Article: "There's a birth and a snog and lots of deaths" (2009)

"Keeley Hawes: ‘There’s a birth and a snog and lots of deaths’" by Maureen Paton for The Daily Mail, April 5, 2009.

We’re thrilled that Keeley has been busy reprising her role (and that 80s bubble perm) as DI Alex ‘Bolly Knickers’ Drake in the time-travel cop series Ashes to Ashes. And, she reveals, life has been just as frantic off screen.

Although Keeley Hawes’s face has become her fortune in more ways than one, it certainly couldn’t be said to have gone to her head.

She arrives for our photo shoot with her hair in a glossy brown bob, but immediately punctures that immaculate impression by pointing out a few grey ones and telling me that she turns 33 the day after our interview. ‘I blame the grey hair on Phil,’ she jokes of her Ashes to Ashes co-star Philip Glenister, with whom Keeley has been working 12-hour days on the second series.

Yet although her action-girl stardom in BBC1’s Spooks and now BBC’s hit time-travel cop show Ashes has made her the best recruiting agent for detective work since that sexy strip-cartoon heroine Modesty Blaise, Keeley surprised many people a year ago by accepting a modelling sideline as the face of Boots No7.

And although there’s a classiness about her that doesn’t immediately suggest the sort of mainstream looks you would associate with the high-street chemist, she’s just signed up for two more years.

‘It’s a strange thing to do,’ she admits of the advertising deal that has given her an accessible profile, ‘but it’s something that everybody [in show business] is doing. Even Ewan McGregor, Sean Connery and Iggy Pop are in ads now.’

And it seems that the accolade matters as much to her as the money. For now she has passed the big 3-0, Keeley confesses to feeling flattered at even being approached in these ageist times when dewy-faced 16-year-olds are used to advertise skin creams they hardly need. ‘I was delighted. To be offered a beauty contract when I’m in my 30s with three kids made me go, “Yay!”’

Keeley, a London cabbie’s daughter who took elocution lessons and studied at the Sylvia Young stage school with Emma Bunton and Denise Van Outen, became a mother much earlier than is fashionable these days. Hence her obsession with the passing years as she copes with the demands of three children under ten while maintaining her career as one of our most successful small-screen actresses.

She wistfully tells me that at the school gates she hardly knows the other mothers – ‘I’m younger than lots of them because I had my children so young,’ she says.

At her age, most working actresses are still child-free. So the money from her beauty contract gives Keeley and her second husband, 34-year-old actor Matthew MacFadyen, the freedom to do the kind of projects they’re really interested in rather than having to sign up, say, to the regular money offered by a soap.

‘Oh God, no,’ groans Keeley of that prospect. ‘If you go into one, you’re in people’s living rooms three days a week and it’s relentless.’

A former child actor, Keeley launched herself into grown-up TV as one of Dennis Potter’s dream-girl sex objects in 1996’s Karaoke, then munched her way through mountains of chips to play a plump young Diana Dors in the ITV drama Blonde Bombshell, followed by a bisexual heart-breaker in the BBC’s sapphic costume shocker Tipping the Velvet.

That role introduced her to a whole new audience, especially after she was misquoted as saying in one lesbian magazine interview that she was bisexual. ‘What I actually said was that everybody is probably perfectly capable of finding somebody of the same sex attractive – but I certainly haven’t had any lesbian relationships,’ she now says.

When she and Matthew met and fell in love on the set of Spooks in 2002, it caused a stir because she had married her first husband, cartoonist Spencer McCallum, just eight weeks beforehand. Their son Myles was only 20 months old, which engulfed her with guilt, yet both she and Spencer have moved on peacefully.

And although Keeley once admitted that the subsequent experience of divorce was ‘horrific – up there with death as one of the worst things that can happen’, she now recalls that episode saying, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

Keeley married Matthew in 2004, and Spencer has met a new partner. He lives near Keeley and Matthew in Twickenham and has always been involved with the babysitting. ‘Although we have a nanny, Spencer still helps out,’ says Keeley. When I say what a civilised arrangement the three of them have come to, she adds: ‘I can’t imagine it any other way – I think it’s very sad when it can’t work out like that.’

Keeley emulated her parents by settling down to marriage and motherhood by her mid-20s (Keeley’s mother Brenda had given birth to all four of her children before she was 30). Keeley was 25 when she had Myles, and she admits she loves babies so much that she lost no time in having Maggie, now four, and Ralph, two, with Matthew.

‘You don’t have three of them if you don’t love children. It’s very easy to keep putting off having a family if you enjoy your job, but you just have to get on with life,’ she believes. ‘I’m very lucky with acting not being a nine-to-five job, so after finishing Ashes, I can have six weeks off to spend with my children’.

Keeley was lucky (or astute) enough to marry two very domesticated men. Matthew does most of the cooking, and is so good with Myles that they were even cast as father and son when Matthew, a great fan of Ashes to Ashes, got his wish to play a cameo role in one episode of the first series. ‘They wanted a seven-year-old who looked at ease with Matthew, so they hired Myles,’ explains Keeley. ‘He came in, tipped a tin of beans over Matthew’s head, laughed and went home – so he had a very nice time.’

She says she could never be a stay-at-home mother like her sister Joanne, and insists that her partnership with Matthew is an equal one, in which both their careers are important.

At the moment, her profile happens to be higher than Matthew’s, despite the fact that his performance as Darcy opposite Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet in the 2005 big-screen version of Pride and Prejudice brought the offers flooding in.

Although Matthew has a significant role as former BBC chief John Birt in Frost/Nixon, his latest prestigious project, A Passage to India, has been cancelled because of economic cutbacks at ITV.

‘I’m often asked whether it’s a problem if one of us is doing better than the other, and I’ve never really understood that question. If one is doing well, it’s a great relief to the other one because it takes the pressure off,’ says Keeley.

She returns to our screens this month in Ashes to Ashes, as Detective Inspector Alex Drake, a 21st-century policewoman catapulted back to the sexist 1980s, while barely clad in a tarty off-the-shoulder red top from an undercover job. No wonder she had so many hysterics while trying to maintain her authority, especially with all that crackling sexual tension between Alex and Philip Glenister’s charismatically macho DCI Gene Hunt (who calls her ‘Bolly Knickers’ because he thinks she’s a champagne-quaffing Southerner).

The second series is darker, with a theme of police corruption, and Keeley says that Alex has developed accordingly. ‘There’s a birth and a snog and lots of deaths and a marriage, although I’m not the one giving birth or getting married,’ she grins, and won’t be drawn over who is doing the snogging.

‘Alex is less highly strung and she’s had time to go clothes-shopping, so that off-the-shoulder number has gone. But if I actually appeared in clothes that a woman DI would have worn then, everybody would say, “Where’s the fun in that?” So you have to have some artistic licence.

'Part of the fun of doing a show set in the 80s is the clothes and hair,’ says Keeley, who didn’t escape the Kevin Keegan look of the time because she got her first perm at the age of 11. ‘Back then everyone wanted to look like Chris Cagney from the female cop show Cagney & Lacey,’ says Keeley, who wears a Cagney half-wig on top of her real hair in the new series of Ashes.

She’s filming the CID interiors in the same windowless room in Bermondsey, London, where she shot the MI5 interiors for Spooks, a show that she doesn’t seem to be able to get away from.

Even while she was giving birth to a 10lb 8oz Ralph, the starstruck anaesthetist was saying to Keeley and Matthew: ‘I do miss you both in Spooks.’ ‘I felt like saying, “Shut up! Now is not the time!”’ says Keeley. ‘Ralph is going to be a tall boy – he’s already got his rugby legs.’

Keeley herself is 5ft 10in, which means she often towers over her leading men – though not in the case of six-footers Matthew and Philip.

Before her big break in Karaoke, she had spent 18 months as a model from the age of 16 – albeit a lazy one, by her account, who couldn’t be bothered to go on diets. ‘I’m a size 12 and I’m very happy with it. Matthew likes me however I am, all through my pregnancies and afterwards,’ says Keeley, who told me when we last met nearly four years ago that he even said he would be happier if she were half a stone heavier (what an ideal husband). ‘Life is simply too short to think about everything you put in your mouth, and it’s not good for children to see you picking over bits of salad.’

And despite her awareness of the passing years, she’s firmly against cosmetic surgery. ‘Botox and other fillers make everybody look the same, with the big cheekbones where they fill you up. It’s much cheaper to have a fringe – it takes years off everybody,’ she grins.

Although Keeley’s looks easily match Keira’s and could make her a natural for Hollywood, she sees no reason to uproot the family to Los Angeles. Four years ago, she had admitted to me: ‘There’s a huge machine that comes with big-budget films and Matthew copes with that very well, but it’s much too frightening for me.’ Now, it seems, there’s another, very practical reason not to go. ‘We’ve just moved to a new house with a lovely garden and chickens, so it’s ideal for the children. And as long as they have that base, they have continuity and that’s the important thing.’

Having grown up in the warm embrace of a big supportive family, she even talked to me previously about adopting a child in need because she had been so moved by the award-winning TV documentary on Chinese orphanages, The Dying Rooms. Now, it seems, she is taking tentative steps towards it.

‘I’m very maternal, and there’s a really lovely thing you can do where you look after a disabled child for a while to give their parents some respite. I thought that would be a good place to start, so I’ve looked into that and have been sent some details,’ says Keeley, who also helps to promote the children’s hospice service Chase in Surrey.

There aren’t too many successful young actresses around with such admirable aims. So I think this yummy career mummy, who valiantly tries to have it all without selling either part of her life short, should be allowed her share of harmless vanities.

When you remind an established star of the erotic pictures they once posed for while trying to break into the business, you usually risk getting skewered by a killer look.

But Keeley can’t wait to tell me that when a newspaper marked the launch of Ashes to Ashes’ first series by running semi-clad pictures of her that had been taken for German Vogue and GQ magazines when she was 18, she was delighted rather than affronted. ‘People thought I had just had them done. Three children and the body of an 18-year-old!’ she laughs.

‘I’m not self-conscious about my body, but I think I will keep it covered up after having three children. There comes a time when you have to say, “Hmm, that’s it, I think I’ll save it for indoors.”

The photos that were published with this article are here.