THERE were times, setting up the interview with actress Keeley Hawes, when I thought it would never happen. After a bewildering number of cancellations and changes of plan, we finally settled on a place and a date.
Then, on the day, I get a phone call saying that her five-year-old son, Myles, is unwell, and can I go instead to her house in Twickenham? I get there and the door is opened by a cute kid (Myles) and Mr Darcy - as in Matthew Macfadyen, who has just played opposite Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice and is Hawes's husband.
Hawes herself is in the background shouting polite hellos but looking stressed. "Sorry," says Macfadyen. "We thought you were told. You're doing it at the cafe on the green." What cafe? What green? He gives me directions and I plod off.
It crosses my mind that Hawes simply might not want to do this interview. In 2002, Hawes and Macfadyen fell in love when they were starring in the BBC's cult MI5 series, Spooks. Hawes left her husband of a few months, cartoonist Spencer McCallum, who she'd been with for four years and with whom she'd had Myles. She married Macfadyen in 2004 and they have since had a daughter, Maggie - but at the time, it was an unholy and very public mess and Hawes doesn't appear to have done much press since.
I've convinced myself she isn't coming when suddenly she arrives, in a flurry of apologies. "I'm so sorry, I thought it could work at home, but it just didn't." Her hair, tinted a reddish brown, is tugged back from her face, she's wearing very little make-up and her huge, pale eyes crackle with nervous energy. She seems highly strung, surprisingly jumpy and vulnerable.
But she's friendly, too, and is quick to laugh. Any worries she's going to be a tricky interviewee evaporate with the first of her loud and rather dirty-sounding chuckles.
Hawes is especially animated when talking about her children. "I was sent the DVD of me in Macbeth, and there was this big, dramatic moment and I was thinking, this is looking good, and Myles came in and said: 'Oh, Mummy, when are you going to do something good like Madagascar?'" She is also very droll about having gone to the Sylvia Young stage school in north London. "It's not: 'I went to Rada and did the classics.' It's: 'I went to Sylvia Young's with one of the Spice Girls.'"
Joking apart, does she feel a snobbery, a pressure? Hawes says she does, but it's mainly self-imposed. "It's this feeling of unworthiness that I create myself." At the moment, she is considering a couple of theatre roles. "It's frightening, but in the long run I want to be an actress and not a sort of superstar." She smiles wanly. "I've got too much sick on my jumper to be a superstar."
Hawes, 28, is quietly, stealthily, shaping up to be one of Britain's foremost actresses. She's certainly busy enough. The new year will see the release of Michael Winterbottom's blackly comedic A Cock and Bull Story, the "unfilmable film" of the "unreadable book" (Tristram Shandy), also starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and Gillian Anderson.
Hawes - seven months pregnant with her daughter at the time - plays Shandy's mother. Almost all of her scenes show her during various stages of Tristram's tricky birth. "When I had Myles, the epidural didn't work, so at least I knew what to do."
Next month, Hawes stars in Macbeth, directed by Mark Brozel, as part of the BBC's new season of modern-day films based on Shakespeare plays. It's a wonderful production, deftly contemporising both the setting and the language into a thriller-like setting. (Imagine an episode of Cracker via the bard.)
Hawes plays Ella, wife of Joe Macbeth (James McAvoy), the frustrated head cook of a Scottish restaurant. Both leads give stunning performances. Hawes's Lady Macbeth is calm, coaxing, sleek, predatory and very sexy - until, finally, the madness bubbles up through the facade.
It's a feat made all the more astonishing because Hawes started Macbeth only three months after Maggie was born. "I was umming and aahing about whether to go back so quickly. Then I read the script and it was like: 'Oh, this is too good; I can't not, really.'"
The youngest of four children of a London cabbie, Hawes was in the same class as Emma Bunton at stage school, just behind Denise van Outen and All Saints' Nicole Appleton. At 16, she left to do A-levels, but was scouted by a model agency. Then she got the call to try out for Dennis Potter's Karaoke, opposite Saffron Burrows. Just 19, she got the part and has been much in demand ever since, with roles ranging from Christine in Lucky Jim to Diana Dors in Blonde Bombshell. Not forgetting Kitty in the lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet, in which she simulated sex with Rachael Stirling, much to the glee of the tabloids.
"There was this countdown in the Sun," she recalls. "'Ten days to go!' 'Nine days to go!'"
Hot girl-on-girl action?
"Yes! And it was quite unfair. It was a lesbian love story." Hawes shrieks with laughter. "Oh well, if I was going to have girl-on-girl action, I'm glad it was before my second child, because you won't catch me doing it again."
Other work includes the film The Last September, set in Twenties Ireland, the lead character in The Murdoch Mysteries, and her most high-profile role, Zoe in Spooks. "I loved doing Spooks," says Hawes. "After 26 hours, I have to say I loved it less. But that's like anything. Three years in any job and you start getting itchy feet."
She smiles a little uncomfortably and sips her coffee. It was during Spooks that Hawes met Macfadyen. Talking about it, she is jumpy, gently twisting her fingers and staring down at the table. Even today, she describes her divorce as "devastating".
"Coming from a family where the parents had been together for 40 years, you never imagine that divorce is going to happen to you."
She also found the media attention painful, in particular the (untrue) insinuation that she'd abandoned her son. "It was hideous, horrific," she says. "I wouldn't wish it on anybody."
Is that why she so rarely does interviews? "Well, I think if you do a lot of interviews, you're laying yourself open. If you put yourself out, accept every invitation to every premiere, then you can't really complain when people knock on your front door and photograph you in the street."
But how do a 'super-hot' thespian couple manage to stay private? "Just look sh*t every time you go out and nobody will want to take your picture," she says crisply.
Things seem to be calmer now. Hawes is on good terms with McCallum (they share care of Myles) and she clearly adores Macfadyen. They organise their schedules so there's always someone around for the children, but Hawes says she is still criticised for having young children and working. "I've nothing against stay-at-home mums, but I love going to work, I love what I do and I wouldn't want to start resenting my home life if I was staying home 365 days a year."
Hawes actually feels motherhood enhanced her performance in Macbeth. "We're around the same age, and James [McAvoy] has this amazing boyishness about him; but, with my having kids, there's a different sensibility, a kind of maturity. So it makes it believable that he should go along with her when she's doing the pushing."
As the interview winds down, Hawes reveals she has another TV project coming up, Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree for ITV. "I get sent film scripts but usually they're not as good, so why should I do it?" she says. "Just to be in some sh**ty film going straight to video? When I could be doing Macbeth?"
'Macbeth' is on BBC1 on November 14. 'A Cock and Bull Story' is released in January
Barbara Ellen
