Sophie Cookson plays Christine Keeler
In a new miniseries about the Profumo Affair, Sophie Cookson gives Christine Keeler a voice
While the actress Sophie Cookson was filming The Trial of Christine Keeler, a new BBC drama series about the Profumo affair of the early Sixties, in which the 19-year-old showgirl was revealed to be having simultaneous liaisons with the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet naval attaché — a scandal that eventually helped bring down the government of Harold Macmillan — she noticed a contemporary parallel. Former Conservative Party publicist Carrie Symonds was plastered over the front pages for her relationship with Boris Johnson. “So often still the focus is on the young woman,” says Cookson, who plays Keeler. “So this does feel like the perfect story to be telling.”
It’s mid-afternoon and Cookson is sitting cross-legged in jeans and trainers in a members’ club in central London, her hair honeycoloured and loose. The 29-year-old, who grew up in Sussex and Suffolk, landed her first major role straight after graduating from Oxford Drama School, in Matthew Vaughn’s 2014 film, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Last year, she made her West End debut opposite Orlando Bloom in Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe.
The Trial of Christine Keeler, which Cookson says has “all of those classic ingredients: espionage, sex, politics and an underdog,” also stars Ben Miles as Profumo and James Norton as osteopath and high-society “fixer” Stephen Ward. While Cookson is non-committal on Norton’s rumoured taking over of Daniel Craig’s Aston Martin, she does reveal that he is, “very good at doing an imitation of a trumpet, so is useful at a party.”
There have been other dramatisations of the affair, most notably the 1989 film Scandal starring Joanne Whalley as Keeler and John Hurt as Ward, yet the new series will tell events from Keeler’s perspective. It aims to show how unjust it was that a 19-year-old woman was vilified by the press, called a “tart” by the prime minister and pelted with eggs on the way to court.
Still, Cookson maintains, “Christine never wanted to be seen as a victim,” and she found the brash and mouthy aspects of Keeler’s character appealing to play. “The entire country was brought to a standstill because of one girl.” (Keeler died in 2017, aged 75, but will long be remembered as the subject of one of the most iconic photographs of the Sixties: Lewis Morley’s nude portrait of her, sitting astride a modernist chair.)
Cookson and Keeler, perhaps, share something of a mindset. When Cookson first began working as an actress she was advised not to kick up a fuss about grievances she experienced on set, in case she’d be branded a “difficult woman”. “Sod that,” she says with a cackle. “You have to be able to stand your ground.”
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The Trial of Christine Keeler is on BBC One in January 2020