Dawn of a new era

20/01/2009

WILD At Heart newcomer Dawn Steele admits she’d be hopeless as a real life vet.

“I’d be terrible,” says the former Monarch of the Glen actress, who arrives on screen as vet Alice Collins next weekend.

“I kept crying while working with the animals, I’m a bit of a baby at things like that. One of the baby zebras died just before we left, and I was crying. Dr Collins wouldn’t have been like that.”

Wild At Heart (ITV1, Sunday, 8.30pm) sees Danny (Stephen Tompkinson) called in to help control an outbreak of rabies in the National Park.

That’s where he first meets Alice, the vet enlisted to help him on the quarantine operation. They immediately get off on the wrong foot when Danny criticises her for bringing along her young daughter Charlotte (Megan Martell).

“But I must admit,” adds Dawn, “when I was doing the vet work, I thought, ‘I’d love to do this for a job.’ But I’m not smart enough, to be honest.

“My favourite bit of playing a vet is getting all ‘the greens’ on – the gowns, the mask and the hat, before the animals come in. It makes me feel important and that I’ve got a job that’s worthwhile, and I’m saving lives!

“Alice is quite straight compared to the characters I normally play. For a start, she’s very intelligent. She’s a young single mum – there’s a lot you don’t know about her. She’s quite mysterious when she comes into the series, but then a lot of things unwind as it goes on.

“She is headstrong and determined, very organised but keeps everything in, which is the complete opposite from me.”

Co-star Stephen reveals: “Dawn was top of my list to play Alice. I worked very briefly with her nine years ago in a film Tabloid TV, which never saw the light of day.”

Over seven million viewers watched last Sunday night’s visit to Leopard’s Den, maintaining Wild At Heart’s status as one of ITV’s most popular dramas.

Fans worried that Evan (Luke Ward-Wilkinson) may have left the series can rest easy. He’s still on screen this week, having convinced his father to let him live in Africa.

Animal lover Dawn was thrown in at the deep end but had no qualms. “You see the animals all the time, they’re all round the farm, so you would just get used to them. It wasn’t scary, just exciting.

“I never felt in massive danger. A lot have been hand-raised but you still just need to remember that they are wild animals. You’ve just got to be realy brave about it – and I think I’m quite a brave, confident person.”

When she auditioned for the role, Dawn had just become the owner of Murphy, her nine-month-old Welsh terrier. “I know,” she laughs, “a Scottish actress, with a Welsh terrier who has an Irish name.

“It was me that wanted to get a puppy for so long. My boyfriend Paul looked after him while I was filming and I came home in the break.”

She was also visited by Paul and her parents, seeing South Africa for the first time since their own emigration there was cut short.

Glasgow-born ex-Sea of Souls actress Dawn can’t remember much about her very first visit to South Africa – when she was just four.

“My uncle Donny had emigrated there a few years before,” she recalls. “He was in security and my dad was an alarms engineer, so we sold the house, gave the dog to the postman and moved to Johannesburg.

“It was at the height of apartheid and my mum was pregnant with my brother. But that way of living wasn’t for them. I can’t remember anything of our time there.

“We only lasted five or six months before we moved back to Scotland and stayed with my granny because, of course, we’d sold our house.”

She accepted that her latest role would mean filming in the middle of nowhere, a long way from her home in London.

“I’m an actor, that’s been my life – missing my friends’ weddings and birthdays. I’m always working away from home. It’s very, very rare that you get a job where you’re able to stay in your own bed. But it’s not like Monarch of the Glen, where I could get to Glasgow every second weekend.”

Dawn celebrated her birthday in the final week of the shoot. “I was in every scene that day but our producer Nick’s wife – who was out there – had her birthday on the same day. All the make-up girls had a cake baked for me, and I got loads of presents.”

 

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