Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes on surviving a showbiz marriage
Keeley Hawes set millions of pulses racing after her first appearance in Ashes to Ashes in suspenders and a micro-mini.
So it’s a slight shock when you meet her to realise that the 34-year-old is the mother of three young children under 10. If anything, the daughter of a London cabbie is more attractive in the flesh, with grey-green eyes and a fine bone structure — the film director Robert Altman once compared her to a prize racehorse.
The final series of the cop time-travel drama which starts tomorrow is the most eagerly awaited TV event of the year. Hawes’s character, police psychologist Alex Drake, will finally find out why she was catapulted back to the year 1981, and we’ll discover the truth about DCI Hunt. She can’t tell me if the on-off flirtation between Alex and Gene Hunt (the man who calls her “Bollyknickers”) will tip into a full-blown affair, but it sounds promising.
A refined, cerebral actress, Hawes admits it can be hard playing a femme fatale when you have young kids but is able to juggle childcare thanks to three men in her life — her husband, Pride and Prejudice star Matthew Macfadyen (father of her two youngest children, Maggie, five, and Ralph, three); her ex-husband, cartoonist Spencer McCallum (with whom she had her oldest son, Myles, nine), and her male nanny Adam.
She’d only been married to Spencer for two months when she realised she was in love with Macfadyen. They met on the set of Spooks in 2002 and it was a coup de foudre. “Matthew just came straight out with it and said, ‘I love you’ in the rain one day. I thought, Oh dear, here we go’.”
Hawes left her marriage of eight weeks (her son Myles was only two) for Macfadyen and predictably the tabloids had a field day. Her own parents have been married for 40 years, and she describes divorce as “horrific — up there with death as one of the worst things that can happen”.
It makes her empathise with Kate Winslet’s split from her second husband Sam Mendes, in which Winslet is left with two children from two husbands. “Suddenly you’re looking at an entirely different thing with two dads and then you might meet someone else and then you’ve got all that going on … The idea of that is quite frightening … having to do it all again,” she says carefully. “Look at Sandra Bullock (who has recently separated from her unfaithful husband), she’s taken her husband’s children under her wing, she won’t want to disappear from their lives. It’s hugely complicated. Actually I’m feeling much better about myself,” she laughs. “But people make it work. Everyone survives, don’t they?”
She married Macfadyen at Richmond-upon-Thames register office in November 2004 when she was seven months pregnant, and today they all live in Twickenham with a flock of chickens.
Her ex-husband Spencer has a new partner and lives nearby, so her son Myles has all the time he needs with his dad. “I have a great relationship with Spencer’s parents, and they have a brilliant relationship with all my children which, to their credit, is something they’ve made work so well. They treat them all the same and I’m forever grateful because I’m sure some people wouldn’t feel the same way. But Spencer’s parents have been phenomenal with my children. And Spencer is a great friend of my family now. We’re all grown-ups.”
Macfadyen is starring in the sexually charged Private Lives opposite Kim Cattrall, and while lesser women might be jealous, Hawes says she and her husband are a good balance temperamentally: “He’s very calm. I’m the fiery one.” Though it’s not easy being married to an actor, she jokes. “I’ve had him come home with prematurely white hair, and then he had a tonsure shaved into his hair for six months last year. I tried to work with that, but it lost its novelty.” Meanwhile Hawes wore basques and leather for Ashes. “He gets a better deal!”
Her banter belies the fact that the demands of two parents in showbusiness is enormously stressful. “It’s really hard when you’re both filming. You have to work much harder at your relationships than you ever do at work. Poor Matthew is crossing over jobs soon. He’s in Private Lives at night and shooting the new TV series, Any Human Heart, during the day — they’re even shooting on Sundays. So you have think, ‘Right, well, we’ve got to get the children to him’. You’ve got to make that work. And crikey, if you’re Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet, you’ve got that stress times a million with the pressures they must be under.”
Though you won’t find her hanging out at glitzy premieres, Hawes is dedicated to her acting career. “My God, I’d be the most depressed person if I stayed at home. It would be awful for me and my family. The main thing is not to beat yourself to death with guilt over being perfect at everything. When I’m with my children, I’m a f***ing great mother,” she laughs. “And when I’m not, I’m a really good mother. I want my children to grow thinking, ‘God, Mummy did something interesting’.”
As an actor, Hawes is used to making brave choices. She’s played Desdemona in Jimmy McGovern’s Othello and was a murderous Lady Macbeth in BBC1’s modern-day version. In Michael Winterbottom’s superlative A Cock and Bull Story, she played Steve Coogan’s wife (and a full-on sex scene) when she was eight months pregnant. Next she’d love to do some theatre.
Part of the problem is that casting directors make assumptions. “If people haven’t seen you lately, and you have three children, they just assume you are 45. When in fact I’m… I keep forgetting, 34. But I’m really glad that I’m 34 and have got three children. We’ve got all sorts of plans in about 10 years’ time.”
Despite her cut-crystal voice, Hawes had a working-class background and got into Sylvia Young stage school on a free grant where schoolmates included Emma Bunton (“I lived with her for six months. We used to go on caravan holidays”) and Denise Van Outen. She left home at 17, worked in a casino, modelled for Select but couldn’t stay skinny enough and was finally rescued by an agent she’d had as a child and landed a role in Dennis Potter’s TV play, Karaoke. Then came a life-changing two years in Spooks and later her lead role in Ashes to Ashes, the spin-off to the hugely successful 1970s cop drama Life on Mars.
Although the series is a bona fide national treasure now, Hawes hasn’t forgotten the mixed reception her character Alex received when the first episode went out in 2008 after she replaced John Simm.
“One of the things that upset me was someone had written ‘even the other actors clearly don’t like her’… and you know we were acting’, and they have to pretend not to like me, and they were doing their jobs very well,” she says. She’s very proud of series three. “The beautiful thing about Ashes is it can go from the sublime to the ridiculous to the heartbreaking. It’s been life-changing for everyone on it.”
But here she adds a note of caution. In a ratings-obsessed climate, the writers have continued to tweak scripts after reading BBC blogs and message boards: “The thing that makes me feel sad about Ashes actually is I think a certain amount of pandering has gone on to the critics and to the fans. And I think if you have a vision as brilliant as Life on Mars and Ashes, then you’ve got to see it through and you’ve got to be brave.”
American TV takes no prisoners, I suggest. Shows like The Wire and Mad Men constantly challenge the audience. “Yes, exactly! Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us,” she beams.
Ashes to Ashes starts tomorrow on BBC1 at 9pm
By Liz Hoggard for The London Evening Standard.
(Source: thisislondon.co.uk)