WILD WILD LIFE
From Ashes to animals for Keeley Hawes
Back in 2011, Keeley Hawes did one of those newspaper questionnaires where she was asked about her likes and dislikes.
Under the heading A Book That Changed Me, she wrote, ‘‘One of the first books I read was
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. Having never travelled or really been anywhere, it opened up a whole other world of possibility for me.’’
Jump forward five years and Hawes is appearing in The
Durrells, a loose adaptation of three of Gerald Durrell’s books, including My Family and Other
Animals. Here, then, is one of those rare cases when an actor who claims to have spent years dreaming about playing a part actually has the evidence to back it up.
As I’m shown into an office on the top floor of ITV’s London headquarters, two things about Hawes immediately become apparent. One is that she is even more striking in the flesh than she is on-screen – with expressive, arching eyebrows and a formidably no-nonsense jaw.
The second is that for some reason she is very eccentrically dressed, wrapped in an enormous men’s overcoat out of the bottom of which poke a pair of gleaming white trainers. The woman she plays in The
Durrells was, in her own way, also pretty eccentric. Keenly interested in both spiritualism and cookery, Louisa Dixie Durrell was leading the life of an impecunious widow in suburban Bournemouth in the mid-1930s when she suddenly decided to take her four children, and their dog, off to the wilds of Corfu.
‘‘I knew very little about her beforehand,’’ says Hawes, ‘‘but I do think that what she did was incredibly brave. In those days, Corfu was the other side of the world. Not only did she have four children, between the ages of eight and 18, but she didn’t know anyone in Corfu, didn’t speak the language, or even have anywhere to live.‘‘
However fond Hawes may have been of My Family and Other
Animals, when she was offered the part she didn’t immediately start dancing on the furniture. ‘‘At first, I thought to myself, surely no one is going to believe in my relationship with these children because, well, because I’m so young.’’
She gives a roar of surprisingly throaty laughter. ‘‘And all through filming I kept thinking, do I really look old enough to play this part? But then when I watched it, I thought, what on earth was I worrying about? After all, I’m 40 now, almost exactly the same age as Louisa Durrell was when she went to Corfu. How can I possibly baulk at playing someone who was almost the same age as me?’’
And here we come to something else unusual about Hawes, something almost unheard of in a member of the acting profession – she seems completely devoid of vanity. ‘‘I remember when I did Line of
Duty‘‘ – in the second series of Jed Mercurio’s acclaimed police drama, Hawes played a deeply stressed policewoman – ’’I overheard one of the electricians saying to the makeup lady, ‘God, you’ve done an amazing job on Keeley, making her look like that’. And the makeup lady said, ‘Actually, I haven’t done anything at all’. She was right – that’s just how I look when I get up in the morning.
‘‘As I’ve got older, I’ve realised that I don’t really have any vanity – although other people might disagree, of course. But when you’ve done something like Line
of Duty and people see you looking like that – well, it’s pretty hard to be vain. Also, I genuinely don’t really care what people think of me. I never have. Maybe that’s weird, I don’t know? But what does bother me is whether I might have hurt someone’s feelings – I can get very anxious about that.’’
Along with not minding if she looks frumpy – or worse – she is constantly on the lookout for parts that test her. It’s how she has ended up doing her first Shakespeare – playing Elizabeth Woodville in both Richard III and
Henry VI, Part 2 for the BBC’s forthcoming second series of The Hollow Crown.
‘‘I was doing it with Judi Dench and Benedict Cumberbatch and I remember thinking to myself on the first day, if I fall on my a... here, there won’t be any hiding it. But if you’re going to do Shakespeare and you’re lucky enough to be in a cast like that, there’s no better way of learning. And, anyway, life would be very boring if you didn’t take risks, wouldn’t it?’’
If you’re going to leap into the unknown, it probably helps if you have an unusually stable home life to go back to. For the past 14 years Hawes has been married to her former Spooks co-star Matthew Macfadyen – they have two children, aged 9 and 11, and she has another son from her first, brief marriage to the cartoonist Spencer McCallum.
Under the circumstances, it seems somewhat ironic that in order to play Louisa Durrell – a woman who takes her four children off to start a new life – Hawes had to abandon her own children, although only for a few weeks.
‘‘That is a bit odd, I know, but actually it worked out pretty well – although there was a lot of commuting involved. I think my children are old enough now to realise that’s just the way things are. And when we’re not working and stuck at home they can’t wait for us to go back to work.’’
Things haven’t always been so happy for Hawes though. In her teens, she began to suffer from depression, something that, to some degree, has dogged her since. I wondered if being an actress meant that this was something she felt she had to try to hide, at least in the early days.
‘‘Well, you can’t hide it. That’s my experience anyway. It’s impossible to go about your daily business and pretend that it’s not happening. I mean, it’s not like self-harm where you can cover it up.’’
Although she seems loath to say it, I get the sense that one of the things that helps keep Hawes’ depression at bay is the fact that she works so much. ‘‘It’s true that I – how can I put this without everyone hating me? Put it this way, I’m quite consistent.’’
What she means is that she hardly ever stops. You can look at Hawes’ CV in search of great deserts of unemployment, but you’ll be looking in vain: Tipping the Velvet, Spooks, Ashes to Ashes, The Casual Vacancy – the list goes on and on.
But it was Line of Duty that really shook things up, making people see just what she was capable of. ‘‘It did really change everything, particularly the sort of scripts I was sent. They suddenly became much more interesting. The expectation of me was different.’’
Did it change her idea about her own capabilities as well?
‘‘No,’’ she says, not altogether jokingly, ‘‘I always knew I was good.’’– The Daily Telegraph ❚ The Durrells 8.30pm, Wednesdays, Prime.