Old-fashioned Fancy for a modern mum (Dec 2005)

IF there's one role that Keeley Hawes is particularly good at playing it's the one of working mum.

As she embarked on filming her latest project - playing Fancy Day in ITV's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Under The Greenwood Tree - she had not long given birth to her daughter Maggie.

"I had two days at home and then my husband freed himself up to look after Maggie through the day," the

28-year-old explains. "We'll make sure one of us is always there, and we have family that help. We don't have a nanny or anything.

I'm a very, very hands-on mum," she laughs.

Keeley loves talking about her new daughter, her first with actor Matthew Macfadyen , who she married last year.

"Maggie said 'hello' today for the first time," she grins.. "She picked up the phone and went, 'Heeellooo'."

She also has a son, four-year-old Myles, from her previous marriage to cartoonist Spencer McCallum , which ended after she met and fell in love with Matthew on the set of Spooks.

"It is difficult when you're spending so much time on set, I must admit," she continues. "But at the same time, this is real life. Thankfully, we're not like pop stars and we don't go out on the road."

Marriage and a new baby certainly doesn't seem to have impacted on Keeley's work. She was recently in Macbeth, as part of the BBC's Shakespeare Retold series, and early next year she'll be appearing in the forthcoming ITV thriller The Best Man.

Before that, however, Keeley will be on screens in ITV's Christmas period drama Under The Greenwood Tree. Set in a rustic village in mid-19th century England, she plays Fancy Day, a woman torn between her promise to her father to marry well, and her love for lowly local boy Dick Dewey, played by Cutting It's

James Murray . "She has her ill father to look after and needs money to support him, which is something people had to think about at that time," says Keeley. "But when it comes down to it, you want her to follow her heart."

Keeley's an old hand at getting into a corset thanks to her turns in Tipping The Velvet, Our Mutual Friend and Wives And Daughters. "Whenever you put a corset on you stand and behave differently," she says.

"You have to. Fancy wears a lot of linen which was really beautiful.

"But at the end of the day it was still good to put some jeans on and relax."