Simone Interview: So, how does it feel being a lesbian icon? ...

Evening Standard
(London, UK)

March 16, 2001

 

So, how does it feel being a lesbian icon?

She's straight, but a role in Bad Girls has made Simone Lahbib a sex symbol with a gay following.

Syrie Johnson reports

I'VE tried to resist, really I have, but my first question to Bad Girls star, Simone Lahbib, was inevitable. "So, how does it feel being a lesbian icon?"

Lahbib puts her head in her hands.

"Oh no. It's overwhelming and very flattering, but it's great. It's slightly unreal, what with being straight. But it seems to be breaking down some of the ignorance, stereotyping and prejudice that gay women and men have to contend with every day, and that can only be a good thing."

Bad Girls, the award-winning Carlton series set in HMP Larkhall, achieved viewing figures last year of nine million.

This Tuesday's episode will pick up where last season's cliffhanger left off - Helen Stewart, Lahbib's character, had dumped her fianc" for lifer Nikki Wade (Mandana Jones).

Wade escaped, dressed as a nurse, and begged Stewart to abscond to San Francisco.

After the most explicit lesbian love scene ever seen on mainstream television, Stewart must now decide whether to turn her in, or to go on the run with her.

The show's cult following means Lahbib herself is now as big a sex symbol as Tamzin Outhwaite. The difference, obviously, is that most of the fans checking into Lahbib's 86 websites are women. Last year, members of the official fan club hired a London pub to watch the final episode, and when Lahbib showed up to answer questions she was mobbed.

The actress - who's in her "early thirties" - receives thousands of letters, as well as gifts, from both men and women. "One woman wrote telling me that she had lived in a little village all her life and was ostracised when she came out. But since Bad Girls, people's reactions to her have changed for the better. It's amazing to know you have this sort of effect on someone."

Lahbib claims she has received only one negative letter, from a woman.

"She was saying, 'How could a nice girl like you allow yourself to be used by the gay liberal front?'

It quoted Sodom and Gomorrah. It went straight in the bin," she says firmly.

Actually, Lahbib was brought up a strict Catholic, and still holds Catholic beliefs though not on homosexuality.

She turned down the chance to do a spread in FHM ("I said I'd be happy to do it, with my clothes on. They didn't come back to me.

Funny that, eh?" she laughs). And she also refused to go on the children's Saturday morning show Ant and Dec. "I'd love to do it, but not representing Bad Girls," she explains, "It's such an adult show. I just think it's wrong."

She is also slightly concerned at the age of some of her fans. After the first series, she did a "meet-and-greet" in Leicester.

"There were loads of teenage girls there and they had all seen the programme," she recalls, "That made me a little uncomfortable, not simply because of the lesbianism, but also the drugs and the bullying."

Lahbib knows about bullying, having been the victim of racism growing up in Scotland.

"I fought back," she says. "There are a few people in Stirling with bald patches where their hair didn't grow back." Lahbib's grandfather was the son of a sheikh, and her father Joseph was a French-Algerian cook who met her Scots mother while he was head chef at Gleneagles Hotel.

And how did her Catholic family react to her love scene? "Some like it, some don't watch. Last time I saw my granny I told her there was a big kissing scene coming, and she said, 'Och, it's only acting, isn't it. As long as you don't like it'."

Lahbib was initially sceptical of the lesbian storyline, believing the idea of a prison governor falling in love with an inmate was too farfetched. It was only when she went to Holloway prison to research her role that she changed her mind. "I got in contact with the ex-governor of Holloway prison. The stories she told me were just incredible.

The suicides, riots, drugs and relationships all rang true." Lahbib is more interested in the women's issues raised by the series than the "Babes behind Bars" sensationalism. "The show's becoming more political - they have a platform and they're using it."

It must be said that her role has provoked no soul-searching regarding her own sexuality. She became engaged before Christmas to an actor who wishes to remain nameless. So how do her lesbian storylines go down with him? "He doesn't have a huge amount of interest. He doesn't really watch it. It's a lot less threatening than if I was doing a love scene with Jude Law."

The third series of Bad Girls starts on ITV on Tuesday at 9pm.

Top TV lesbian moments

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit -snog and naked bed scenes.

* Portrait of a Marriage - Janet McTeer snogging, and raping in one scene, as Vita Sackville-West to Cathryn Harrison's Violet Trefusis.

ramatisation of Joanna Trollope's A Village Affair, with Sophie Ward and Kerry Fox having a romp after a swim.

* Famous lesbian embraces: Kay Mellors' Playing the Field (BBC1), with two of the football team snogging in a bar.

lAnna Nolan ran to hug and kiss her lesbian lover after leaving Big Brother.

lAlly (Calista Flockhart) and Ling (Lucy Liu) snog in Ally McBeal.

* No snogs but two women in a bed in the BBC2 series Rhona, with Rhona Cameron.

* Emma Thompson played a closet gay actress in an episode of Ellen.

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