School’s Out
At first glance, Keeley Hawes doesn’t look like your average Surrey housewife. She stands five foot 10 inches tall without shoes, and strides languidly across the room, her walk the legacy of modelling as a teenager. Her beautiful, angular face creases into fits of infectious giggles every few minutes.
Right now, Keeley, 25, has every reason to be laughing. She is busy planning her marriage to fiance Spencer, a designer and the father of her 15-month-old son Myles, as well as decorating the family’s new home in Esher.
Then there is the little matter of her career. You might know her from any number of films and television dramas, including the BBC’s Dickens classic Our Mutual Friend, Dennis Potter’s Karaoke, Murder in Mind, The Last September or ITV’s Blonde Bombshell, in which she sizzled as the young Diana Dors.
She may be one of the brightest new talents of the last few years, but Keeley takes great pride in the fact that she passes largely unnoticed in her suburban neighbourhood.
“I don’t know what my neighbours think of me, but one shouted out that he liked my programme the other night and all I could think was, ‘Oh my God, I think he’s seen my bum,'” she says, dissolving into laughter.
“I lived in the middle of London before and you would constantly see people like Jude Law and Jamie Oliver because of all the TV production companies around. It’s not quite the same in Surrey. Chris Tarrant is the big man in my neck of the woods. He gets all the kudos and he can have it.”
They’re very proud of Chris in Esher, but Keeley isn’t doing too badly either. She seems to handle the demands of motherhood and the pressures of her burgeoning career with ease, thanks largely to Spencer, 28, who works from home and takes care of Myles while she is working.
“When I’m not there, he is with his dad, which made it a lot easier for me to go back to work,” says Keeley. “I would find it harder if Spencer wasn’t at home. Myles has either got me or his dad or both of us. I know it sounds ridiculous but I was really surprised at how good Spencer was around the baby. I wasn’t expecting it, but he has been great, he really is a new man, it seems to come naturally. And it was nice after nine months of living for someone else, not eating cheese, and always thinking of someone else before you, to let him take over.
“I was breastfeeding at first and suddenly you find you have lived for over a year just for this other little person. By the time I went back to work, I shut the door and sighed. It was a little bit like getting back in control, finding your feet again and getting back a bit of confidence. You remember who you were again. Lovely as it is being totally engrossed, physically and mentally, in a baby, it was nice to be my own person again.”
It’s obvious that Spencer is the love of her life. They met years ago through a mutual friend but it wasn’t until Keeley split up with her long-term boyfriend Kelly three years ago that romance blossomed.
“I was going out for a drink with a friend and she said, ‘Oh, I’ll see if my friend Spencer wants to come along.’ We didn’t start going out together straight away because I was with somebody else, but we became really good friends. About a year later, I split up with Kelly, and then it happened. Thankfully it wasn’t messy and Spencer was very good to wait for me,” she adds with a laugh. “He didn’t put me under any pressure, it all naturally went its way and ended up with the two of us together.”
Within 12 months, Spencer had proposed. “We had been to Tiffany’s in New York just before Christmas,” she says, as she shows me her platinum and diamond engagement ring. “I had no idea what he was planning but I left him browsing in the store, saying I had to make a phone call. And I pointed out a few rings that I liked before I left. We were planning to get married when I got pregnant so we put it off and it has been put off ever since. Now, with the baby and work there hasn’t been time, but we will do it. I started off wanting a huge wedding but trying to plan it was a nightmare, so it has got smaller and smaller.
“I’m not religious, so it probably won’t be a church wedding. We went to a church wedding recently and it made up my mind that it’s not for me. Saying that, though, I didn’t plan to get pregnant first either, so I slipped up a bit somewhere.”
Since starting work again just under a year ago, Keeley has completed three new dramas. Lucky Jim, for ITV, pitches her alongside Helen McCrory and Stephen Tompkinson in the story of a schoolteacher in 1950s Britain who can’t make his mind up about love. Me and Mrs Jones, a drama with Robson Green as a reporter who falls for the female British prime minister, has Keeley playing his ex-wife and boss. Then there is Othello, ITV’s cleverly updated version of the Shakespeare tragedy, with Christopher Eccleston and Eamonn Walker. Keeley plays Desi, the devoted girlfriend of high-flying police chief John Othello, whose mind is slowly poisoned against her by his ruthlessly ambitious best friend Ben Jago (Eccleston).
The story was adapted by Andrew Davies, whose past successes include Wives and Daughters and Pride and Prejudice, and with its themes of racial tension and sexual jealousy, it feels more like a feature film than a TV drama.
“When I heard that Andrew Davies had worked on it, I knew from the start it was going to be good,” says Keeley. “It could have been done very differently, and styled like The Bill, but I’m glad they did it this way.”
One of the most refreshing things about Keeley is her honesty and lack of guile. When I ask her what it was like working with Eccleston, who is rumoured to be difficult, she tries hard to be diplomatic but hints at fraught times during filming.
“Well, he was playing a totally wild, quite frantic character. It would have been very difficult for him to have a character behaving like that and then leave it alone. He was also very involved in the technical side as well, which is unusual for an actor. Generally, you read your lines and go, but he was interested in the way it was being done, how the scenes were shot, and he kind of threw a spanner in the works, really, because he was so different. It livened things up but I found him very down-to-earth, ordinary. He’s nice and approachable.”
Keeley made her name playing uppercrust roles and her cut-glass accent betrays nothing of her roots. The daughter of a London taxi driver, she grew up in a council flat in Marylebone with her brothers Jamie and Keith and sister Joanne.
Her accent is the result of seven years spent training at the renowned Sylvia Young stage school, just yards from Keeley’s childhood home. “I used to come home and practice my vowels. I’d walk around saying ‘Jane bakes a cake’ and my dad would sit there and laugh,” she recalls.
Keeley’s contemporaries at Sylvia Young’s read like a Who’s Who of showbusiness. Spice Girl Emma Bunton was her best friend and fellow students included Denise Van Outen, Dani Behr and Kelly Bright, who appears in the upcoming Ali G movie. “It’s quite incredible to think of my class, with Melanie Blatt and Nicole Appleton from All Saints and Emma Bunton,” she says now. “We never had a class photo taken but I really wish we had. There was a huge amount of success — something amazing happened there.”
Keeley is still close to Kelly Bright but has lost touch with Emma since the success of the Spice Girls. “I was close to Emma but not any more,” she smiles. “It’s difficult enough to keep friends in this business, but when you haven’t spoken to someone for that long, it would be strange just to call them up out of the blue. I’d be talking about the stair carpet or a new door and she’d be talking about the MTV awards. We’re not the same level any more, and that is quite a natural thing.”
I ask Keeley how she would feel if Myles announced that he wanted to go to stage school too. “I’d tie his hands behind his back and make him get a proper job,” she says in a mock growl. “When I went to Sylvia Young’s, it hadn’t been open for very long, and there were about 100 of us, all doing the same classes. Now, I think it’s more about being a star. I’m not sure I’d want him to do it, but I couldn’t really say no, could I?”
When she was 17, Keeley was spotted by a scout for Select Models while out shopping in Oxford Street and within weeks she was living in a flat with other fledgling models and appearing on the covers of teen magazines. Despite her success, she never really felt comfortable in the modelling world and, although naturally slim, she always questioned the wisdom of being told to eat less.
“I was scornful of staying thin, and I will remain so,” she says, slapping her thighs to prove that they aren’t skeletal. “Around the time Kate Moss started to make it big, everyone was emulating the skinny look. I wasn’t like that and didn’t want to be. I was surrounded by thin people eating rice cakes. But I’m less scornful now of how I behaved when I was modelling. I used to feel strongly that I did too much partying but now I’m really glad I did all that stuff because I couldn’t do it now even if I wanted to do. Spencer did it too, so we are more than happy to sit at home together.
“There I was at 17, living in this flat, having a great time and going out to parties. Who doesn’t want to do that at 17? But I’m glad that it stopped when it did and I was able to go into acting. I spent ages wishing I hadn’t done modelling but I know I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t.”
She quit modelling after a couple of years to work as a fashion assistant at Cosmopolitan and, while sorting through a pile of shoes in the fashion cupboard, she received a call from Sylvia Young to say that a casting director had seen some of her pictures and wanted her to do a screen test for Dennis Potter’s last TV drama, Karaoke.
Before long, Keeley was in demand, appearing in The Moonstone, The Beggar Bride and The Avengers movie with Sean Connery and Ralph Fiennes. She has an agent in America but isn’t sure that she really wants to pursue a Hollywood career.
“My agent there keeps sending me things and I look at the doormat in terror,” she says with a laugh. “I’d like to work there but not to go out and wait for something to happen. I’ve been getting film scripts but by the time they reach me, they’ve usually already been cast. It’s the story of my life. I don’t know what is happening next and it will be quite nice not to rush off on something else — I’m looking forward to being at home for a bit. I think I’ve got a good balance between my career and my home life. It’s good to be with someone who isn’t an actor, otherwise we would be all over the place.”
Keeley would also like to have another child. She is besotted with Myles and babbles constantly about him, though she admits that the maternal feelings took a little while to kick in. “After his birth, I expected to have a feeling of overwhelming love, of falling in love with this baby,” she says. “I saw Spencer falling in love with him and everyone else around me doing the same. It took a few weeks for me really to bond with him.
“Then some other mums I know told me they didn’t like their babies much for a year. It only took a couple of weeks for me, and of course I loved him, but maybe it was the pressure to feel that overwhelming link. I worried when it didn’t come right away, but we got to know each other and it came. I wish someone had warned me that it might happen, that you might feel unmotherly at first.”
A city girl through and through, Keeley decided while she was pregnant that she would rather bring Myles up outside London. “I’ve gone the other way since having Myles and, ideally, I’d like to move even further out,” she says. “I grew up in a city and was happy with that way of life but I have visions of my child growing up somewhere greener. I remember one night at my flat in Charlotte Street, we had a burglar running across our roof and police helicopter lights shining through our bedroom window. It wasn’t unusual — things like that were happening every night – and you got used to it, but it’s not what I want for my children.
“I’d love another baby but I’d like a bit of a gap so that I can enjoy being with Myles. He has had a big impact on my life. He is such a happy boy, I feel very lucky. I can’t complain at all.”
By Karen Hockney for The Scotsman.
(Source: keeley-hawes.co.uk)