Keeley Hawes
Fresh from the thrilling Bodyguard, Keeley Hawes’s latest TV role in Mrs Wilson re-tells an intriguing real-life story…
You can barely turn on the TV these days without spotting the formidable Keeley Hawes starring in a major new drama series.
As one of our leading television actresses, she has enchanted us as matriarch Louisa Durrell in The Durrells and gripped us with her per formance as Home Secretar y in Bodyguard.
She admits the plot of her latest TV drama, a three-part BBC1 series called Mrs Wilson, sounded very far-fetched when she first read the script. Yet it’s based on a shocking true stor y!
Ruth Wilson, best known for playing Alice Morgan in Luther and Alison Bailey in The Affair, takes the leading role as this remarkable story is that of her real-life grandmother, Alison Wilson. Following the death of her husband, young Alison is stunned when a woman named Dorothy turns up on her doorstep claiming to be “the real” Mrs Wilson.
Alison is determined to prove the validity of her own marriage to Alec – played by Iain Glen – but is instead led into a world of disturbing secrets.
“The whole thing is one revelation after another. It’s just extraordinary,” says Keeley, who plays Alec’s other wife, Dorothy. “If it wasn’t real, I would have read the script and said, ‘Oh, come on!’”
This stranger-than-fiction tale was only partly revealed by Alison Wilson’s memoir in which she details how she met Alec and fell in love with him before discovering his betrayal. The full truth will forever remain a mystery as Alison, who also wrote extensive diaries, later burned any reference to Alec.
However, it is known that Alexander (Alec) Wilson’s life was full of lies and subter fuge, for he was not only a writer of spy novels but a spy himself!
It also transpired that he had more than just two wives…
“My immediate reaction to hearing about Alec is that he sounds awful,” says Keeley. “But the other side of it is that he always seemed to be doing the right thing by each of the women who believed they were his wife. He had several children with them and all the women, as well as the children, considered him to be a brilliant father.
“Because of this, the family is ver y protective of him and don’t want him to be portrayed in a bad light. He was much adored by all of the children!”
So what did Keeley discover about her character Dorothy?
“She was an actress and they met when he was posted to India, where he worked as a Professor of English but was actually there in an undercover role, trying to find out whether there were Nazi sympathisers within the British embassy there.
“A ‘handler’ put him together with Dorothy to schmooze in the society of the time, and she loved moving in those circles. They had an immediate attraction and fell in love, got married and had a son. No one knows how many wives Alexander had. He had to tell so many lies to cover up his life as a spy and it’s all very complex.”
In real life, Keeley is married to actor
“No one knows HOW MANY wives he had. As A SPY he told SO MANY LIES!”
Matthew Macfadyen, whom she met in the BBC spy drama series Spooks. She has two children with him – Maggie (13) and Ralph (11) as well as Myles (18) from her first marriage.
Ever-busy, she has recently finished filming the fourth and final series of The Durrells in Cor fu, which will be shown next year, along with two spy and Cold War drama series. In the Channel 4 drama Jerusalem, set in the aftermath of WWII, she plays Priscilla, the civil service boss of a 20-something woman who is secretly spying on her government for the Americans. And in Summer Of Rockets for BBC2, set in 1958, she plays Kathleen, wife of MP Richard Shaw (Linus Roache) who are both being spied upon by MI5.
But Keeley’s still looking ahead to other things she’d like to explore.
“I’d quite like to do a play with my husband at some point because I think he’s a brilliant stage actor,” she says. “He seems ver y serious but he’s the world’s worst at corpsing. He’s such fun to work with!”