Her Upstairs
From Spooks and Ashes to Ashes to the eagerly awaited sequel to Upstairs Downstairs, Keeley Hawes is one of our classiest television actresses. She talks to Julia Llewellyn Smith about ‘mannies’, motherhood and life as Mrs Matthew Macfadyen.
I’ve long nursed a huge girl-crush on Keeley Hawes. Not only has she starred in some of the nation’s favourite television series — Spooks and Ashes to Ashes — she’s also married to an acting legend, the brooding Matthew Macfadyen, Mr Darcy in the latest screen version of Pride and Prejudice and now starring in Any Human Heart in Channel 4.
She lives not far from me in bourgeois Strawberry Hill, west London, and her youngest children are almost the same ages as my two. All in all, I’ve cherished rather stalker-like fantasies about us becoming best buddies.
Hawes, however, has reason not to like the press. In 2002 she left the father of her son Myles, now 10, and husband of eight weeks, for Macfadyen, her Spooks co-star. Two years later they married and since have had Maggie, six, and Ralph, four, but at the time it caused a terrible hoo-ha that Hawes must be sick of rehashing.
As I wait in a café in Richmond I’m braced for frostiness, but then I spot Hawes striding along the street, broad smile on her face. She bursts into the room and within seconds I’ve learnt that she’s been up most of the night because Ralph was vomiting. (‘He was surprised. He was saying, “Mummy, my sick has spaghetti in it!” I did think, “Thank God we haven’t got the new carpet in.” Really. Bad. Mother.’)
Sparky and effusive, Hawes, 34, radiates joie de vivre. As well as the acting, she is familiar from her three years as the face of Boots No 7. Unusually, she’s even more beautiful in person with flashing almond eyes and windscreen-wiper cheekbones. Her ethereal beauty, however, is counteracted by her boisterous presence — constant booming and irreverent guffaws.
Wearing an unassuming black jumper and grey skirt, she looks much perkier than the last time I set eyes on her, some weeks previously in Cardiff, when she was giving a press conference to publicise Upstairs Downstairs, the BBC’s Christmas blockbuster. Then Hawes had picked up a bug and, although she answered questions diligently, was clearly keen to be home with her children.
A sequel to the early 1970s hit series, the three-part drama is set in 1936, six years after the original series ended, when a new family has moved into 165 Eaton Place. The cast includes Dame Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh, who together created the original series. (Marsh played Rose Buck, the housemaid, but Atkins was busy playing Queen Victoria on stage so her role went to Pauline Collins.) Hawes plays Lady Agnes Holland, the new mistress of the house.
‘Agnes is a good egg,’ she says in her Mitford-sister tones, the result of elocution lessons at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. ‘She’s a politician’s wife, so she has to be seen to be fashionable and respectable in the same way that Sam Cam does now. She and her husband [played by Ed Stoppard] are very much in love. When we meet them everything’s good with the world, then Maud appears [her mother-in-law, played by Atkins] and that’s the first of many spanners in the works.’
From the few clips I was allowed to see, Upstairs Downstairs looks to have all the hit ingredients: a brilliant script by Heidi Thomas, who co-wrote Cranford, gorgeous costumes and lavish sets. ‘They’re really stunning,’ Hawes agrees. ‘What was lovely was that for once we filmed scenes in sequence, as the house is supposed to be all cobwebby and falling down. The Hollands bring the builders in and rejuvenate it, so we actually saw the reveal ourselves.’
How was it to work with the legendary Marsh, the only original cast member to return? Her character, Rose, is now elevated to housekeeper. ‘Jean and I only had a couple of scenes at first, but then they started editing and thought there was a really lovely connection between the two characters, so they wrote some more scenes and developed the relationship. Agnes has to lean on Rose for help; she realises that she’s not quite as on top of things as she thought she was.’
Recreating such a cherished series can be a poisoned chalice. Hawes is too young to remember the original series. ‘But I became more aware of the pressure throughout. People say, “Oh, my God! Upstairs Downstairs!” And you say, “Oh, crap!” I didn’t want to be in another show that already had a huge following. I didn’t realise with Upstairs that would happen again, which was naive of me.’
She’s referring to Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to the cult series Life on Mars. There, Hawes took over the time-travelling cop role first played by John Simm. Initial reactions were vitriolic. ‘An annoying, screeching toff who makes viewers want to punch the telly,’ was a typical review of the first episode. Hawes in her fabulous ra-ra skirts and white leather jackets quickly won round the critics and the fans, but it was clearly a painful experience.
‘Ashes was successful, but it’s a difficult thing to do,’ she says, examining her nails. ‘You want to keep people happy while being different.’ She concludes briskly, ‘You can’t keep everybody happy all the time.’
Expectations aside, there’s also the problem of Downton Abbey. Upstairs Downstairs was still in the middle of filming when ITV was showing its equally opulent and star-studded series, which attracted its biggest drama audiences since Brideshead Revisited. Comparisons will be inevitable, but Hawes insists no one is worried.
‘I’m really thrilled about Downton Abbey. For so long everybody’s been saying, “Where’s the quality drama?” If there’s room for 30 reality shows, surely there’s room for two amazing costume dramas. From the tiny amount of Downton I saw it was gorgeous, but as far as I can make out it has a very different feeling to Upstairs. One is town, one is country, and they’re set in different eras. But hopefully they’re not too different, because it was so brilliant and that’s what people like.’
Hawes isn’t sure if she’ll watch Upstairs Downstairs. ‘Matthew and I don’t really watch each other on TV. If we try we just go, “Oh, Christ, turn it off!” It’s just difficult when it’s your husband.’ Transmission dates are unconfirmed when we meet, and might clash with her pre-Christmas holiday to Mauritius. ‘I’m so excited,’ she cries, with one of her uproarious giggles. ‘I’m feeling smug, but Matthew’s just finished 14 weeks in Germany playing one of the three musketeers, so I do feel we deserve it.’
I’ll say. However glamorous the trappings, long spells as a single parent are no fun. ‘No fun. It’s just quite difficult,’ she agrees. ‘Every job Matthew gets seems to be away for some reason, and it’s really hard. Really hard. We say we’ll make it work and most of the time we do. We try to do it so one of us is always there for the children, so I’ll do a job and then he’ll do a job, without too many crossover periods. But it’s lonely. Matthew’s the cook, so when he was away I got quite thin. I’d just stand at the fridge and eat a bit of cheese. Now he’s back you can hear the pans coming out every night again.’
Despite the excitement, there’s a catch. Hawes, who in 2002 set pulses racing in the BBC adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel Tipping the Velvet, was offered a part in Waters’s The Night Watch. ‘We’d booked the holiday and then I hear the BBC is making my favourite book of all time. I couldn’t believe it, but I had to turn it down. Matthew said no to something in the summer because we were going away. It’s always the most difficult thing, saying no in our business. You’re always worried nothing else might ever come up, but you have to. The family stuff is too important. Something has to give, doesn’t it, if you’re going to invest time in each other.’
It’s a cue to cautiously mention the failure of her first marriage to the artist Spencer McCallum. ‘Spencer and I are great friends and we have an amazing son,’ Hawes says. ‘He has a lovely girlfriend; they both came with me to school fireworks night. People get confused when people are able to make things work. They wonder why there isn’t a story or some sort of horror going on. But wouldn’t it be awful if your relationship was horrendous almost 10 years later? There would be something wrong if you couldn’t work it out by then.’
All the passion and intrigue certainly seems consigned to another era. Hawes and Macfadyen, 36, are now paragons of domesticity, enthusiastic subscribers to The World of Interiors. ‘It has such interesting articles and it doesn’t make you feel inadequate, whereas reading something like Vogue you don’t feel fashionable enough or thin enough.’ If even Hawes feels inadequate, what hope for the rest of us? ‘For a mother of three I feel all right,’ she says, endearingly not totally convinced. ‘I don’t punish myself. Life’s too short.’
The couple are happily restoring the Victorian house they bought two years ago. They have chickens, a ‘really stupid but totally beautiful’ Coton de Tulear dog called Nana and, of course, the children. Having started her family relatively young, Hawes would love another baby. ‘I mean, they’re lovely, aren’t they? But with four I wouldn’t want to work. It would be too much, just one thing after another. And I love what I do. Never say never, I suppose.’
To help with the menagerie there’s Adam, their ‘manny’ of two years, whom Hawes originally interviewed along with several female candidates. ‘Matthew came home and said, “How were they?” and I said, “There’s only one, really, that I’d like you to meet.”
I was doing the washing-up and wasn’t facing him, and I just heard, “I’m not having a f–ing manny.” He said, “I don’t think the children need another male influence.” But then Adam came for a second meeting and Matthew said, “He’s a really nice chap.” I’ve two boys and a tomboy, so it works brilliantly.
‘I do feel very smug about him,’ she continues. There’s something about having another man around the house. ‘It’s just different from sharing your kitchen with another woman. It’s really easy and he’s fixing the hose as well, which is out of his job remit but he does it.’
Adam won’t accompany them to Mauritius, or be there at Christmas when — back in Strawberry Hill — it will be just the five of them. ‘Matthew will do the cooking, I’ll decorate the table. I love all that.’ We meet six weeks before Christmas but she’s already ordered lots of vintage decorations on eBay, plus bought and wrapped all her presents. ‘Yes, I’m anal. I am just really organised.’
It’s a world away, as Hawes points out herself, from her childhood, as the youngest of four, on a council estate in central London (her father is a cab driver, her mother a housewife). She badgered her parents to let her attend the stage school across the road where her best friend was Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice (they’ve since lost touch). Hawes left home at 17, worked as a model, then got her big break, a role in Dennis Potter’s television film Karaoke.
‘I mean, it was a nice council estate, but I don’t think I could ever have imagined my life turning out like this. Everyone has their ups and downs, but it could be a lot worse and I’m well aware of that. I’ve been very lucky.’
I feel as if I have, too. I’m not kidding myself that Hawes and I are going to start arranging play dates, but for an hour she’s been a brilliant enough actress to con me into believing we really are best friends.
By Julia Llewellyn Smith for Stella magazine.
(Source: my grabs from Telegraph e-paper, telegraph.co.uk)