Back then, I was self- conscious, insecure, too worried about how I’d come across.’ From her das on Waking The Dead, she’s remained close to Holly Aird, who is also a near neighbour. ‘I wasn’t sure, but Becks’s attitude was: Go for it! No one would ask me these days but the funny thing is, if they did, I’d probably be much less inhibited. It was Rebecca who first encouraged Claire to accept the invitation to pose for those daring pictures for the lads’ mags all those years ago. Claire is godmother to Rebecca Lacey’s daughter, Betsy Rebecca is godmother to Amelia. It wasn’t remotely awkward.’ And she has remained good friends with Rebecca Lacey and Rebecca Wheatley – she sang at Claire and Craig’s wedding – from their shared Casualty days. Now Claire has the energy – and the time, after finishing Exile – for a social life, she bumped into former boyfriend Jonathan at a party at their agent’s not long ago. ‘Just three days of doing that and she slept through the night. ‘That way, the child is constantly reassured that you’ll always come back, that you haven’t abandoned her,’ Claire explains. Her recommendation was to leave Amelia to cry, but only for a matter of minutes. In the end, out of desperation and on the recommendation of a friend of Olivia Coleman’s, they called in sleep expert Andrea Grace. We tried every thing we could think of but to no avail.’ She was up for two hours every night without fail, crying and wanting attention. ‘I love her with all my heart,’ she says, ‘but, from the start, Amelia was a terrible sleeper. Claire has long since grown accustomed to the Mother Goose jokes, but it took her a lot longer to adjust to motherhood. They married in 2007 and, in September 2009, baby Amelia Grace was born. He told me later that he’d danced all night because he was so high on caffeine.’ ‘Seven hours, and countless cups of coffee later, we were still there. ‘Craig and I met at Starbucks in Chiswick at 11 o’clock one morning,’ she says. In 2004, following the break-up of her relationship with actor Jonathan Kerrigan – the two had met and fallen in love on the set of Casualty – she met Craig, 38, on a blind date set up by a make-up artist on Waking The Dead. In her profession, that’s an almost unheard-of combination. It’s not that she’s naive more that she knows who she is: a capable and attractive woman, happy in her own skin and blessedly devoid of ego. Pitch any question at her and she doesn’t attempt to duck it. It said in the script that, for the first time, the two characters were making love.’ And it was an important scene in that the couple weren’t just having sex, something we’d seen earlier. ‘I’m sure I could have done, but I trusted the director. She was wearing skimpy briefs throughout but, presumably, she could have asked to keep her bra on, if she’d felt too exposed. And I realised almost straight away that, with the director telling me to move this arm here or that leg there, it all becomes very technical. In the end, we worked out what we were going to do and just got on with it. ‘I’d told John and the director that it was my first ever nude scene and I wasn’t quite sure of the etiquette involved. ‘I’d been quite nervous leading up to the day of filming that scene,’ she says. But I couldn’t stop.’ And it didn’t take her long to reach the scene where Tom and Mandy are naked together and indulging in a spot of horizontal aerobics. ‘Our printer was broken so I had to read it on screen, which I normally hate. ‘I wanted to do it as soon as I read it,’ says Claire. Conceived by Paul Abbott (Shameless, Clocking Off), Exile was written by one of his protégés, Danny Brocklehurst.
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