Rising Vamp

Curvy, confident and shamelessly sexy, actress Keeley Hawes is the next A-list Brit girl. Hot from her role as Diana Dors, ELLE transforms her into a bombshell for the 90s. Rosie Green catches the fallout.

Think of Brigitte Bardot wearing nothing but a towel, Liz taylor shot in a slip or Marilyn Monroe naked behind a wisp of silk. Almost bare, free of pinching corsets, spiked shoes and make-up that sets their mouths in a bloody pout, their sex appeal is at its most intoxicating. It is this naturalness that is the cue for today’s modern sexiness – and the theme of ELLE’s shoot with Keeley Hawes.

Five foot nin inches of smooth, alabaster skin, perfectly proportioned curves and a face reminiscent of a young Audrey Hepburn, Keeley is a natural. In the studio she is wearing only a super-small pair of Versace pants and a transparent scarf. Her make-up is simple: smudged eyes, slightly flushed cheeks and bed-head hair.

Perhaps it has something to do with the champagne she has just been sipping, but Keeley is giggling girlishly at the camera. The shots get sexier and sexier, until she is left wearing only half a sheet. ‘Move your leg out a little bit,’ commands Uli, the photographer, who has re-named himself Hugh(as in Hefner) for the day.

The sheet slips off Keeley’s perfectly proportioned bottom. ‘These pictures are hot,’ he says, still in character. Keeley throws her head back and laughs. ‘Hold it,’ Uli says, clicking the camera shutter. A sex symbol is born.

You may already recognise Keeley Hawes. She starred in last year’s BBC blockbuster Our Mutual Friend, with Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh. She scored rave reviews – and was Bafta-short-listed – but still it was Anna, the undisputed darling of the Brit girls, who everyone remembers.

But all this is about to change. At the age of 22, Keeley has landed the big one, the role that is set to shoot her to the top of the A-list. In The Blonde Bombshell (on TV this month), Keeley stars as a young Diana Dors, the orginal British sex symbol. You don’t need bifocals to see how she won the part. Among the roll call of wafer-thin starlets, it’s Keeley’s smouldering sexiness – and let’s face it – her deliciously voluptuous body that screams starler-from-another-era.

Landing the big one

Before she could slip into the waist-clinching, bust-swelling Diana Dors frocks, Keeley had to put on a stone and a half. ‘Did I look okay?’ Keeley asks, knowing I’ve seen The Blonde Bombshell preview tape and she hasn’t. Yeah, you look really fab. ‘Really fat?’ she asks. No, it went on in all the right places. Beleive me.

‘You know, putting on all that weight didn’t bother me at all,’ laughs Keeley. ‘It was the most enjoyable experience of my life. I had a fried breakfast every day and threw doughnut after doughnut down my neck.’ You didn’t do it the Elle MacPherson way, then? ‘Which way is that?’ she asks, looking worried. With a personal trainer and a special high-carb diet. ‘Yeah, right, sure…’

So, how did it feel to be bigger and curvier? ‘Sexier,’ she says without pausing. ‘I loved having all those curves, When I was a model I used to worry about not fitting into the clothes. Then, just as I finished filming the Diana Dors role, I did a fashion shoot and, of course, I couldn’t fit into any of the dresses – they had to leave them open at the back. After that I thought, ‘Fuck it’ and I stopped comparing myself to all my model friends.

‘I felt such freedom – not having to worry about my weight. That’s what Diana Dors was like. She had so much confidence about how she looked and was completely unapologetic about it – she ate, drank and wore what she wanted to. And she was so sexy.

‘But,’ Keeley adds with a grin, ‘I didn’t love my jeans not fitting.’ Nor, it turns out, did she love the blue contact lenses that coloured the whole world aqua, the false nails that snagged on everything or having to bleach her hair white so it wouldn’t show underneath her itchy wig. What? Your hair was granny white? ‘Pretty much,’ she winces. ‘I looked like an albino – bloody awful. It was worth it, though. I couldn’t believe how different they made me look. But I wouldn’t want to go through it again.’ Thanks God bombshell beauty isn’t about all that anymore, I say. ‘Thank God,’ she agrees, trying to rip off the last of her false nails.

Star material

Keeley’s rise didn’t happen overnight. She never planned to be an actress. But in a Hollywood-style twist of fate, she was brought up right opposite Sylvia Young’s Theatre School. ‘I used to hear the noise,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what they were doing in there, but I wanted to be a part of it.’

She sang. She danced. She shared a class with Emma (Baby Spice) Bunton and looked ahead to Dani Behr, Denise Van Outen and the All Saints sisters in classes above her. But while it happened for them, Keeley’s dream of hitting the big time faltered. At one point she decided to pack it all in and train to be an English teacher. A strange choice? ‘All my friends were having such a hard time getting work,’ she explains. ‘And I love drama, so being an English teacher seemed a perfect solution.’

But before she got the chance to step into a classroom, Keeley was spotted by a model scout. ‘Modelling was fun,’ she laughs, ‘but I wasn’t exactly a supermodel. I never made much money but I got to travel.’ How come she didn’t stick at it? ‘It felt a bit seedy and it was the time that heroin chic was really big,’ she says. ‘All those girls like Tania Court and Kate Moss were around and I was never really thin enough. I remember one day an agent told my friend she had to lose some weight from her wrists. Her wrists! I mean, come on, please.’ After that, Keeley ditched modelling, but not dressing up – she ended up working in the fashion department of a glossy women’s magazine. ‘I loved it,’ she smiles. ‘You girls have got the best job in the world.’

Getting the call

Then came the first big break. Out of the blue, her childhood agent telephoned to say that Dennis Potter had seen a picture of Keeley taken four years earlier (‘Luckily I hadn’t changed much,’ Keeley grins) and asked her to audition for one of the leading roles in Karaoke, a dark, pushing-back-the-boundaries drama also starring Richard E Grant. ‘I went along to meet Dennis, then was called back for about three costume fitting – all the time totally desperate for the part,’ she says. ‘The funny thing is, no-one told me I’d got it. We were practically filming before I knew.’

Of course, in Karaoke, being Dennis Potter, there was sex. And more sex. ‘My first ever sex scene was with Richard,’ recalls Keeley. ‘I had four nude-coloured G-strings on, all stacked up (like that made any difference) while he had a cricket box stuck on with gaffer tape.’ Must have been painful. ‘Well he went pretty white,’ Keeley laughs. ‘The funniest thing was that, throughout the whole thing, he kept his Burlington socks on and a pair of the tightest-laced brogues you’ve ever seen. It was the most embarrassing moment of life – but funny at the same time. The director was round the corner, watching it on the monitor and he kept saying things like, ‘Richard, you’re about to come now.’

Doing Hollywood

Then came Our Mutual Friend, now there’s The Blonde Bombshell, so surely LA is the next move? It was for Diana Dors. ‘I’m not going to get on the next plane out there,’ says Keeley. ‘I’ve been asked to go and see people, but I’m going to wait until my new film, Last September, comes out in America. Some actors are so desperate to get there, you can practicularly smell their hunger – I hope it’s not like that with me.’ But what about the parties? The glitz and the glamour? I tell her about a party at Madonna’s, where everyone was wearing borrowed Versace and getting wasted on Cosmopolitans. ‘Ooh, yeah,’ she says, ‘that kind of thing’s fantastic – but only if you go out to get pissed and don’t mind falling over. I hate those posey standing-around parties.’

Getting wise

No tabloid exposes (a la Diana Dors) or celebrity flings are likely to taint Miss Hawes’ reputation now. ‘I love partying,’ she says, ‘but private partying. I’ve done all that Met Bar stuff, where you make six new friends a night, but they’re not the kind of people who will stick around if something goes wrong, are they?’ Instead, Keeley hangs out with her mum, dad, sister and baby niece. ‘I see them all the time and wouldn’t have it any other way. They stop you becoming a monster.’

But Keeley Hawes will never become a monster. She’s too down to earth (she’s climbed fences to get into McQueen’s show at London Fashion Week), brilliantly funny (she kept us all entertained with the stories of meeting Jimmy Savile in the middle of the Scottish wilderness), bright and beautiful. If sex-symbol superstardom is going to happen to anyone, it’ll happen to her.