Strictly star Alex Kingston's VERY racy start to her career revealed: Actress was a nude life model before starring in raunchy roles that saw her strip off for the camera

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Alex Kingston's raunchy start to her career has been revealed after she became the third star to sign up for this year's Strictly Come Dancing.
Her journey from butcher's daughter to internationally acclaimed actress and the latest star to sign up for the BBC 's flagship show began almost 30 years ago.
And it certainly was a risqué beginning to stardom, with Alex, 62, earning extra cash as a nude life model for artists before going on to star in the 1996 romp The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders.
The series was an adaptation of the novel Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and charts the bed-hopping antics of the criminal's daughter brought up in society.
And the show was Alex's springboard to fame and brought her to worldwide attention, not least for the number of bodice-ripping scenes she featured in.
Since then, Alex, who has starred in Doctor Who and EastEnders, has never been shy about stripping off in front of the camera.
It certainly was a risqué beginning to stardom, with Alex, 62, earning extra cash as a nude life model for artists before going on to star in the 1996 romp The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders.
Two years later, she appeared alongside Clive Owen as Jani de Villiers in the gambling flick Croupier, where movie fans could bet on getting more than a glimpse of her impressive curves.
In 2000, in the film Essex Boys, came more raunchy scenes with her leading man.
The film is loosely based on events in December 1995 that culminated in the murders of three drug dealers in Rettendon, Essex, UK, and she played femme fatale Lisa Locke.
And in the 2011 series Marchlands, Alex was seen in the buff yet again when she played Helen Maynard in a supernatural drama following the lives of three families who live in the same remote house in different time period, and in the 2019 series The Widow, she locked lips with co-star Siobhan Finneran.
But in a recent interview with The Telegraph, she said she had managed to avoid the horrors of the Harvey Weinstein-style casting couch predators.
She grew up the daughter of a butcher and an art teacher, making her screen debut aged 17 as Grange Hill bully Jill Harcourt.
She told the publication last year: 'Casting couch culture still existed when I came out of drama school. If you were a young girl, you'd likely encounter something at some point – I have friends who did – and, if you were on the up, people might question how you got there.
'I was too naive to read the signs and in a weird way that protected me, because I never went for "the drink in the pub".'
Her role in Moll Flanders earned her a Bafta nomination and a fruitful new career path as ER's Elizabeth Corday.
Nowadays, such demands would require intimacy coordinators and, while she is relieved such provisions are in place for her drama-student daughter Salome ('although she's very ballsy, she can look after herself'), she regards her own blasé attitude with fondness.
'I was a life-drawing model so I was very used to being naked around people. After one of Moll's earliest sex scenes, the first AD [assistant director] jumped into bed and the three of us had a post-coital fag together because we thought it was funny. You couldn't do that nowadays, which is probably a good thing', she added.
But she did infamously bite the tongue of a male co-star in a stage play – leaving him needing stitches in his tongue.
She was unhappy when the unnamed lead used his tongue in their kissing scenes and issued a warning to him to stop the saucy smooch.
The actor refused, and Alex bit his tongue while they were mid-performance - and it was only the next day she realised the severity of what she had done.
She told The Graham Norton Show in 2011: 'Interestingly, and I'm not going to mention the actor's name... I did do a job once. I did a play and at the end of the play there was a kiss and we'd been doing this for a long time, a long run, and this actor, every time we did this kiss, he would stick his tongue down my throat...
'So I said, "If you do that again I will bite your tongue", and I think he thought I was joking so the next performance he did it again and I bit his tongue and clung on for a while, and didn't think anything of it.
'And then the next day, when we were backstage and I bumped into him, he was just having soup and I couldn't understand why he wasn't eating anything more substantial, so I said, "You're only having soup?" and he said, "I've got four stitches in my tongue".
'I had actually bitten through his tongue! I warned him!'
Alex's very colourful career comes as she's set to add another string to her bow - as a Strictly contestant.
Speaking to The One Show hosts Roman Kemp and Alex Scott on Monday about her upcoming stint, the actress teased: 'My hips don't lie'.
Alex notably appeared in US drama ER from 1997 to 2005 alongside George Clooney.
She also took on a recurring role in Doctor Who, playing River Song - the love interest of Matt Smith's incarnation of the Doctor and the daughter of Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill).
Alex briefly reprised her role during Peter Capaldi's stint on the BBC sci-fi show and has also leant her voice to a number of audio releases in the franchise.
Alex has previously spoken about her desire to sign up for Strictly, revealing she and her close friend Sarah Hadland - who competed last year - had discussed it.
'Sarah Hadland and I talked about how much we'd like to do Strictly Come Dancing,' she said in 2019.