THE KEELEY EFFECT

THERE’S PROBABLY A REASON WHY THE TV SHOWS SHE HAS APPEARED IN HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE BIGGEST HITTERS OF THE PAST TWO DECADES – BUT KEELEY HAWES IS FAR TOO SELF-EFFACING TO ADMIT IT’S ALL DOWN TO HER. ELIZABETH DAY MEETS ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL – BUT GL

Red’s cover star talks love, marriage and being taken too seriously

When Keeley Hawes’ eldest son, Myles, was a toddler, he saw her on the television. Mystified by the fact his mother was both on screen and sitting next to him, he walked up to the TV, examined it closely, peered around the back, and asked, ‘How do you get inside?’

‘He was really confused,’ Hawes says now, laughing. We’re sitting in a high-ceilinged restaurant in Richmond, south-west London, and Hawes, 42, is drinking hot water and lemon as she tries to get over a winter cold.

It’s the sort of deliciously discreet place where waiters speak in hushed tones and customers sit on muted green banquettes, surrounded by brass light fixtures, but Hawes is not one to stand on ceremony.

She is dressed in a black crew-neck jumper and jeans and is immediately warm and forthcoming. She is, in the flesh, an improbably beautiful woman – a former model with high cheekbones and delicate features – yet she possesses none of the stand-offishness one might expect.

Her conversation is peppered with jokes and selfdeprecating asides. She admits to being anxious about interviews because her humour is often misinterpreted. Recently, a Sunday newspaper supplement ran a piece, accompanied by a front-cover photograph of her face and the headline ‘I Always Knew I Was Good!’. Myles, no longer a toddler but a strapping 17-year-old, texted her a picture of the cover to tease her. She was mortified.

‘I looked really smug,’ she says. ‘But actually, what

I said was a joke. Never in a million years did I think it would be taken seriously. And you want to run around grabbing every copy, but it’s completely out of your control. People are picking it up and going, “Oh my God. What?” Because I would. I’d pick that up and go, “Oh, this person sounds like a bit of a twit.” And that person is me!’

Being an actor, as her son rightly identified at an early age, is a fairly surreal business. Hawes isn’t entirely sure she’s got used to it yet, even though she’s been working solidly since 1995. She’s starred in many of the most memorable hit TV dramas of the past 20 years – she was a Victorian lesbian in Tipping The Velvet, a spy in Spooks, a police psychologist in Ashes To Ashes, a grieving mother in The Missing and, in the second series of Line Of Duty, she wowed audiences with her stripped-back portrayal of a police officer being investigated for corruption.

Along the way, she had three children without much of a let up in professional pace. Her first marriage, to

‘DIVORCE WAS AWFUL. BUT MY EX-HUSBAND IS ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS IN THE WORLD’

Myles’s father, DJ Spencer Mccallum, ended in divorce in 2004, after she met and fell in love with her Spooks co-star Matthew Macfadyen. She and Macfadyen went on to have two children together, Maggie, 13, and Ralph, 11.

Taking the decision to end her first marriage ‘was just horrible. It was awful. But it was a long time ago now. And we have this wonderful son and my exhusband is still one of my best friends in the world.’

In fact, Mccallum and his girlfriend live just down the road and often babysit.

‘They are just really wonderful, generous human beings who, ultimately, have always put my son and my other children first,’ Hawes says. ‘And I can’t thank them enough, really.

‘Divorce doesn’t have to be messy. I think as long as people concentrate on the children above themselves – which is difficult, I know – maybe that’s the way to make it work.’

Hawes is about to return to our screens as Louisa Durrell, the widowed mother who decides to up sticks and move her four children from drab 1930s London to Corfu in The Durrells, ITV’S charming Sunday-night drama. The third and latest series, adapted by screenwriter Simon Nye from Gerald Durrell’s trilogy of much-loved novels, including My Family And Other Animals, is set in 1937 and promises much of the aspirational villa porn that made the first two series such enchanting viewing.

‘It’s a delight to film,’ says Hawes. ‘Corfu is beautiful and the people are lovely. It’s sort of a joke job, really.’

She refers to her four on-set children as ‘my fake family – the difference is, I can walk away from them’ and, in the two years since the first series was broadcast, she’s watched them grow older in tandem with her own three real-life kids. Milo Parker, who plays Gerald Durrell, is now 16; a year younger than Hawes’ eldest son, whom she also nicknames Milo.

‘Yes, it’s confusing,’ she giggles.

She thinks the reason behind the show’s popularity is, ‘that sort of Pixar thing, where as an adult you can sit and laugh at the jokes that go right over the kids’ heads.’

She launches into a story about how her daughter, Maggie, asked a friend round for tea last year ‘and my daughter hadn’t told her what I do or didn’t care.’ Hawes was doing some washing up, about to prepare dinner, and could feel this girl ‘sort of looking, looking, looking, and suddenly she said, “Are you… Mrs Durrell?”’ »

Hawes laughs at the memory. ‘I said, “Yes, yes I am.”’ Her family often head out to Corfu during the eight weeks when Hawes is filming. She and Macfadyen do not have a nanny, and manage to make their schedules work with help from friends and family. She had her children young (‘they were all planned… my mother had her children young and I just thought that was how it would be for me’) and travelling for work has become easier now that the kids are a bit older. Hawes is aware that as her youngest two enter adolescence, ‘I am becoming the most irritating person on the planet. That’s what happens.’

When she speaks, Hawes is for ever on the brink of poking fun at herself. She frequently stops and re-starts sentences, hesitating to find the right word or phrase, and half-expressed ideas are often left falling into ellipsis.

For someone so self-possessed on screen, Hawes seems sweetly rather unsure of herself in real life.

She was a stage-school kid, but has none of the overweening confidence that might imply. In fact, Hawes is the daughter of a black-cab driver, and grew up on a council estate in Marylebone with two brothers and a sister. No one in her family knew any actors. It was only when the Sylvia Young Stage School opened up across the road from her house that she realised such a profession existed. She attended from the age of nine to 16, and her contemporaries included actor Kellie Bright and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton, both of whom are still friends.

‘I loved it,’ Hawes says. ‘But it’s a very different world now with X Factor and this sort of celebrity explosion… I think people go there now with that in mind, possibly. But it wasn’t really like that for any of us. There was no one with a raging ambition to be a movie star. We were all there because we enjoyed acting and dancing.’

At Sylvia Young, Hawes had elocution lessons. Her London accent lost its rougher edges and ever since she’s sounded far posher than she feels. People often assume she comes from a semi-aristocratic background.

‘It’s the best acting I do,’ she says drily. ‘Yeah,

I’m not really posh. It’s weird that, isn’t it? I think the actors I work with often think I’m posh, too.’

After stage school, Hawes took on a series of part-time jobs as a model and interned for women’s magazines (she was in the shoe cupboard of Cosmopolitan when the call came through that she’d won a part in Dennis Potter’s 1996 TV series Karaoke). She has always worked in order to support herself – and it hasn’t always been easy.

She went through a period of depression when she was 17 and took anti-depressants ‘for a few years, but no other treatment… there wasn’t the sort of help there is now. I had friends and support. I got through it.’

She still suffers from anxiety, saying, ‘I’m very anxious. I worry about big things, but I also worry about little things. I’ll worry about this interview now for a month. And it’s all unnecessary.’

She’s on Twitter, but hardly ever uses it because

‘my heart races when I Tweet. I can’t take it back!’ Is Macfadyen adept at calming her down?

‘He is good and then he just gets bored of me and goes, “Shut up!” which is probably the best thing he could do.’

The couple are still very much in love. Macfadyen told her if she ever got Botox in her forehead, he’d divorce her.

‘But he didn’t say anything about this part,’ she says, pressing the barely noticeable loose flesh around her neck with the palms of her hands.

To be fair, Hawes doesn’t need any help. She looks the same as she did 10 years ago. She says she’d hate to have Botox ‘because people can see it. I couldn’t have my lips done and play Mrs Durrell because suddenly you wouldn’t believe in Mrs Durrell, and that would be awful!’

It’s an interesting time to be a woman in this particular industry. Hawes and I are meeting a few days after the 2018 Golden Globes, when actresses took to the red carpet wearing black gowns in solidarity for the victims of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the rise of the #Metoo movement.

Hawes thought it was ‘brilliant… There’s a long way to go, but the idea of something like what’s happening now happening six months ago would have been extraordinary.’ Has she ever experienced sexual harassment herself?

‘Yes. I don’t really want to go into it, but something happened to me – not on set, but it was something to do with my work… and it was inappropriate behaviour from a man in power.’

She dismissed it at the time, and only recently told friends about what happened.

Had she heard rumours about Weinstein before the shocking allegations were made public?

‘Yes!’ she shrieks. ‘I’m an actress from south-west London and I mostly work on British TV, and even I heard rumours about him. I think everybody knew,’ she adds. ‘It’s like the Jimmy Savile thing. For a long, long time people had heard rumours about him and nothing was done. So, it’s another example of that, really.’

Given she’s been in the industry so long – and that it’s Red’s 20th birthday this year – what advice would she give her 20-year-old self?

‘Don’t smoke,’ she replies quickly. ‘Moisturise.’

A few days later, she texts me with further thoughts, ‘Get a financial adviser – you’re rubbish with money – and a stylist! And be kinder to yourself.’

And then Keeley Hawes, one of the nicest, funniest and most thoughtful women you can imagine, adds, ‘Hope that’s okay?’

It absolutely is. Just like her, it’s more than okay. The Durrells returns to ITV in April.

‘I AM VERY ANXIOUS. I WORRY ABOUT BIG AND LITTLE THINGS’