“She hates me! She hates my hair, she hates my face — hates me! But do you know why? Because she’s in love with Gene Hunt. She is! She’s written pages and pages about her love for Gene Hunt, so it’s inevitable that a woman like that is going to hate me. There was a little thaw when she realised that there wasn’t going to be a big snog between Alex and Gene. I was back to being all right then.”
On her biggest critic Radio Times’ TV editor Alison Graham. Radio Times, July 2010.
“Until Ashes to Ashes, I’d never had a bad review — not one I’d read, at least. I took it quite badly… I became the scapegoat. I took the flak for hair and makeup, wardrobe, the script, everything.
[But] now I won’t be frightened of doing anything. I came away thinking, I’ve got three beautiful, healthy children, a gorgeous husband and a lovely house, and actually [these critics] can go fuck themselves.”
Psychologies magazine, April 2009.
If you pay close attention to the video for Pulp’s 1995 hit “Common People“, you’ll spot a delicate, dark-haired girl dancing her heart out. Before she became a full-time actress, Keeley Hawes paid the rent doing pop videos. “I’m the one doing a little dance a bit further along from Sadie Frost,” she recalls. “Jarvis Cocker came up afterwards and said [she affects a northern accent], ‘That was really cool’.”
Next she is a woman caught up in a volatile male friendship in the new ITV thriller, The Best Man. Like so many ITV two-part dramas, it’s a love triangle where you spend most of your time playing spot the serial killer. But it’s redeemed by a great cast (Hawes, Toby Stephens and Richard Coyle).
“It was such a lovely experience filming with both of them,” she enthuses, “although it was very hard to keep a straight face. They’ve just got funny bones. I’ve worked with Richard twice before. In Wives and Daughters he came on for one day and asked me to marry him, and I shoo-ed him off. Then I did Othello with him where he fancied a bit of Desdemona, but I was having none of it. Then finally, third time lucky, he gets hitched to me in The Best Man!”
As for Stephens, “You want to take him home and tuck him up. He’s been so well brought up.” In fact Hawes worked with his mother Maggie Smith on The Last September and is an unabashed fan. “She’s my role model. I hold her in such high esteem, she’s faultless. And hilarious, she’s got it all. I was constantly pestering Toby for titbits, ‘Did she mention me? What did she say?’ It was really quite sad.”
Today you sense she is ambitious rather than ruthless. She says she and Macfadyen are a good balance temperamentally: “He’s very calm. I’m the fiery one.” She radiates happiness and finds it hard to stop talking about him. But she’s far from smug.
A couple of days after our photographer visited, Hawes had her hair cut into a Louise Brooks-style bob, in a bid for sophistication. She tells the story against herself with wry humour. “I had it done in a mad moment in New York. I was quite pleased with it but then as soon as I walked back into the room, my little boy Myles went, ‘Ooh, hello, Willy Wonka’.”
The Independent, 11 March 2006.
“I was sent the DVD of me in ShakespeaRe-Told: Macbeth, and there was this big, dramatic moment and I was thinking, this is looking good, and Myles came in and said, “Oh, Mummy, when are you going to do something good like Madagascar”
His tone is trying for tetchy man-of-the-world, but comes out closer to delight. Nonetheless, running three children and two freelance careers is something of a challenge. Nor are the kids impressed by their parents’ starry professional lives. “Keeley played Lady Macbeth in the modern version for the BBC in 2005. We were watching the scene, on video, where she’s naked, covered in blood and gore. Myles came downstairs, flicked a glance at the screen and said, ‘Why can’t you guys ever be in anything good, like Madagascar?”
‘There was this countdown in the Sun,’ recalls Hawes. ‘”Ten days to go!” “Nine days to go!”‘ Hot girl-on-girl action? ‘Yes! And it was quite unfair. It was a lesbian love story.’ Hawes shrieks with laughter. ‘Oh well, if I was going to have girl-on-girl action, I’m glad it was before my second child. because you wouldn’t catch me doing it again.’
The Observer, October 30 2005
“My character uses Jonny [Lee Miller] purely for sex. I think he felt a bit insecure, because I had to play a woman taking control.
“She used him as a man often uses a woman. But Jonny didn’t particularly enjoy it and kept a little pair of pants on while we were filming.”
She added: “Complicity is risque but I’m not bothered by such things. I watched Robocop the other night and it was full of gratuitous violence. I would rather see gratuitous sex.”
On sex scenes in Complicity. Now magazine
Keeley Hawes couldn’t exactly cast off the role at the end of each day’s filming either — she put on a stone and a half to emulate Diana’s ample figure. “I felt so much sexier with all those curves,” she says.
“I had spent so much time worrying about my weight as a model that to eat what I wanted was very liberating.”
On piling on the pounds to play Diana Dors.