The Scotsman
One look at Simone Lahbib, with her hair and eyes and mouth - oh yes, she's got all the component parts, in the right order, too - and you instantly fall in love. The trouble is, someone else loves her, and he got there first.
He's an actor, half-Italian, half-English, and Lahbib, the half-Scottish, half-French star of The Young Persons Guide To Becoming A Rock Star and Bad Girls, is keeping his identity secret for now. But they've just got engaged.
"We met a couple of years ago," she tells me over a fish tea in North London, near to where she lives. "He's had small parts in big films and he's lovely. We were sitting on the couch one night and he just said: 'I never want to lose you,' And that's how it happened."
The Stirling-born actress really is a looker - and trendy with it, in spray-on leather jacket, baggy jeans and funky trainers. But more than the hair and eyes and mouth - blondish, brown and big - it's the colour of her skin. It's sun-kissed, a shade you only see now in faded holiday snaps from the Sixties, before sunbeds and bottle tans. She says I should see her sister, who's even more sallow, but who suffered at school because of it.
Lahbib herself suffered at the hands of classroom bullies, so was acting an opportunity to rebuild self-confidence or even reinvent herself? Not really - she started out wanting to dance and still walks with a ballerina's poise and grace. But the traumas hardened her for the challenges ahead.
"I found school really tough," she explains. "When I was 13 the boys in my class had a wee competition to see who could get off with me. I wasn't interested - I was into 18-year-olds when I was 13 - but some of the girls got jealous and beat me up. I was always getting into fights. One time a friend stopped me going down a corridor because the girls were waiting for me. I thought then that she saved my life and I still do now. But other times I had clumps of hair pulled out and my head rammed down the loo. The biggest, scaries girl in the whole school once gave me a good kicking in front of the rest of the class. Just seeing them all surrounding us and hearing them chanting her on, that destroyed me."
Now Lahbib is 30, a year older than every actress's favourite age and she reckons she's got where she is today by a combination of her mother's romanticism and her father's dogged determination. To illustrate the latter, she chooses chess. When her father discovered the game, he threw himself into it, learning all the right moves from books. Soon, he was pretty much unbeatable, but Lahbib remembers a game when she could have taken him. "I couldn't bring myself to do it. I might have broken something in him."
So where exactly is Lahbib today? She caught the eye in The Young Persons Guide To Becoming A Rock Star as a sassy DJ and had a wry smile to herself about the Channel 4 drama because she had pop dreams once. She starred in Thief Takers on ITV, where she met her man, and on the same channel, in the women's prison saga Bad Girls, which returns for a second run with her governor, Helen Stewart, resuming her dangerous liason with an inmate serving a life sentence for murder. She's doing OK, but takes her acting seriously and would like to do better and break into movies.
The eldest of five, Lahbib owes her exotic name to the slip of a pen, when her Algerian grandfather, the son of a sheikh, was signing up for the Foreign Legion. Her own father is a chef who used to be chief cook and bottle washer at Gleneagles Hotel. Her earliest memories of growing up in Stirling are good ones: lots of cycling and fishing on warm, sunny days. Later on, she says, it became a good place for a fight. "Did it rain all through my teens? It seemed like it. And maybe that would explain all the fighting, the jaggedness of the landscape and so on."
As a Bowie-mad teenager she sang in a band, for fun at first, but then chased record deals. "Our sound was big and synthy and filmic," Sample lyrics? "Oh God... 'Follow the bounce of the wooden ball... burn, burn, burn, like a Roman candle' Terrible, huh?" (Yes, and since when did wooden balls bounce?).
Despite the signing and now the acting, she says she's never really wanted to be a star. "I'm wary of stardom because it seems to make people feel a little bit unhappy and a big bit trapped," she says. "The most important thing for me is to feel free. I've never really had a plan. When I was younger I couldn't see further than the day I was in and now I've come to realise that that's a good thing."
But she does admit, as a girl, to being a bit of a poser. "There's a picture of me back home in Stirling, from school sports day. Everyone else at the starting line is a blur but I'm just stood there posing for the camera. I didn't even start."
Despite the boy attention she got at school, Lahbib insists she wasn't aware of her looks at the time. "Most teenagers are unhappy with themselves," she says. "It's your first sense of self-awareness and it can be a bit of a shock." Her first kiss was with a boyfriend and that one lasted four and a half years (the boy, not the snog). Lahbib has no desire to thank her tormentors for toughning her up, but that is what they did. "That whole experience changed me. In this profession, you constantly come across people who want to knock you down, but I just don't care anymore I'm much more thick-skinned now."
She had reservations about Bad Girls, initially because of it's mainly female cast. "I did an all-girl thing on stage once before and it was a nightmare - women can be such complete cows. Everyone hated one another and two girls in particular really triend to put each other off. I can't speak for men in that situation, but I think women are more clever at being horrible. They're more subtle at f****** with your head."
There were other concerns about Bad Girls, too - most notably the lesbian story-line. "I was nervous about it at first," she admits, "so I did some research. I was relieved to find that this sort of thing does happen, that it wasn't just a bunch of male television executives dreaming up some gratuitous girl-on-girl action. But I had to warn my granny that I kiss another woman. 'Just as long as you didn't enjoy it, dear,' she said."
Lahbib met a real-life governor as she swotted up for the series and was amazed to discover she wasn't a battleaxe, but an attractive, thirtysomething, university-educated woman who wanted to "work with people". Prisoners are people, too, says Lahbib, as are actresses. But she has no idea what possesses women to want to work in jails, and even less when it comes to cracking the secret of why they want to act. "It really is the strangest job," she says.
