BEAUTIFUL, BRIGHT... AND HUNGRY FOR FAME
LONG before she thrust herself into the limelight as the leading lady in a spectacular tale of politics and sex, Serena Cowdy had a notion to become a serious actress. Her ‘big break’ came in the 2006 film, Shuga Shuga, a sadly rather forgettable short in which she plays a pretty young wife oblivious to her husband’s straying eye as he considers betraying her with a saucy ‘dancer’ whom he follows into a seedy strip club.
The film, made on a budget of £3,000, predictably sank without trace, but surely the image of Miss Cowdy as a spurned wife must stir up feelings of bitter irony among those devastated by today’s extraordinary revelations.
Not that she would be expected to dwell on the trampled feelings of others. Ever since her acting days, as her hugely informative website makes clear, she has single-mindedly placed her own interests centre stage.
Miss Cowdy was raised single-handedly by her father, Vernon, in what she described in a Guardian interview as ‘a tiny bedsit in central London’. As a child, she was fascinated by wildlife, once recalling: ‘I loved animals, but we didn’t have room for a pet and we couldn’t afford to go to London Zoo.
‘So instead, my dad took me on “urban safaris”, introducing me to all the wildlife that was right on our doorstep. I fed the sparrows on the window ledge, made friends with the squirrels in the parks, and spotted enormous stag beetles pottering along the pavements.’
A clever child, she went on to gain a 2:1 in modern history at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, then the university’s last all-female bastion. She specialised in Irish political history and it was only later that her head would be turned by Scottish political figures.
She left university with the goal of making her name in showbusiness and won a place at London’s Royal Central School of Speech & Drama.
Yet fame eluded her. On her website, which includes a gallery featuring some rather vampish studio shots, she says: ‘After pottering about being an actress for a few years, I decided I’d like to be a journalist instead. So here I am!’ In fact, she began writing the ‘Diary Of An Out-Of-Work Actress’ for a London-based magazine while still struggling to make ends meet.
A piece entitled ‘An Office Affair’ lightheartedly recounts how she tried to arouse the interest of a work colleague, including enlisting fellow employees to help her ‘stalk’ her intended beau. She writes: ‘I will utilise my acting training to the full, creating a persona with the kooky charm of Roberts, fragile vulnerability of Pfeiffer and laid-back cool of Diaz.’
In one particularly intriguing past incarnation, Miss Cowdy set herself up dispensing dating advice via an online column. She talks in one piece about engineering chance encounters with men she fancies, or ‘targets’ as they are described. She concludes: ‘In our efforts to snare our beloveds, fate must be given a gentle nudge, or a hearty kick up the backside.’
HAVING apparently given up on her acting career, Miss Cowdy transformed herself into a wildlife journalist, writing and contributing photographs for the likes of Time Out, the Guardian and World of Animals, and appearing on Sky News and BBC radio as a wildlife commentator.
More recently she started to write for House, Westminster’s weekly magazine, where she seems quite at home studying the behaviour of political animals close up within the rarefied environment of the Houses of Parliament.
Just when Stewart Hosie first caught her eye is unclear, but when, on December 25, 2014, the MP tweeted: ‘Hope that everyone is having a wonderful Christmas’, Miss Cowdy was one of 54 followers to like it.
When she was writing her dating advice column, Miss Cowdy touched on ‘The dos and don’ts of dumping etiquette’, in which she sagely notes: ‘Girls remember the bad dumpings of years gone by as boys remember great World Cup goals.’ What, one wonders, must Shona Robison have made of Miss Cowdy’s scoring technique?