Hero or Villain? Keeley Hawes
You have to admire her. This time last year Keeley Hawes was being called “woefully wooden”, “clunking” and “a screeching toff” in her role as DI Alex Drake in the first series Ashes to Ashes. Did she mind? A bit. But it didn’t stop her from getting straight back on set and filming series two last summer, the first episode of which airs next week.
Like Drake, the steely detective and psychological profiler, Hawes has grit. We had a hint of this when it was first announced she would be replacing John Simm in the sequel to the hugely popular Life on Mars, the tyre-screeching cop drama that momentarily made the Seventies seem acceptable, even sexy. Unless you wanted, in your fledgling acting career, to be universally reviled, you wouldn’t consider standing in for Simm, who played Sam Tyler. “I should have been more daunted,” she says now. “The reaction! People just could not get their heads around the fact that I wasn’t John Simm. I’m not! I’m never going to be!”
As it was she became detective Gene Hunt’s pretty other half, nicknamed by him Mrs Woman, pouting and preening as he Rambo-ed his way through the sleazy underworld in his red Audi Quattro. She was his intellectual superior, of course, and until now their relationship has been purely professional. But to not a few fans she was nothing more than an annoying distraction from the main show of Philip Glenister’s sublime performance as the ultimate chauvinist swinehund.
If Drake were to tumble into bed with Hunt in the forthcoming series it would be a spooky case of art imitating life for the halo slipped when she carried out the most outrageous man-grab during the filming of Spooks.
As Zoe Reynolds, Spooks‘s female lead in the first series, she broke the mould for attractive women in spy dramas, hitherto largely for ornamental purposes only. Zoe was forced to leave Britain and get new identity in Chile after being found guilty of misconduct during a spy operation. In real life, Hawes had fallen in love with co-star Matthew Macfadyen. But she had a child and had recently married the father. Eight weeks after the wedding she ran off with Macfadyen, leaving husband number one, the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, clutching the two-year-old.
Zoe Reynolds was, like Alex Drake, a winner: strong, independent, and more than a match for the men around her. Zoe would never have eloped with a colleague while paying off her honeymoon credit card bill. Female fans were horrified, but in many cases, one suspects, because they themselves had plans to nab Macfadyen, who went on to play Mr Darcy opposite Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice.
To be fair, the relationship with MacFadyen was no spring fling — they have now been married five years, and have two children. Hawes’s attitude to childbearing is also to be cheered — she never lets a pregnancy get between her and a part. “Just don’t tell anybody,” she says. “That’s my advice. Wear big dresses. I worked through all my pregnancies.”
For someone who never planned to be an actress she has plenty of ambition. Because she lived opposite the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, north London, she went to classes, and before she knew it she was acting opposite Richard E Grant in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke. But she is patiently waiting for another chance to be defined other than by association with a hot male lead. Then she can be a hero in her own right.
By Matthew Bell for The Independent on Sunday.
(Source: highbeam.com)