Still one sexy mamma! She was the most shameless of the cheating sirens in smash-hit TV drama Mistresses. Now a mum, Shelley Conn can't escape vampish roles...

PUBLISHED: 22:30, 13 September 2013 | UPDATED: 22:30, 13 September 2013
Shelley Conn played the ultimate vamp in three series of Mistresses, Britain’s answer to Sex And The City. Like her US equivalent, man-eating Samantha, Shelley’s character Jess had no qualms about taking her clothes off, nor did she have any intention of getting emotionally involved with any of her conquests.
Fast-forward three years and Shelley was still in siren mode when she played Sue Perkins’ lesbian love interest in the comedienne’s BBC sitcom Heading Out. 
Imagine then Shelley’s delight when she discovered her latest TV role involved her being ‘one of the boys’. 
As Jessica Jones, a clandestine police officer in BBC1’s By Any Means, she gets to stomp around in androgynous jeans and boots as part of a team laying traps for criminals when the legal system fails.
She was the most shameless of the cheating sirens in smash-hit TV drama Mistresses. Now a mum, Shelley Conn can't escape vampish roles...
She was the most shameless of the cheating sirens in smash-hit TV drama Mistresses. Now a mum, Shelley Conn can't escape vampish roles...
So far so asexual, but clearly the show’s makers had no intention of keeping her covered up for long.
So guess what? Early in the series, she goes undercover – as a sexpot. ‘In the script it was written that I’d be dressed in a classic red femme fatale dress, and I said “Oh, this is just too obvious”,’ she laughs, pulling a face.
‘I started looking into other outfits I could wear and found this cool Victoria Beckham nude dress. But it didn’t work. Eventually even I had to agree. If something is obvious and it works, why rail against it?’
You can see exactly why the producers would want to exploit her appeal. As far as looks go, you can’t get much more exotic. Shelley, 36, jokes about her ancestry which is a mix of Indian, Burmese and Portuguese. And it turns out she’s not protesting too much about always being typecast as the sultry one. In her last big role, she was more than a little horrified to discover she was playing the mother of a 17-year-old – at the grand age of 33. 
Mistresses (l-r) Trudi (Sharon Small), Jessica (Shelley Conn), Siobhan (Orla Brady) and Katie (Sarah Parish)
Mistresses (l-r) Trudi (Sharon Small), Jessica (Shelley Conn), Siobhan (Orla Brady) and Katie (Sarah Parish) (l-r) Trudi (Sharon Small), Jessica (Shelley Conn), Siobhan (Orla Brady) and Katie (Sarah Parish)
She had landed the female lead role in Terra Nova, the £43 million Steven Spielberg time travel series. Getting the part was a coup, but sadly, Terra Nova wasn’t a triumph. Beset by problems with filming in Australia, the show wasn’t renewed for a second series. But it turned out to be a blessing for Shelley because she discovered she was pregnant with her first child. 
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Her husband, the Casualty and Heartbeat actor Jonathan Kerrigan (who appears in the upcoming film Diana, as the Red Cross head who gets Diana involved in landmine charity work), was back in the UK. ‘It was a surprise,’ she admits. 
‘I had visions of having the baby in Australia. Jonathan said we’d manage. He even talked about trying to get a part on Home And Away. In the event, we didn’t need to do any of that. Oscar was a London baby. I had a home birth, and it was stress free – as stress free as it can be.’
Shelley and Jonathan had been together ten years before Oscar was even thought of, after meeting on the set of police drama Merseybeat, where Shelley played PC Miriam Da Silva. They hadn’t considered marriage, let alone a baby. ‘We thought marriage felt old-fashioned. But something about being parted changed things. I missed him.’
In 2011, Jonathan came out to Australia to visit her and stayed for a month, ‘and then I begged him to stay another month and he did’. 

 ‘I got my image from Mistresses and ultimately I’ll never be anything other than grateful for it. And can I still play the sexy young thing? Of course I can!’
At the end of the trip, he proposed. ‘He presented me with a ring and I burst into tears and it was glorious, everything we tried to pretend we didn’t want. Underneath it all we’re hopeless romantics. I didn’t expect to fall pregnant immediately – but I did. 
He came to Australia, got me up the duff then disappeared!’ She told Jonathan, back in the UK, that she thought she might be pregnant – and did the test over Skype. ‘I held the thing up to the camera and he saw two lines and went, “Wow!”.’
Shelley, who was born in London to Anglo-Indian parents, has acting in the blood, as her great-aunt was Hollywood legend Merle Oberon (Oberon’s brother was Shelley’s grandfather). 
Merle played opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, and Shelley describes her as ‘the ultimate movie star’. And Shelley is equally determined to succeed. 
‘After Oscar arrived I felt an urge to prove I could do it all, so I went to an audition when he was 18 days old. I didn’t get the part, but I was probably giving off signs I wasn’t ready.’
The first role she did take after the birth was Heading Out, which aired in February this year. ‘That was hard because I was feeding Oscar at the time, and you don’t feel drop-dead gorgeous when you’re in mummy mode,’ she laughs.
But it looks like the real ‘mumsy’ roles will be a long way off. ‘I got my image from Mistresses and ultimately I’ll never be anything other than grateful for it. And can I still play the sexy young thing? Of course I can!’ 

By Any Means starts on 22 September on BBC1.