My Prostitution Phase

Disappointingly, an introduction to Ellen Love, the saucy turn-of-the-century courtesan captivating Sunday night television audiences in Mr Selfridge, does not take place behind an ostrich feather-draped screen in her dressing room. There is no corsetry cinching her tiny waist, no champagne coupe dangling from her fingers in a studied gesture of lassitude – just a bog-standard Starbucks at her publicist’s. This is probably because Miss Love, music hall darling, gentleman’s muse and the newly-crowned Spirit of Selfridges (circa 1909) tends to arrive as her modern-day alter ego, actress Zoe Tapper. But happily, as Mr Selfridge has just been commissioned for a second series, she makes for equally charming, if less relentlessly coquettish company, notes the Telegraph's Judith Woods...

Tapper, 31, who is married to fellow actor Oliver Dinsdale and has a 21-month-old daughter, Ava, is poised yet quirky in an Olivia Rubin frock, teamed with battered bronze brogues. She describes herself as “a jobbing actress”, but the expression does her something of a disservice. Dark-haired, full-lipped – think Rachel Weisz shrunk-to-fit – she’s such a slip of a size eight it’s hard to believe she launched her career in 2003 playing self-styled “protestant whore” Nell Gwyn to Rupert Everett’s debauched Charles II in the film Stage Beauty.

"That was my prostitute phase, and I was a bit more buxom back then," she says with an infectious giggle. "After I appeared in that, I kept getting cast as bawdy wenches and harlots, and being asked, persuaded, and in one instance bullied into doing nude scenes. Honestly, I can’t tell you the number of scripts I read where my character enters and, for some unfathomable reason, immediately removes her top. When you are fresh from drama school and eager to please, you will do those sorts of scenes just to appear obliging, but I've learned that I’m actually a bit of a prude and now I put my foot down and am much more discerning."


After her red light days (A Harlot’s Progress, 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, The Private Life of Samuel Pepys, with Steve Coogan) came a slew of “mad psychic” roles. This kicked was kicked off with the Andrew Davies drama Affinity and eventually graduated to the conversation-stopping part of a half-blood vampire in the Philip Glenister vehicle Demons, that "probably wisely" never made it past the first series. In recent months she has filmed Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a period version of Four Weddings and a Funeral, starring Elizabeth McGovern, which had its gala performance this week. The plot revolves round McGovern’s bride-to-be daughter who frets about whether she is about to marry the wrong man; Tapper plays her best friend. There is also a soon-to-be-released Britflick thriller, Blood, starring Brian Cox, more of which later.

But Tapper found herself inexorably drawn to the wrong side of the bedsheets once more by the complex characterization of Ellen Love, who wins the heart (albeit briefly) of Harry Selfridge, the eponymous founder of the department store, played by a dashing, bearded Jeremy Piven, star of the US cult series Entourage, who is hotter than a tamale across the Atlantic. "Ellen is quite a complex individual and there’s more to her than initially meets the eye, which makes her great fun to play. She starts out as a relatively frothy good time girl, who loves the high life and adores being plied with furs and jewels by Harry, but she also has a Holly Golighty side to her nature and there’s a lot of tension lurking beneath the surface." Her comeuppance is heralded when she makes the fatal mistake of genuinely falling for Harry Selfridge, a serial womanizer with a magpie’s eye for shiny new baubles and prizes. "Harry is reckless with Ellen’s heart, but you’ll see later in the series that things are quite as straightforward as he hoped they would be."

Where the springboard of her current show will catapult her remains to be seen, but given Piven’s "god-like" status in America, the success of Mr Selfridge there is virtually guaranteed. Tapper and her husband and daughter will shortly be joining the annual actors’ exodus to Los Angeles for pilot season, when there is a flurry of auditions (known, confusingly, as 'meetings’). "I did pilot season about nine years ago and it’s terrifying," says Tapper. "You arrive at a holding area full of actresses who all look like you, only better, then you are ushered into a room and you get a single shot at reading lines, which lasts maybe two minutes, then you’re out of there."

This time however, the excitement surrounding Mr Selfridge means her stock will be considerably higher. But it would take a pretty plum role to convince her to leave British shores on a permanent basis. Not least because she’d miss the theatre- and the shopping. "As an impoverished student I used to spend days out in Selfridges, nibbling on samples of free cheese and dousing myself with scent in the perfume department," she recalls with a nostalgic sigh. "Would I like to be the 21st century Spirit of Selfridges? Absolutely!"