Steely Keeley

This year, Keeley Hawes has had to face the music – not only in her challenging new TV role as a bisexual theatre star, but also in her private life.

Here’s a question for you. When Keeley Hawes landed the part of a cross-dressing, bisexual Victorian theatre performer, in BBC2’s hotly anticipated drama Tipping The Velvet, she realised the part was going to require her to do more than just say lines. She was going to have to sing and dance and simulate lesbian love scenes as well. But – and here’s the question – which of these extracurricular activities do you think most frightened her? Was it a) stepping out on stage and tripping the light fantastic; b) singing popular show tunes from the Victorian era; or c) stripping off and jumping into bed with another women in order to simulate sex?

The answer, rather surprisingly is both a and b with particular concerns about b. Compared to both a and b, c was a doddle.

“All these things are relative,” says Keeley, 26. “I was so worried about the singing and dancing that I didn’t have time to worry about the sex scenes. But they still weren’t something I had been particularly looking forward to as they are fairly saucy and intimate. I seem to remember having a glass of wine so I didn’t feel quite so nervous.”

The sex scenes in the three-part drama have already caught the media’s attention and there’s maybe a part of Keeley which hopes the public’s attention is distracted by them when the show airs.

That way, people won’t take so much notice of her singing. “I can’t sing very well and I can’t dance very well either. The prospect of doing both was terrifying,” she says. “Everyone asks about the lesbian scenes but they were so far from my mind for so much of the time that they weren’t even a worry. Singing at the top of my voice at Wimbledon Theatre, where we filmed some of the theatre scenes – that was a worry.”

All of this, of course, begs an obvious question. If Keeley was so concerned about the quality of her singing and dancing, why was she willing to take on the part of Kitty Butler, talented and beautiful star of the Victorian music hall?

“Good question,” she laughs. “The truth is I didn’t want to pass on this brilliant part. So I bit the bullet. And, while not wishing to make excuses, there was original going to be more rehearsal time, but it got whittled away and that presented me with more of a challenge.”

And does she think she has risen to that challenge? “I think the production looks good,” she says.

And her singing and dancing? “The scenes in which I do those two things have been cut together beautifully. I concentrated on trying to perfect certain parts of a song, and certain parts of a dance, rather than trying to learn whole songs and whole dances.

“When I appeared in the first series of Spooks, I had to learn some Russian, I worked hard enough on that part to make people believe my character was fluent in the language. I took the same approach with the singing and dancing in Tipping The Velvet.”

Mention of Spooks reminds us that thus has been a spectacularly good year for Keeley in terms of TV work. Spooks, in which she plays an MI5 spy was a ratings winner for the BBC – so much so that a new, extended series has been commissioned and Keeley starts work on it later this month.

She also started in the ITV drama A Is For Acid, with Martin Clunes, so Tipping The Velvet completes an impressive hat trick.

Filmed, but not yet seen, are roles in the Robson Green drama, Me and Mrs Jones, and the remake of Lucky Jim, with Stephen Tomkinson.

And the movie world had come calling too. The stunningly beautiful 5ft 10in actress, who moved so smoothly from modeling to acting when she was younger, has recently filmed Chaos And Cadavers, with Nick Moran, a black comedy set in an English country house hotel.

The irony won’t have been lost on Keeley that her solid, almost relentless, professional success has been played out against a background of personal upheaval and uncertainty.

She only married her long-time partner, cartoonist Spencer McCallum, in December and has a young son, Myles, by him. Yet, by early spring, she was romantically involved with her Spooks co-star Matthew Macfayden, after falling in love with him on the set of the BBC1 drama. Their relationship attracted obvious media attention though it was a specific aspect of the coverage which frustrated Keeley.

“Of course it’s not very nice seeing your private life plastered over the newspapers and I can’t imagine anyone enjoys it when it happens to them,” she says. “But what really frustrated me, when the pictures of Matthew and me were printed, was the suggestion, the implication, that I hadn’t been there for my son. That I’d just left him somewhere and gone off.

“That absolutely wasn’t true and people were talking about a situation they knew nothing about. I’m totally devoted to Myles and he spends his time either with me or with his dad. We are always there for him – and I have always been there for him.”

Keeley is clearly a loving mum. Myles is frequently mentioned in conversation and Keeley jokes about getting him a part in the new series of Spooks.

“Maybe he’s a bit young,” she admits. “He’d have to be a very, very small spy, wouldn’t he?”

“But he loves coming to see me at work. I have lunch with him, although it’s not a great idea for him to be around when we are actually filming. He is only two years old and, understandably, for a child of his age, he can be a little noisy.”

There’s also the chance that he might sneak off and see something he shouldn’t. Heaven knows what he might have caught sight of, let loose on the set of Tipping The Velvet.

Even the man who has adapted the novel on which the series is based, Andrew Davies, has called is “a very rude show.” And rude it most certainly is. The passionate love scene, in the opening episode, between Keeley’s character Kitty and Rachel Sterling’s character Nan, a woman besotted by the beautiful and elegant Kitty, is only a foretaste of things to come.

A later episode, in which Nan turns to prostitution, sees the actions getting even more raunchy with plenty of sex scenes.

“I actually think I escaped rather lightly in terms of the sex scenes,” says Keeley, the daughter of a London cab driver.

“Rachel and Anna [Chancellor] have more explicit scenes to do than the ones I’m involved in. And that took the pressure off me a bit.

“But only a bit. I still had to worry about my singing and my dancing.”

The three-parter, Tipping The Velvet, will be screened from next Wednesday on BBC2.