Michelle Keegan has achieved the dream of many soap opera actors by making the transition to serious drama. That is a difficult switch to make but Keegan has recently starred in two very popular high-end series.
Born in Stockport, she won her first serious role as the feisty but vulnerable Tina McIntyre in Coronation Street. First brought in to play a girlfriend of the notoriously volatile David Platt, her character spent most of her time trying to calm his evil ways. After positive feedback from both producers and viewers she became a permanent member of the cast, with her ballsy, charismatic portrayal inspiring a number of crazy storylines.
Tina McIntyre ended up in relationships with Platt, Tommy Duckworth, Jason Grimshaw and Peter Barlow, to name a few. Not surprisingly all those relationships meant plenty of feuding and histrionics.
After a turbulent six years in Weatherfield, Tina was killed off in typically brutal fashion. She was not only pushed off a balcony, she was also beaten to death with a lead pipe! She reprised the role in a one-off Jeremy Kyle special to celebrate the 1000th episode of Coronation Street.
Keegan picked up a few awards along the way, including “Best Newcomer” at the 2008 British Soap Awards. This was followed by “Sexiest Female” six times in a row, from 2009 to 2014. In 2015 she landed her first major serious role as Tracy, a receptionist at a busy car showroom, in the BBC One series “Ordinary Lies”. Tracy becomes embroiled in a drug smuggling incident with her best friend, which leads to the friend being arrested in The Dominican Republic while Tracy returns to the UK. Keegan brought real emotion to the role, which led to her next big part.
Following the path of another former soap actress (Lacey Turner), Keegan took the lead role in “Our Girl”, as Lance Corporal Georgie Lane, an Army Medic. The series follows her posting to Kenya on a humanitarian mission to help refugees. Her personal life becomes intertwined with events in Africa and these are brought home in the thrilling climax to the series, with a terrorist plot in Manchester. Again, Keegan was brilliant in the role.
Most recently, she appeared as Tina Moore in the dramatisation of the life of World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore. Tina is an ordinary girl caught up in an extraordinary life, and her marriage to Bobby thrusts her into the limelight. With the subject of her character still alive, this was a delicate role to take on but Keegan excelled once again. Her performances drew strong reviews and showed her developing skills as an actress, often over-shadowing the slightly wooden Lorne MacFadyen, as Bobby.
The future is promising for the glamorous Michelle Keegan.
The post The Amazing Women of British TV Drama: Michelle Keegan appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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