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Fan Forum Legend
Joined: May 2002
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From The Guardian
Quote:
They say you can learn a lot about a woman from the contents of her handbag. If that is the case, you would have to conclude that the actress Keeley Hawes is either a new age hippy or a not especially discerning shoplifter. She is neither, it turns out, but today her brown leather tote overflows with alternative remedies. There's fish oil and ginkgo biloba capsules that promise to boost memory ("I saw them this morning in Boots and thought, 'Brain performance! That's what I need!'") and a little tub of seeds called D'Mix that you chew after meals ("Revolting, but you feel so worthy").
"There's nowhere to hide in the theatre," she says, sipping from a canteen of detox tea. Her grimace indicates it's a regime she has undertaken reluctantly. "You can't be the one in rehearsal who doesn't know their lines. When you're filming, you can always hide if you've got a hangover or you feel a bit ****. I haven't had a drink for a week and a half." She pauses, letting the scale of her commitment sink in. "I'm just saying."
Hawes is one of Britain's most prolific and successful screen actors – Spooks, Ashes to Ashes and Upstairs Downstairs – but any edginess she's feeling now may be explained by the fact she is preparing for just her second professional theatre appearance. The play is Barking in Essex, a dark comedy written in 2005 by Clive Exton, a mainstay of TV dramas such as Poirot and Fry and Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster, not long before he died but never performed until now. For its West End debut, it has a heavyweight line-up: not just Hawes, but Lee Evans and Sheila Hancock.
Two facts become clear as Hawes talks about Barking in Essex: first, it sounds very funny, and second, fans of Poirot might want to cover their ears. Or "there's a little bit of blue language", as Hawes decorously puts it. The plot follows the adventures of an Essex crime family: halfwit son, Darnley Packer (Evans), his wife, Chrissie, (Hawes) and his mother, Emmie (Hancock). Algie, the kingpin of the Packers, is about to be released from prison after seven years and the family has some bad news about the £3.5m in untraceable notes that he had hidden before he was sent down.
Posters for the play make it look like a companion piece to ITV's The Only Way is Essex, but in the cafeteria at a rehearsal space in south London, Hawes could hardly look further removed from Lauren, Billie and Co. Her dark hair is scraped back elegantly and her face is luminously pale and free of makeup. She wears a billowing white shirt, jeans and pumps.
"I did watch Towie before we started rehearsals," says Hawes. "Those images are in my brain now and I can never take them away. But the play was written before that came along and we've decided on it being set in 2008." This means there is fake tan and big hair, but no "reem", "vajazzle" and "well jell". "No, those words are not there," Hawes smiles, "because Clive Exton didn't have the great privilege of predicting Towie."
While Hawes is hardly thrilled about four months of weekly spray tans, she accepts it could be worse. She's been reasonably lucky throughout her career, while her husband, the actor Matthew Macfadyen, has recently been forced to have giant lamb-chop sideburns for Ripper Street, a monk's tonsure for The Pillars of the Earth and an exuberant, much-loathed moustache for Anna Karenina. "It's only other people that remind you that it's not normal: like Matthew's 1970s porn 'tache at the school gates," she says. "Sometimes you get the good end of the stick … but I can't think of any. There must a bonus; maybe that's what the tan will be."
Hawes was ecstatic to be cast as Chrissie in Barking in Essex; actually, from the sound of it, she basically ordered the director, Harry Burton, to give her the part. "I read the first page of the script and I thought, 'I'm doing this play,'" she recalls. "I auditioned for Harry and I've never done it before, but I went in and said, 'I just want you to know that I'd really like to do this and I feel quite strongly that you have me.'"
If it is hard to imagine Hawes's mellifluous accent mangling estuary English and foul-mouthed tirades, then that is a testament to her acting. She may be familiar as Lady Agnes Holland in Upstairs Downstairs (or, to another demographic, as the plummy voice of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video game), but she is the daughter of a London cabbie.
Her voice is the result of a decade of elocution lessons that started at the Sylvia Young theatre school in Marylebone, and included putting a pencil in her mouth to perfect her vowels. The change has become so ingrained that when Hawes was cast as Jason Statham's wife, called, perfectly, Wendy Leather, in the 2008 film The Bank Job, she needed training to regress her accent.
"There are lots of actors who are posh and stick with that and there are lots of actors who are cockney and that's what they do," she says. "That's fine, but I don't think that could be said about me. I just happen to have played a lot of people who speak properly. So it was kind of thrilling when I started this play. It feels a bit naughty and I was like, 'Fackin' hell! Oh my gawd, what's me mum gonna say?'"
Barking in Essex is not the only new role that might make us look at the 37-year-old Hawes differently. She has not long finished her first comedy, the David Mitchell and Robert Webb series for BBC2, Ambassadors, in which she plays the wife of the British diplomat (Mitchell) dispatched to the central Asian republic of Tazbekistan. Again, it was a part that Hawes felt she had to fight for. "I thought, 'Well, I'm not very comedy … ', but I turned up anyway and met David and Rob," she says. "Then I went away and they saw about 400 other people, so I obviously blew them away."
Mitchell, an Observer columnist, has a more flattering memory of the encounter. "To be honest, I've never really thought there's much of a distinction between comic acting and acting," he says. "There aren't many good comic actors who aren't also pretty good straight actors if they turn their hand to it – and vice versa. Certainly, Keeley is very good at both and Ambassadors is very much a comedy drama rather than a sitcom, so in many ways the bigger question is what are a couple of clowns like Rob and me doing in a drama about diplomats, not what is a respected actress like Keeley doing in a comedy."
Hawes's enduring roles have tended to depict her as cool and competent – "She comes across as extremely likable and intelligent on screen," says Mitchell. "She is also, I'd like to stress, very likable and intelligent in real life." But she is also hoping to mess with that perception. In The Tunnel, Sky Atlantic's forthcoming adaptation of the Scandinavian hit drama The Bridge (the action is relocated from the bridge between Denmark and Sweden to the tunnel between England and France), she again plays against type as Suze, a drug-addicted care worker.
"The high-profile things I've done have been women who are very contained, self-controlled and capable," says Hawes. "And suddenly, in The Tunnel, there's this woman being sick into her own hair and completely at a loss with what to do with her life. It spirals out of control and explodes. It's nice, because people usually see me as quite clean and tidy."
Is that an accurate reflection of what Hawes is like off screen – composed and together, that is, rather than vomiting into her hair? "I can see why people would think that, yeah," she replies.
Part of that organisation comes from necessity. Hawes has two children with Macfadyen: Maggie and Ralph, aged eight and six; and a 13-year-old son Myles with her first husband, Spencer McCallum. Childcare is an unrelenting consideration, particularly from now until the new year, as both Hawes and Macfadyen will be taking nightly trips to the West End (he's playing Jeeves opposite Stephen Mangan's Bertie Wooster in Perfect Nonsense at the Duke of York's theatre in London).
"It's a posh problem when you're an actor," says Hawes. "We spend so much time sat on our arses at home, so it's quite a luxurious thing for us both to be working. I'll be able to take the kids to school, go and see their school plays, which is something you can't do when you're filming because you leave at 6am and you get back at 8pm. I think it will be fine: they are very used to us coming and going or appearing one day with a massive 'tache."
Hawes says that she is finally becoming more relaxed about acting: she accepts now that there will be times when she doesn't work – almost six months last year – and other periods, like this autumn, when she appears to be on every channel. Some of her work will be well-received, other performances won't.
"I've stopped worrying about whether people think what I do is any good," she says. "I've taken stick in the past and I've genuinely worried and got incredibly upset. Now I just think that I'm lucky enough to be working – it's going to sound wanky – in a job I love and where there would be a queue of people behind me if I didn't want to do it. My kids are all healthy and I've got a lovely, gorgeous husband. It takes 37 years to work that out, though I'm sure it will always hurt when somebody says something horrible. It would hurt any of us."
Surely the good reviews outweigh the bad? "Well, I've been at it a long time," she replies with a raucous laugh. "I've been working since I was nine, so if everything had been badly received, I'd have probably found something else to do by now."
It is certainly going to be hard to miss Hawes over the next few months. As she takes one final sip of detox tea, we haven't even had time to discuss the fact that she is joining the second series of Line of Duty, the most successful BBC2 drama for almost a decade, and there's also a role in the fantasy children's film, Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box. Any concern that we might get sick of her?
Hawes thinks for a moment. "It's just the way it's scheduled and I'm not the controller of the BBC," she says. "And if people are sick of me – in the words of Chrissie Packer – they can fack awf!"
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I only wanted one time to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain
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I'm not sure if I had, to be fair.
that should be full of laughs 
going to read now 
