Keeley Hawes and Ed Stoppard’s stairway to heaven
Hi-res and [nearly] text-free pics: Cover, pics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
His father is a world-famous playwright, hers was a London cabbie, but they make a perfect upper-crust couple in Upstairs Downstairs. Ed Stoppard and Keeley Hawes put on a show for Hermione Eyre.
He looks most at ease in a velvet smoking jacket, and her hands are not for scrubbing stairs: Keeley Hawes and Ed Stoppard are simply born to rule. They play Lord and Lady Holland in Upstairs Downstairs, the new BBC sequel to the classic ITV series and the period drama to give Downton Abbey a run for its money. Hawes, star of Spooks, Tipping the Velvet and Ashes to Ashes, arrives for our interview looking like Anna Karenina, her beautiful face framed in a huge MaxMara hood of the softest black fur. Lavishing giggly charm on everyone, she is followed by an assistant carrying a bunch of roses (a present from a producer). Her husband, the actor and former Mr Darcy, Matthew Macfadyen, pops in to say hello halfway through the shoot, holding her face adoringly in his hands, then disappearing. ‘Matthew’s gone to buy me presents,’ says Keeley. ‘He’s very good at presents.’
Upstairs Downstairs will be a feel-good drama, not fuel for class war, according to Ed Stoppard, who plays diplomat and head of the household Sir Hallam Holland. He has a silly name but a kind nature. ‘Upstairs characters have just as much heart as Downstairs characters,’ says Ed. Standing next to him in real life, Keeley is a little taller and obviously has eyes for no one but her husband, but on screen they make a handsome pair. And not for the first time: ten years ago she played his psychotic girlfriend for a BBC short, Murder in Mind. ‘I murdered someone he was having an affair with while sleepwalking,’ she remembers. ‘With my slippers on, using a club hammer.’ Upstairs Downstairs was much more enjoyable. She loved her character’s bias-cut satin dresses –’the 1930s are a very kind period, costume-wise’ –while he looks dapper in a bespoke suit. ‘The costume designer tracked it down at Angels. It’s the same one I wore for Brideshead Revisited,’ he says, referring to the 2008 film in which he played the eldest Flyte, Bridey. ‘I love that suit. I’d like to be stylish in everyday life but my twin girls are just at the age when they would splatter me in soup.’
Ed, son of Sir Tom Stoppard and the agony aunt Dr Miriam Stoppard, found it easy to step into the role of paterfamilias. He is married to Amie, an American photo-grapher, and has three small daughters, Esme, six, and identical twins Maggie and Evie, four. ‘We’ve only dressed them the same a handful of times. Amie and I want to let their individualities grow and now they’ve gone their separate ways.’
Perhaps their confidence stems from his: he’s full of intellectual braggadocio, coming out with corkers such as ‘There’s a reason some of Shakespeare’s plays aren’t performed much –they’re crap!’ and postulating that arts spending cuts might invigorate the industry: ‘There’s definitely room for production companies to be a bit more careful with their budgets… If Alan Sugar or Philip Green got hold of a film or TV
company they’d probably be appalled.’
Mercurial and chatty, Ed rolls up his white grandad-shirt sleeves and tells me public school and he ‘didn’t gel’. He went to Stowe but didn’t make any lasting friendships. He read French at Edinburgh before training at LAMDA and endured a period of anxiety about his famous surname when he con-sidered changing it to Straussler — his Czech-born father’s original name. Now, at 36, he seems to be coming into his own.
He laughs a lot, clowning about with Matthew Macfadyen — with whom he starred in the recent TV drama Any Human Heart — but he tells me he is most at ease alone. ‘I’m quite pensive and insular. I can spend hours, days, weeks on my own and be perfectly happy. Maybe it’s why I’m cast in quite a lot of damaged, conflicted roles… I’ve never played a cheerful chappie.’ His roles have included Hamlet for the English Touring Theatre, and Tchaikovsky in a BBC drama-documentary. He was also Adrien Brody’s hungry-eyed younger brother in Roman Polanski’s war epic The Pianist. He has a compact action-figure body and eyes that crinkle with thoughtfulness: he can definitely do intense.
What are his abiding memories of Stoppard family Christmases? ‘We were very lucky — we sometimes had skiing Christmases or visited friends in Scotland.’ (His parents broke up in 1992, when he was 18, and his stepfamily extended temporarily to include his father’s lover, the actress Felicity Kendal, and, on his mother’s side, the former GlaxoSmithKline chairman Sir Christopher Hogg, who Miriam married in 1997.) ‘One year, when I must have been five or six, my brother and I woke up very early, of course, and saw that on the floor were paper arrows, one with an ‘E’ on for Edmund and one with a ‘W’ for Will. One led one way and one the other. I followed mine but I only had to go about ten paces and there was a rocking horse. I remember thinking: “A rocking horse? Really? I’m sure I asked Santa for an Action Man…” Then I found my brother and he had a Grifter — the bike everyone wanted. I remember being just speechless and woke my parents up and started complaining about being given a girl’s present. That’s a powerful memory.’
For his 21st birthday his father gave him a year’s membership of The London Library, which he still finds ‘a wellspring of infor-mation. I read up on the Indian civil service to help with my character in Upstairs Downstairs, who has just come back from India.’ He also researched Kenneth Stoppard, his father’s stepfather, an officer who brought his father up in India. This Christmas will be a strictly nuclear affair, in Spain. ‘I’ve been working non-stop for the past eight months and I just wanted the five of us to have a week together.’ Ed will pull his weight with the cooking (‘I’m famous for my River Café courgette pasta’) but they will miss the first broadcast of Upstairs Downstairs on Boxing Day. ‘Sitting down watching myself on TV is not my idea of a good time,’ he says.
Ed is the youngest of four, and so is Keeley. ‘Lots of actors are the youngest of big families,’ says Keeley. ‘My youngest, Ralph, is already a real showman. He sits at the head of the table and regales us all. It’s youngest-child syndrome.’
Keeley grew up in Marylebone, the daughter of a cabbie and a housewife. She lost her London vowels at elocution classes at the nearby Sylvia Young Theatre School. ‘My mother brought us up and my father worked all day. It was a very normal childhood. We never went on holiday and we were never spoilt — except at Christmas. Then we were indulged.’
Christmas morning always began ‘with the four of us climbing into two sleeping bags, one in front of the other. We would slide down the stairs in them and then we’d wait until my parents got up and we’d be let in to see what was underneath the tree. We’d each have piles of presents. Christmas was the big thing. I think it’s why I’m so into it now.’
A self-confessed control freak, Keeley has her presents already wrapped. ‘I love spoiling the kids. Matthew always says, “I really think you’ve overdone it this time.” But weirdly, as a result, I think they’re more satisfied. If we go to Hamleys they say, “Oh, OK,” quite sweetly when you say they’re only allowed to look.’Keeley’s own present pile has, in the past, contained a Morris Minor (she came home one day remarking at the nice car someone had parked outside; Matthew passed her the keys), a sketch by the 20th-century English artist Mary Newcomb of two sheep (last year’s Christmas present), perfumes, Smythson diaries (a fabulous new colour every year) and ‘anything from Margaret Howell’. Macfadyen does indeed sound like an expert present giver.
In Upstairs Downstairs, Lady Holland is not very good at bossing the staff around. ‘She has to tell people what to do but she’s not very used to it. She’s come from a nice family and she’s well brought up, but she’s never been well-off — as my sister, played by Claire Foy, says, “It’s old money, which means there’s no money.” So as the show opens she is just getting used to her new position. It’s very similar to now-adays with people who are lucky enough to employ cleaners — I still dust before the cleaner comes and I can’t bring myself to tell her if she’s missed a bit, I just do it myself.’
Keeley, 34, has also recruited a ‘mannie’, Adam, who helps her look after the children. ‘It’s such an odd thing. I don’t come from that world at all. My mother did everything. But my husband did come from that sort of background and grew up with nannies and people looking after their house because his father was in oil and they lived abroad a lot. Just the polar opposite of my childhood. When I met Matthew the suggestion of a cleaner was…’ she makes a face that demonstrates offended sensibilities ‘…but not now!’
Matthew and Keeley met in 2002 on the set of Spooks. At the time Keeley was married to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum, and they have a child, Myles. It caused some consternation when Keeley began her relationship with Macfadyen, but the couple always maintained that they did not begin their romance until Keeley and Spencer had
separated. Keeley and Matthew married in a small ceremony in 2004, when she was pregnant with their first child, Maggie. Two years later they had Ralph; all three children live with them in Twickenham.
She says she has learned a lot about the trust that develops between upstairs and downstairs. ‘There are so many levels of trust… Particularly if people are looking after your children.’ Her hazel eyes widen dramatically. And financially, as she discovered when she was stung by a former employee who was found to have been siphoning funds out of the couple’s account. She laughs, as she seems prone to do in adversity. ‘It was an account that only bills came out of so we didn’t notice. And then the bank and the police both received an anonymous email saying they knew someone had been spending this money.’ In total, £7,000 was missing. Insurance covered the loss but ‘we never got to the bottom of it, really’. Nor did they press charges. Still, as Agnes Holland she can bring real feeling to lines lamenting that one can’t get the staff these days.
This year she and Matthew are reading at a Nativity service for CHASE, the children’s hospice charity they support, then heading off to Mauritius on holiday. ‘Matthew has been away for 14 weeks being a Musketeer [opposite Milla Jovovich and Orlando Bloom], so yes, we’re going off, and because he’s been away it’s very important we get together — just us.’ She looks as excited as a child. Mauritius was their honeymoon destination. They returned later with the children, and disaster struck. ‘I was pregnant with Ralph, and Maggie was with us, but on the plane she started breaking out with chicken pox. No one wanted to go near us. We had the pool, the restaurant to ourselves…’ Fingers crossed that this time round their tidings are of
comfort and joy.
Upstairs Downstairs is on BBC One and BBC One HD on 26, 27 and 28 December at 9pm
By Hermione Eyre for London Evening Standard.
(Source: thisislondon.co.uk, Evening Standard e-edition)