After various disasters over the years, I had pretty much given up on interviewing actresses. “So,” said my editor, “you won’t want to meet Kelly Brook, then? She’s in the new Miss Marple.” I said, now, now, boss, don’t be hasty, I can always make an exception. A couple of weeks later, I found myself alone with the former glamour model in the library of a Central London hotel. (I say “former”, but as recently as November, Kelly was photographed wearing nothing from the waist up, and not a great deal below it.) “Mind if I smoke?” I asked. “Yes,” said Kelly brightly, adding her trademark perky giggle. This minor social glitch was merely the prelude to an excruciating few minutes, during which I think I speak for both of us in saying we wished we were anywhere else.
We managed to establish that Kelly is 26 years old and hails from Rochester, Kent. A working-class family? “They all work,” she said pointedly. And your dad was a scaffolder? “Yeah.” Did he have his own business or work for someone else? “I don’t want to go into my father’s employment.” What sort of house did you grow up in? “A regular house” (this with a fair bit of petulance). And what did your mum do for a living? “I really feel uncomfortable talking about my family,” said Kelly. “I know you’ll build up this rags-to-riches scenario, and it’s not fair.” I said I’d read interviews in which she had talked about her background. “I know what you’re trying to get at,” said Kelly, with increasing and as it happens inaccurate presumption, “and it’s not what I want this article to be about. This is about Miss Marple and me coming back to England and doing a great drama on ITV, and that’s all I’m here to talk about. So I don’t know if you want to carry on the interview or terminate it.” A bad start, then. Fortunately a waitress arrived, and a couple of minutes of placatory tea ceremony noises ensued: chiming crockery, stilted exchanges, “Shall I pour?”, “Yes, please,” “Milk?” “Thank you,” and so on. All very Miss Marple.
So let’s hold that scene for a moment while I establish Kelly’s credentials for the uninitiated. Last year, readers of FHM voted her the sexiest woman in the world. She’s been a favourite of the so-called lads’ mags almost since the genre was invented by Loaded in 1994. What Kelly coyly refers to as her “look” (5ft 6in, 32E bust) was no use to high fashion, but was perfect for the new back-to-basics mood on the news-stands, as indeed it was for the Daily Star. She also looked nice enough, and behaved well enough to make her credible as the girl-next-door, a quality still necessary in the innocent days of the mid-Nineties if a sex object sought to achieve broader fame and, ultimately, respectability. (The climate has shifted so much in the decade since that glamour modelling is now itself respectable: a recent survey of 15 to 19-year-old girls found almost two thirds of them would rather take their clothes off for a living than become doctors, lawyers or nurses.) Next to the likes of Jordan and Abi Titmuss, Kelly is positively demure. She doesn’t talk about her sex life, she barely swears, she doesn’t even flirt.
At least not with me, although the temperature had risen fractionally, from the frozen to the merely frosty, by the time the waitress left. Are you willing to talk about yourself at all? I asked. “Of course!” said Kelly. “This job, my career, my public life... my childhood is not something I care to discuss too much, because a lot is taken out of context.” She says she “never felt a sense of lack” as a girl. My interest isn’t sinister, I said. I’m just trying to get a sense of what you’re like. She giggled and reached for a biscuit. “You can write what you want about me, you can say ‘she was a complete bitch’, I don’t care.”
Generous as it is for Kelly to grant such licence, the ensuing 55 minutes did not lead me to any such conclusion, complete or even partial. In fact, though I don’t imagine she’ll be calling the next time she’s over from her base in LA, relations had thawed sufficiently by the end for us to laugh over the ghastly introduction. “I hate interviews,” she said. Well, I said, at least, it got better. “My family are like, ‘Kel, don’t talk about us’, I’m like, ‘I respect that’. Just as I don’t want my mum gossiping about me at work.” Fair enough, I said. Still, she hadn’t shaken off the idea I was some smart aleck from a posh paper with hostile intent, either to mock, or over-analyse, or caricature, she wasn’t sure. “Really boring, aren’t I?” she said. “You want me to be this tragic actress with an eating disorder who was abused as a child and comes from the ghetto.” No I don’t, I said. Kelly giggled, as if to say, oh come on, I know your game.
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I think it’s important to Kelly, understandably after the savaging she endured while hosting The Big Breakfast as an under-prepared 18-year-old, that she is thought of as shrewd and savvy. I don’t doubt that she is both. (A Big Breakfast memo was leaked saying she struggled to read the words “intrepid” and “satirical” off a cue-card.) “It was prejudice. I’m not thick. No. I’m not thick. I might not be able to have a one-to-one with Salman Rushdie and, y’know, comment on, y’know, his whole rap, but c’mon, it was The Big Breakfast! How experienced and educated did you need to be to host that show? Ricky Martin? Eminem? Britney Spears? Do you need an A level to interview these people?”
So, she’s sensitive about being thought stupid, but other than that, it seems to me that the salient point about Kelly Brook is that she is remarkably determined and thick-skinned. “A woman on Friday night, at a party, come up to me,” she says. “She was a bit drunk, she was, like, ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful’. I was, ‘Oh, what can I say? Thank you,’ and she said, ‘And that’s why everyone hates you!’” She laughed it off. “I don’t think about it too much. I don’t think about whether bloody Joanne in Watford likes me or not. What do I care? I’ve got my boyfriend, my family, my mates, there’s always room for everyone else to love me if they wanna, but if they don’t, then whatever.”
She’s one of those people who is not much interested in the past, who moves forwards relentlessly, who is always becoming something else. (Hence the move to the West Coast, where they don’t ask you what your dad did for a living.) And what she wants to become now is a proper actress. She gets sent “loads of terrible scripts for teenage slasher movies”, but “I love older films,” she says, “and European films like Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino and Malèna.” She reads self-improvement books (The Celestine Prophecy, The Power of Now) but knows they’re a bit naff. She’s just read Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, and a biography of Jennie Jerome, Churchill’s mother. “I thought that’d be a good movie. I’d love to buy the rights to something like that.” She was worried about doing a posh voice for her part in Marple and hired a voice coach. “I thought I’d be doing this serious English period drama, and then I arrived and everyone was treating it like pantomime.” Her accent now is by turns estuary, RP and transatlantic.
She lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend Billy Zane, 39, actor, Kate Winslet’s ultra-baddy fiancé in Titanic. She was with another actor, Jason Statham, from 17 to 24, but “I felt I didn’t know a certain part of myself” and she left him, spent what seems actually to have been a very brief time single “to discover how I could make myself happy and not rely on a partner”, and then got together with Zane. They will, she says, marry later this year. She wants children, “Pretty soon. I think 30, maybe.” Life in Hollywood is “Lovely; the beach, yoga, pilates, drive up to Big Sur, Carmel... [but]... LA is pretty dead. You’re in bed by 9.30, 10 o’clock.” She’s been looking at places in New York. “I’d like to do a New York chapter.”
She has always been, she says, “Very careful and strategic in what I chose to do.” I can well believe it. When she was 11, “putting on crazy little shows in the playground, completely in love with theatre and dancing and singing”, she watched The Royal Variety Show and remembers “looking at the credits to see where all the dancers were from. And they were from Italia Conti [stage school]. I said to my mum, ‘I want to go to Italia Conti. I want to be on a Royal Variety Show and meet the Queen.’ I was just a big dreamer as a kid. Always dreaming.” And her parents did not discourage her. “Mum said, ‘Put together a little dance and a song for me and I’ll audition you.’ And then she went, ‘OK, I’ll call the school and take you to London.’ It was never, like, ‘Oh, no, you can’t do this!’” She went to Italia Conti from the age of 12 to 16, commuting every morning at 7am from Kent. “I loved my years there.”
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She was, she says, very ambitious as a child, “really driven”, keen to get out of Rochester and off to the big city. But her ambition was to dance, or to act, or to sing, not to model. “I’d been in pantomimes, and was part of a cabaret act doing old-school showgirl stuff at weekends and holidays.” And then she left stage school and was faced with the prospect of earning a living. “It was horrible, horrible... I wrote to all the acting agents in London and said, ‘Hello, this is me, this is my headshot’, and they’re like, ‘Come back once you’ve been to RADA, come back once you’ve been to Central, blah blah blah’, and I was like, ‘I can’t afford to go to RADA, I can’t afford to go to Central, how am I gonna do this?’” Her mother stepped in, entering Kelly, unbeknown to her, in a local newspaper’s beauty contest, which she won. “I was mortified. I was really embarrassed by that whole notion of being a model.” Soon enough, however, Kelly had a deal with a glamour agency and was doing swimwear and lingerie commercials.
“No one ever considered me that beautiful when I was young. I suppose when I was about 13 people started looking at me as a beautiful young sexy girl and photographers [became] interested in taking my picture.” What? At 13? “Fourteen, fifteen.” Wasn’t that a bit weird? “No! You’ve seen 14-year-old girls, are you serious? They’re pretty sexed up at 14, 15, into boys, into going out. I was quite, y’know, my parents let me grow up quickly. I really was advanced for my age.” Even so, she was “too young and too shy” to go topless. “I had the body of a woman, but the face of a child. The first time I posed topless was last year for David Bailey. I thought if I don’t do it now... I’m getting towards that 30 thing, and I’m thinking about having a family and maturing into a woman. I don’t feel like I wanna turn up and put a G-string on any more.”
“I would have loved,” she goes on, “to have stepped straight out of school into a Disney movie. That wasn’t my path, for whatever reason. I knocked on the doors of numerous people; it wasn’t happening. I thought: ‘Well, I’m not gonna give up!’” Looking back, I say, if you could have got to where you are now, and you could have done it by a more conventional route, without taking your top off in the Daily Star, would you prefer to be in that position? Kelly has a long think about that, and then she says firmly, “Yes, absolutely. Because it does ultimately make it harder, it doesn’t really serve. But it’s a short cut. It pays your bills. You get exposure. It gets you in the door.”
The Marple season begins on February 5 on ITV1. Kelly Brook stars in The Moving Finger broadcast on February 12