteran of one marriage split, you might think that she would be cautious about diving into another relationship, especially with an actor.
‘Oh, actors have lots of relationships with other actors,’ she says, ‘and you hear about the ones that go wrong; you don’t hear about the ones that go on and on for 50 years.’ Does she see herself and Matthew being together for 50 years? ‘He did say something to me the other day, about how he wanted me to be there to hold his hand and help him over the road when he was old,’ she says with a fond smile. She would, she says, love more children.
But any such plans are going to have to wait, because Keeley is, in fact, still married to Spencer. ‘It’s all going along, but we’ve got to the point where Myles is happy with the arrangements, and we’re all happy. That’s the first step, rather than the paperwork. I will get round to it.’ McCallum works from home so is able to share equally in the care of Myles, who, Keeley insists, is an extremely happy little boy.
Despite her breezy self-assurance, it’s clear that sensibilities are still somewhat raw. She drops her face into her hands when you ask why she fell for Matthew.
‘I’m not allowed to talk about Matthew,’ she says, in muffled tones. ‘It’s very difficult, I’d upset everyone else.
You’d just have to meet him, I guess.’ The situation is exacerbated by the fact that she is the only person in her family who has gone through a marital break-up. ‘You don’t expect it to happen to you,’ she has admitted. ‘My parents have been together for 35 years; you sort of aspire to that.’
Keeley is the youngest daughter of a London cabbie and a housewife, and credits her down-to-earth upbringing for rooting out any diva-like pretensions she might have had. As a child, she had no great ambitions for fame ‘God no! I don’t come from that Bonnie Langford background I hope I wasn’t a horrible little snotty-nosed kid like that.’ She joined the Sylvia Young Theatre School at the age of nine because she was entranced by the noise of singing and dancing that floated into her parents’ council flat, just by Marylebone Station. ‘It just looked like something a bit different, a cool school.’ With her elder siblings at secondary school, her parents decided they could afford the fees.
‘I think things were quite difficult, but there were ordinary kids there, not just ones with rich parents.’ She was friendly with Emma Bunton, who was also a pupil there, but says: ‘I’m 27, I left school when I was 16, I’ve yet to find anyone who does hang out with people they went to school with, really.’
From Monday to Wednesday, she studied a normal curriculum, but for the rest of the week, she was allowed to attend in a tracksuit ‘and ponce around’, learning tap and ballet, stage makeup and elocution, which transformed her London accent into beautifully modulated RP.
‘Elocution was just part of the curriculum but it obviously stuck more with me than with others,’ she says with a laugh.
At 16, she left to attend sixth-form college, intending to take A levels in art, drama and English. But just a fortnight into the course, a talent scout spotted her on the street and suggested she try modelling. She was taken on by Select, the agency that represents Helena Christensen, dumped her studies and began dating a booker at the agency.
But this was the era of the superwaif, and Keeley’s natural curves were exacerbated by the fact that the flat she shared with four other models in Kensington was above a Pizza Hut. ‘I wasn’t that great as a model. I never hung about with Kate Moss or anybody famous.’ Nevertheless, she got by with campaigns for Sisley and Paul Smith, though ‘it was mostly cheesy stuff for J17. I was never going to do high fashion, but I thought it was all quite exciting.’ After six months, however, the novelty had worn off. So she did work experience at She magazine, then got herself a lowly job in the fashion department of Cosmopolitan.
It was at this point that Sylvia Young got back in touch with the news that she’d been asked to audition for Karaoke. ‘I’d kind of given up on acting, really. So many of my friends were trying, going to endless auditions, and although I enjoyed it, I thought it was so difficult to get in to. But, by some amazing fluke, I got it and it threw me back into what I really wanted to do.’
Since then, she’s appeared in a host of acclaimed dramas, including playing Diana Dors in The Blonde Bombshell, Cynthia in Wives and Daughters, Kitty in last year’s controversial lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet and Christine in Lucky Jim and proved herself an accomplished and unselfconscious actress. Her modelling days have left her comfortable revealing all. ‘I’ve always been given saucy roles,’ she says, opening her brown eyes wide. ‘Of course, you always panic and think, “Do I look fat?” and, “Oh God, I don’t know this person”, but in the end you just do it.’ Her lesbian scenes with Rachael Stirling were ‘no harder than any other love scene,’ she says. ‘We shared a Galaxy and a bottle of wine, sat around in dressing gowns and giggled a lot with overexcited, nervous laughter and then we just got on with it.’
Spooks, by contrast, has been rather a less jolly experience, principally, it seems, because of the long hours involved. ‘They picked us up at 5.45am and we finished at 7.30pm, six days a week. And we had no rehearsals. You have to learn your lines the night before; all the words are stuck all over the set on bits of paper. But your brain just gets used to working at that speed.’ Her mother would bring Myles to see her on set ‘otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen enough of him’. (Perhaps it’s no wonder that he has a tendency to rush up to the telly crying ‘Mummy!’ when a woman appears on screen.) When filming ended in June, she decided to take the rest of the year off. ‘And then The Knight’s Tale came along and I loved the script,’ she says with a shy smile. The updated televised version of The Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales bears a slightly unfortunate resemblance to her own recent history, being the story of two men both in love with the same woman, but in the fictitious case it all ends in tragedy.
‘I’m very pleased with it,’ says Keeley, ‘and I don’t think I’ve ever said I’m pleased with anything in my whole career before. All the performances are quite effortless and it looks very real to me.
I certainly didn’t want to do anything after Spooks, but I’m so glad I did this. It brought back my youth and enthusiasm for the job.’
Meanwhile, before she starts shooting Spooks again in December, she’s enjoying a period of domesticity, cooking, rearranging her new house ‘I want it to look exactly like this,’ she jokes, waving a hand at the spare whiteness of the room we’re in and spending her spare time campaigning for the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity.
It’s a commitment that started after she discovered a lump in her breast when she was just 19. ‘I can’t talk in any way about having breast cancer but I know what that fear feels like,’ she says. ‘I was in the bath and found a lump about the size of a penny. Three days later, I was in hospital having it taken out.
‘I was just terrified. It was one of the worst weeks of my life; I came out of hospital and I was all bandaged, which was awful when all you’re thinking about at that age is boys and what to wear.’ The lump turned out to be benign. ‘But it’s quite good in a way, because I’ve always got that reminder.’ Otherwise, she confesses, she doesn’t worry too much about it, though she did give up smoking three days before we meet. ‘I started coughing up black stuff,’ she confesses, with a throaty giggle. ‘It was revolting.’
Aside from the health benefits, giving up smoking could potentially improve her career prospects no end: she once admitted that she couldn’t think of moving abroad because she didn’t like the cigarettes outside the UK. But it is hard to imagine an actress who admits to having her hair gummed up with baby sick feeling really comfortable in the super-groomed atmosphere of Hollywood. Which is all to the good: we haven’t seen nearly enough of Keeley Hawes.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month [020 7405 5111; www.breakthrough.org.uk]
By Lydia Slater for Evening Standard Magazine.
(Source: KeeleyAndMatt Yahoo Group, keeley-hawes.com, transcript by keeley-hawes.co.uk, large image of cover from lazygirls.info, Snarkerati for the text scan)