Keeley admits

Dinner with Prince Edward? The bravest of us would quack ove the cutlery, but actress Keeley Hawes is a self-confessed blusher – and she admits that her royal encounter was a potentially blotch-inducing experience.

“At the end of the evening, he said he was going home, and we realised that ‘home’ was Buckingham Palace,” she says. “We giggled at the idea of him letting himself in with his own backdoor key.”

The Prince took Keeley and her co-star to dinner in his capacity as boss of Ardent Productions, makers of her latest TV drama, The Cater Street Hangman. “It was all a bit weird,” she says, “a bit dream-like. You kept expecting to wake up.”

Keeley Hawes is probably used to feeling like that. It’s true that she speaks with the nicely rounded vowels of a young Hayley Mills, but that’s elocution lessons. (“Jane bakes a cake,” she says, beautifully.) Keeley was not born to keep company with Princes.

In fact she was raised in a London council flat. Her dad, two brothers, her uncle and her grandfather (now retired) all drove cabs. “You should see our house at Christmas,” she says. “Outside it looks like the taxi rank at Victoria Station.”

Dad, Tony, and mum, Brenda, are naturally as proud as a whole convoy of bunting-laden and horn-tooting Hackney carriages of their 22-year-old daughter’s success. As well they might be: since her TV debut three years ago in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke she has barely been out of work for five minutes. Her TV successes include Our Mutual Friend and the drama The Beggar Bride, and she recently had a film part in The Avengers.

Yet none of this might have happened but for an accident of Geography. The Hawes’ home happened to be opposite the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Keeley heard the sound of singing wafting in the air, and begged her parents to enrol her, they did, and she paid her own fees by doing TV commercials and a Saturday job in an antiques market.

Then, at the age of 16, she was spotted by a talent scout for Select Models while shopping on Oxford Street. Modelling assignments around the world followed, which would have been enough for most girls, but Keeley had higher ambitions. “Well, modelling always struck me as a bit scummy,” she says.

A job as fashion assistant at She Magazine and then at Cosmopolitan could have led to a career in magazine journalism, “but then, out of the blue, Sylvia Young called them and said that someone had seen my picture and they wanted me to screen test for a part in Karaoke. No matter how far I stray away from acting, something always pulled me back there.”

Karaoke certainly got Keeley noticed, not least for what she describes as “an extremely fruity love scene” with actor Richard E Grant. Then The Beggar Bride provided her with a starring role, as a hard-up council estate mother who cons her way into the life of a millionaire aristocrat and marries him bigamously. This was a part that appealed strongly to the actress.

“When we finished filming I missed the character terribly ’cause I could relate to her so much. She came out of nothing and tried to make something of herself, which is kind of where I’m at too.”

Indeed she is, with two major television productions in the pipeline. In The Cater Street Hangman, a period thriller, she plays a traditional bodice-wearing romantic heroine “but with the soul of a feminist”. The plot is that a maid is murdered at the family estate, and Keeley’s character falls in love with the investigating Inspector “which is a bit like Tamara Beckwith falling in love with a road sweeper. It’s actually a very bold thing to do because he’s very much below her social status.”

Though the chemistry crackles there are no sex scenes. “There is a kind of subtlety and innocence about it that I think is a lot sexier than full-frontal nudity. I rather enjoyed not having to get my kit off for once.”

Not that she’s adverse to nudity if the part calls for it, as she does it in the second of the projects The Blonde Bombshell. This is the life story of Diana Dors, with Keeley in the lead-role. That an actress who describes herself as “kind of long, tall and dark” (she’s 5ft 10) should be chosen to play the 5ft 2in blonde and buxom Dors, surprises no one more than Keeley herself.

“But then, if they’d wanted a look-alike I’m sure they could have found one. I hope they chose me because they felt that, as an actress, I could capture the essence of her.”

Playing Dors from the age of 16 to 35 is, nonetheless, a daunting prospect. “She was such an icon for the British people and so you’re setting yourself up for a bit of a slagging if you bugger it up. Thing is just to do the part as best you can and try not to be too intimidated by public opinion.”

Immersion in the role called for some major physical changes. “I’m very much a brunette so it was odd to have my hair dyed blonde. Weight-wise, too, I’ve never put on a pound no matter how much I eat. I had to pad out a bit – you know, lie in bed for a week and eat doughnuts, that kind of thing.

“I don’t suppose it flattered me in the least to put on weight. But I’m not obsessed by my looks at all. Even though I’ve played a lot of love interest roles, I’m quite prepared to play parts where beauty isn’t the main thing. For me, Diana Dors was a very, very sexy woman, but she wasn’t your conventional beauty at all, especially according to today’s standards. I think it’s challenging to capture that quality she had. I don’t suppose it’s easy.”

Since it would stretch credibility to tell the Diana Dors story without them Keeley’s steeling herself once again for the inevitable love scenes, about which she has strong views.

“You can say what you like about the, but the truth is that they’re pretty peculiar, aren’t they? Whichever way you look at it, you can only bring what you personally know about sex to a love scene. So it’s quite natural that when people see you that they’re going to think, ‘Ah, so that’s what Keeley’s like in bed…’ To be blunt, you’re allowing the nation to imagine you… well… bonking, really.”

The best and, indeed, the only way to deal with it, she says, is with humour. “You’ve got to giggle about it and hope that you’re in bed with someone who sees it the same way. But, quite honestly I don’t think any actor is going to tell you that love scenes are their favourite part of the job.”

Coming as she does from a family where modesty is highly prized – her dad would not allow boys over the threshold when she was growing up – she’s a little torn about the business.

“I wouldn’t do a nude scene if I felt awkward about my dad watching it, but I’m not going to be a smart-pants and say I’ll never take my clobber off for anybody. My granny said that she didn’t like the nude scene in The Beggar Bride, but I think she probably enjoyed having a look. Anyway, it will get to a point where I’m really too old and no-one will want to see my body anymore.”

Whatever the extended family makes of Keeley’s nude scenes, they are hugely supportive of her career. Keeley counts her mum and her elder sister, Joanne, amongst her best friends. “I’d rather spend time with them than with anyone else,” she says.

Her parents now live in leafy Middlesex, but Keeley, having left home at 17 and lived in a succession of flat shares, has a “little place” off the Marylebone Road in central London.

I came to the conclusion that I need my own space. I’m a very tidy person. Everything is neatly folded and just so. I wouldn’t get into an unmade bed if you paid me. I feel insecure if I don’t know where everything is.”

It would not, she concedes be easy to live with her. At the moment, particularly, life is unpredictable. “So I can’t say to someone, ‘I’ll be home for tea at 6 o’clock.’ Actually, at the moment I eat like a tourist. I never have time to go to a supermarket like normal people. So I’m always on the phone foe take-aways. You know, get home later, run bath, phone for pizza, eat pizza in bed before falling to sleep. It’s not the healthiest lifestyle.

Nor is it conducive to romance. At the time of our interview she was single. A four-and-a-half year relationship with a former male model had ended eight months before. “I’m still on my won,” she says. “And it’s all right.” But the mock sobs that follow imply the reverse. “Okay, I’m pretty lonely,” she admits.

She’s not too sure why the relationship ended. “But I suppose it got to the point where we were hardly seeing each other and you feel as though you’re holding a person back from the good parts of a relationship they could be having.

“I miss having someone on the scene and I miss the physical contact. Sometimes I think, ‘it’s five days since someone even put their arm around me.’ But I’m not a girl who wants a casual relationship. I’m just not like that. If you have casual sex with someone, you’re giving too much of yourself and it demeans you terribly. I’m really not that desperate.”

She retreats instead, she says, into her friendships. “I’m not someone who has a million friends. I’ve got friends who are my friends, if you know what I mean. I’m choosey about my friendships too.”

At Sylvia Youngs her contemparies included Samantha Janus, Denise van Outen and Dani Behr. But her best friends from that time was milkman’s daughter Emma Bunton, better known as Baby Spice. The pair stay in touch, but busy schedules intrude. “It’s a bit like being friends with a Beatle,” she says. “You have to catch Emma when you can.”

Keeley’s family, on the other hand are constantly on hand. During time off you will often find her at her sisters, for example, having Sunday lunch and playing with her niece and nephew.

“For someone who’s missing human contact it’s absolutely lovely cause they climb all over me and give me the biggest hugs. I absolutely love them.”

She’s equally fond of her brothers children. “They’ve got two each as well,” she says. And they in turn are intrigued by their increasingly famous aunty. “I think they see me as a bit of a novelty. They’re not quite sure what to make of me. They’re always asking me ‘how do you get in the telly, Keeley?'”

One day she’ll sit down and explain it to them in full. It is, after all, just the kind of fairy story children love.