How a children’s author (who once posed nude for Mayfair) terrorised a 6ft 4in TV king
Thought YOUR neighbours were irritating? Then read the jaw-dropping story of the five-year feud in leafy West London that turned into a £1m court case
‘The banging and shouting continued every single day’
‘It was a frightening level of anger’
WHEN he was cast as a ruthless Saxon king who tortured and killed his enemies, actor Ivan Kaye delighted his fans with an all-too-convincing performance.
‘Perfectly enjoyable,’ is how the 57-year-old star described some of his most bloodthirsty scenes in the television series, Vikings. One particularly memorable scene in the popular History Channel series saw his vindictive alter ego, King Aelle of Northumbria, tossing his arch nemesis into a pit of venomous snakes.
Nothing in Mr Kaye’s fictional on-screen life, however, appears to have prepared the former EastEnders’ actor for the real-life battle he faced with his neighbour in the flat downstairs — children’s author Amanda Lees.
‘Terrifying’ was the word he used to describe 53-year-old Ms Lees at Central London County Court, where their ongoing five-year spat was laid bare in all its gory glory this week.
Ms Lees, claimed 6ft 4in Mr Kaye, was ‘frighteningly angry’ and caused him anxiety and distress when she banged on the ceiling and screamed ‘like someone was being murdered’ in protest at the noise he was making upstairs in the Victorian property in West London where they both own flats.
She shouted at the slightest noise, he claimed, and even complained to the police when he had friends around.
Judge Richard Roberts, who presided over the hearing on The Strand in Central London, evidently agreed with him.
He accepted Mr Kaye’s claim that he was forced to move out of his £850,000 maisonette after a fiveyear-long campaign of harassment by Ms Lees left him ‘frightened to move around his own home’.
He also sided with Mr Kaye, who most recently appeared in the BBC’s The Woman In White miniseries, over the matter of Ms Lees’ ‘unreasonably overgrown’ plants in the front and back gardens and has ordered her to have them cut back.
Single mother Ms Lees, who was not in court to hear the judgment made against her and had no solicitor to represent her, is now facing a potentially crippling legal bill of up to £1 million.
So how on earth did the elegant, convent-educated brunette manage to frighten Mr Kaye — a veritable giant of a man, who describes himself as a ‘villain for hire’ thanks to his frequent roles as the archetypal ‘baddie’?
Certainly, as the Mail found this week, there is more than meets the eye to this saga, which stretches back to 2013, when divorced father-of-two Ivan Kaye spent £650,000 on the upstairs maisonette in the semi-detached property in Ravenscourt Park where Ms Lees had owned the groundfloor flat since 2001.
When he bought the property, Mr Kaye told the court, he was already aware that mother-ofone Ms Lees had concerns about noise coming from the flat above hers.
But he said that when he tried to arrange a meeting with his new neighbour to discuss the matter, she refused to answer her door to him.
Despite subsequently meeting for a drink at his flat, he claimed that just days later she ‘blanked’ him when they met in the hallway.
The previous owner, surgeon Christopher Thorn, also gave evidence in court, saying that he, too, had endured run-ins with Ms Lees and that her behaviour became so bad that his partner had moved out with their baby daughter.
A former tenant of Mr Kaye, a young student who moved in with friends when Mr Kaye moved out, described Ms Lees as ‘petrifying and harsh’.
‘The banging and shouting continued every single day,’ she told the court.
Damning evidence indeed, but none of this sits easily with the picture described to the Mail by others who live in the quiet, upmarket street.
Hong Kong-born Ms Lees, whose father was an Oxfordeducated Gurkha intelligence officer and Scottish mother a nursing matron, is described as ‘friendly’ by several who know her, as well as highly sociable and communityminded — not to mention ‘hilariously witty’ on the website of a local business association of which she is a member.
She was a staunch supporter of her now teenage daughter’s West London primary school and has enjoyed good relations with members of the large Polish Catholic Church situated in her road ever since she was asked by the Metropolitan Police to sit on a community panel set up to help ease tensions between locals and the congregation.
Can this really be the same woman who, according to Mr Kaye, waged a campaign of harassment which left him and his partner, make-up artist Beatrix Archer, ‘whispering and imprisoned upstairs’?
According to a neighbour who lives in a flat adjacent to the property occupied by Mr Kaye and Ms Lees, the root of this row lies in the infrastructure of the property itself.
‘You can hear your neighbours in these sorts of buildings, so you have to be very considerate,’ he says. ‘When I moved in, the first thing that the people downstairs said to me was, if you don’t sound-proof your floor, we’re going to sue you — so I put down some vinyl and carpet.
‘Amanda quite often told me: “They’re driving me crazy with the noises upstairs.” That was Ivan and Beatrix. I never met them, but I could hear them walking up and down the stairs. Their stairs are on the other side of the wall to my stairs. There’s no soundproofing so you have to be respectful of your neighbour.’
Mr Kaye’s partner Beatrix insisted in court that they had been respectful, but to no avail.
‘No matter how quietly we moved about the house, she banged, sent emails and threats, and yelled constantly,’ she said.
But the 57-year-old businessman who lives next door to both Mr Kaye and Ms Lees said that he had also heard noise from Mr Kaye’s property, two or three years ago when it was being rented out.
‘It’s one of those things that’s built up over time,’ he said. ‘Noise does drive you crazy.
‘The people who Ivan rented the property out to would hold sessions where there would be chanting. I could hear it in my house. It was a bit odd.
‘It would go on even in the daytime and it sounded like there were between four to eight people. In the end, Amanda called the council — so that put an end to it after about six months.’
Born in Hong Kong after her parents met in the jungle in Borneo, Ms Lees had travelled the world by the age of eight. She speaks four different languages and, most recently, while carrying out research for
her latest book, trained SAS-style in the Brecon Beacons. When she decided to buy a holiday cottage near the Black Sea in Bulgaria, she walked through Heathrow Airport with the cash for the purchase strapped to her leg.
A self-confessed ‘wild child of the Eighties’, she was expelled from her English convent boarding school at the age of 17 after posing naked for Mayfair magazine, and, according to her own website, was subsequently ‘summarily ejected’ from a Jesuit boy’s school.
She later studied drama at Bretton Hall College of Education in West Yorkshire, but aside from her first TV appearance as a member of the French Resistance in ’Allo ’Allo!, which saw her running around with a dachshund under her arm, her acting career never really took off.
She turned to writing books, she said in a talk she gave at Waterstone’s bookshop in London’s Notting Hill in 2009, simply to make money.
Her early forays into writing were done under the pen-name, Amanda Craven, and included the 1999 book Sex Magic — How To Cast A Spell In The Bedroom, which featured recipes for aphrodisiacs as well as a step-by-step guide to ‘capturing and keeping the man of your dreams’.
Her first novel, Selling Out, was about a part-time, ‘high-class’ prostitute and earned her a sixfigure advance in 2001 — the same year as the birth of her daughter. She followed that, a year later, with another romantic comedy, Secret Admirer, before penning the first of a trilogy for young adults entitled Kumari, Goddess Of Gotham, featuring a feisty young Nepalese goddess-intraining whose adventures, she said, were inspired by her own exotic childhood.
Hardly surprising, one might argue, that such a prolific writer would be desperate for peace and quiet in which to work.
‘I am one of those writers who becomes wholly absorbed in their work,’ she wrote in a blog on her website. ‘Hell, I don’t even play the radio when I’m writing. I need peace. Silence.’
But according to her upstairs neighbour Mr Kaye, the writer was ‘over-sensitive to noise’.
‘It was a frightening level of anger being spat out,’ he claimed. ‘And this was engendered by going in the kitchen, opening the fridge door and going out.
‘Every time when you came in the front gate, you could see her at the wooden blind of her window, already warming up to be angry about us walking up the stairs or whatever.’
For Northamptonshire-born Kaye, whose rich, booming voice has also made him much in demand for voice-overs for the gaming industry, Ms Lee’s behaviour was stressful indeed. He said that he and his partner resorted to ‘camping out’ on the upper floor with the television before moving out and renting the flat to students.
‘I thought it was me personally she had taken against and that it would resolve into a thaw when she didn’t have me upstairs.’
But the students who moved in suffered similar complaints.
One of them, 19-year-old Shalini Chatterjee, told the court: ‘It felt like we were being attacked every day by someone who did not want us to be there. I remember going to bed and being scared to walk down the corridor to get a glass of water before bed.’
According to Mr Kaye, Ms Lees’ endless complaints were part of a campaign to ensure silence above her by keeping the flat empty or buying it herself.
‘She sort of thinks the place is all hers,’ Mr Kaye told the judge. ‘That’s what I think: that having people upstairs is not for her.’
He and his partner now live a five-minute drive away in a fourbedroom terrace house on a Thirties housing estate. Mr Kaye, who appeared in the 2004 cult film Layer Cake and on TV as Dr Jonathan Leroy in East-Enders between 2003 and 2005, this week declined to comment about the case.
In court, he claimed that the dispute has rendered his property — which should now be worth around £850,000 — effectively worthless.
‘I do not believe that anyone would be prepared to purchase it due to her actions.’
His lawyers say that the final bill facing Ms Lees could be as much as £1million because he is also claiming compensation for ‘anxiety and distress’.
Ms Lees, who had asked for the case to be postponed on the grounds of ill health, has also been banned by the court from threatening or intimidating Mr Kaye, his tenants and visitors, or from communicating with them, aside from emergencies.
She was also banned from banging on the ceiling, shouting or screaming at those above and obstructing them in accessing or leaving the flat.
She has been given until August 20 to have the plants in her garden cut back. The level of compensation she will have to pay will be decided at a later hearing.
Ms Lees declined to discuss the case this week. She is said to be away on a caravanning holiday with her 16-year-old daughter. It is not clear whether or not she will appeal against the judgment.
‘To destroy someone’s life over this is crazy,’ says her neighbour. ‘It’s a communication breakdown.’
In future, of course, Ms Lees might do better to decamp to her Bulgarian cottage when she wants to write in silence.
For, above all, this stranger-thanfiction story provides a salutary tale for anyone who has ever considered banging on a wall or a ceiling to hush up the neighbour on the other side.
‘To destroy someone’s life over this is crazy’