Keeley Hawes - Lady, spook and dodgy cop

If Christopher Eccleston ranks as one of the most compelling TV male actors, then Keeley Hawes must be right up there in the Premier league of females. More than that, I’d pay good money to see her meet Mr Eccleston in the TV drama Champions League final.   She’s a true chameleon of her craft. I know she’s an actor, and that’s part of the job, but she has such an incredible range, whether as sultry siren, power-dressing politician, haughty aristocrat or dowdy detective.

Keeley Hawes made her name in adaptations of literary classics, and it’s a name redolent of posh young aristocrats in corsets and bonnets, complete with a peerless speaking voice. As I may have mentioned before, costume drama ain’t my bag, but I made an exception in 2010, dipping a tentative toe into the water of BBC1’s reboot of Upstairs, Downstairs. Her character was, of course, firmly in the ‘Upstairs’ camp (Lady Agnes, no less) but sadly even she couldn’t save it from the axe after season two, leaving ITV’s Downton Abbey clear of competition. As for costume drama, I’m not sure whether the 1960s count but it was pleasing to find Hawes opening the door to Mrs Wilson in the 2018 serial of that name. She would have been a nailed-on favourite for the title role had the eponymous Mrs W not been the grandmother of actor Ruth Wilson. Fair enough!

I probably first noted Keeley in the early Noughties, appearing in the closing mystery of the Murder in Mind anthology series, but it was in Spooks that she made her first real impression on me. As MI5 agent Zoe Reynolds she was in this consistently excellent series right from its 2002 launch. Hers was a key character before being written out in the third series. Unlike several members of the team, she did at least avoid leaving the Service in a body bag. Her love interest had been played by Richard Harrington but, in real life, Hawes left the show with a different new husband, fellow ex-Spook Matthew MacFadyen. 

Four years later she added the sci-fi fraternity to her fanbase. Starring in Ashes to Ashes, her DI Alex “Bolly-Knickers” Drake found herself back in 1981, at first clashing with, then becoming closer to the splendidly unreconstructedly macho Quattro-driving Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Personally I didn’t find it as compelling as its predecessor Life On Mars, and the time-swap storyline was somewhat baffling, but naturally Keeley was great in it, holding her own against Glenister’s crowd-pleasing turn, which can’t have been easy.

She was another plain-clothed detective in ITV’s Identity in 2010, this time heading up an elite unit in the present-day. However, I watched only the opening episode. Judging by the ratings and reviews I wasn’t the only viewer to give episode two the ‘heave-ho’ but maybe I wasn’t in the same mood for crime drama back then.

It wasn’t all socialites and kick-ass security forces; there have been charming comedy roles, too. In The Vicar of Dibley’s climactic Christmas two-parter, Keeley played the glamorous woman embracing Dawn French’s fiancé Richard Armitage, getting the Rev all hot under the dog collar. Being a Richard Curtis comedy, of course, she turned out to be his sister and everyone lived happily ever after. Ahhhh.

A few years hence and she guested in a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look, a BBC2 show greatly under-rated in my view.  In a typically surreal scene, she actually played herself, a disbelieving David Mitchell’s dream wife. And can you blame him? Sadly for David it proved to be just that, a dream. In 2013, however, he had actually married her, albeit only in Ambassadors.  There was more tongue-in-cheek casting with Keeley’s real-life hubby Matthew MacFadyen in the Foreign Office. It was a mildly amusing comedy-drama but failed to elicit a re-commission.

I can’t say I’ve watched her star in a comedy series, but in 2017 Hawes shared equal billing in one of the funnier Inside No.9 vignettes written by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. Playing the level-headed wife to Shearsmith’s abandoned shoe obsessive, it was an enjoyable half-hour in an always-quirky but rather hit-and-miss franchise. I’m willing to bet she also enjoyed her part as a 2014 Doctor Who villain opposite Peter Capaldi in ‘Time Heist’. I know I did.

In the subsequent years, Keeley Hawes has really charged into the upper echelons of British TV royalty. I willingly gave The Durrells a miss although. Having read JK Rowling’s book, I would have liked to try the BBC production of The Casual Vacancy. There was no chance whatever of ignoring the second series of The Missing. Penned by brothers Jack and Harry Williams, the first one had been a riveting thriller, introducing the engaging character of Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo). In 2017, the retired French detective was back in mainland Europe for The Missing 2 to investigate another missing girl, the daughter of our Keeley and her dodgy army Captain husband David Morrissey. For all their star quality, it was Karyo’s Baptiste who dominated the screen and thoroughly deserved his own, Amsterdam-set series last year. I hope there’ll be more, especially in this miserable xenophobic post-Brexit age.

But back to Ms Hawes…. A couple of years ago she made the headlines again when, in what proved to be a Sunday night ratings blockbuster, her character came to such an unexpectedly premature and gruesome end that newspapers couldn’t accept she had actually died. Conspiracy theories abound. Hang on, it’s only fiction! I’m talking about Jed Mercurio’s The Bodyguard, and Keeley’s portrayal as the Home Secretary who falls for her lantern-jawed police minder, played by Richard Madden. It was a compelling series, perhaps let down by the implausible concluding episode, but for all the powerful acting it was impossible for me to imagine Amber Rudd, her real-life counterpart at the time of recording, ever seducing her bodyguard. As for her predecessor Teresa May, the very thought makes me vomit!

For all these memorable performances, none have quite matched Hawes’ Lindsay Denton in another Mercurio creation, Line of Duty.  In recent years, the series has consistently set the standard for crime drama and much of the credit must go to the calibre of the cast. Each series involves an investigation of a possible bent cop, and in a roll-call of top-notch actors like Lennie James and Stephen Graham, Keeley topped the lot.

To start with, it was bizarre seeing her as a miserable, dowdy detective shorn of the make-up and hair-styling which I’d normally associate with her characters. As a viewer I would be flung by tortuous plot twists hither and thither in finding her innocent or guilty. Hawes was mesmerising as a complex and vulnerable cop caught up in a conspiracy, but how complicit was she? DI Renton actually made it into a second series but she displayed a degree of redemption in her shocking final scene, bringing the audience with her to the bitter, bloody end.

Talk about leaving the viewer wanting more! Whether her name is above or below the title, I look forward to the next Keeley Hawes vehicle. It’s bound to be a fast, bumpy but enjoyable ride.