Top of the lass

Whoops.
Are those sirens in the distance?
Is that whooshing the sound of many unseen P.A. ninjas about to spirit me away?

How did this happen? I was just chatting to Jennifer Ellison, swapping stories about our respective families – hers staunch Evertonian, mine devout Liverpudlian – and I might have muttered something to the effect that the clan must have been disappointed when, some years back, she dated Steven Gerrard rather than, say, Big Duncan Ferguson.
I wasn’t fishing. Honest. It just seemed like something to say, something organic to the conversation. But uh-oh, the drawbridge goes up. The ninjas are here. Ms. Ellison affects her surliest ‘Scouse tones.
“I’m only here to talk about the film,” she says sternly.
“Of course,” I say. I decide it would be safest and best if I don’t point out that she has been quite happy to discuss everything else until now.
Fair enough, I suppose. In Jennifer Ellison’s world, every trip to the shop sans make up is the cover of Starz magazine, every conversation with a gentleman is a tabloid story bearing the legend “Breast Of Friends.”
“I don’t mind it,” she tells me when we’ve calmed down a bit. “I don’t care if someone takes my picture going to the shops. I don’t care if I’m wearing my tracksuit. That’s what I look like, you know what I mean.”
The Jennifer Ellison story is fairly typical of the British everygirl celebrity. Born into a thoroughly working class family – dad is a taxi driver, mum an administrator – she was precocious little kid who liked to achieve. Unsurprisingly for someone who has lived in Liverpool her entire life, she can trace her ancestry back to Ireland, and has been a frequent visitor here.
“My family are from Mayo,” she says. “I’ve always said that if I ever get married I’ll have the wedding there.”
Her adolescence is a remarkable record of achievement and drive. She always wanted to be famous. She wrote to Brookside’s producers suggesting herself for a part at the age of nine. She studied dance and music. She won the national ballet championships at 13 and again at 14 before accepting a place in the Royal Ballet School where she trained for three years. Finally, Brookside came calling.
“It was filmed really near my house,” she recalls. “You couldn’t avoid thinking about Brookside. It was the ideal place to start my career. I was still a very ordinary teenager. All my mates are the same ones I’ve had since then.”
Her role as ‘ wild child Emily Shadwick’ on Phil Redmond’s soap was expected to last six weeks but she wound up staying for five years. All the while, she kept up her studies. Despite production stints that frequently lasted until 1am, she managed to achieve 11 O-levels.
“I always wanted to make sure I had other options,” she says. “Ballet gave me the discipline and training to keep everything up. I never had a plan or anything. I just knew I wanted to act and sing.”
In the end she discovered a much quicker route to celebrity. Her first brush with the lad’s mags’ sector came in 1999 when, aged 16, she appeared in a series of suggestive poses for FHM. Since then she has been a staple of that industry and holds the dubious distinction of being World’s Sexiest Blonde 2005 as voted by the readers of Nuts.
Doesn’t she feel, well, a bit icky about it?
“Oh no,” she says. “I’m from a family where we’re proud of our bums and tits. We’re proud of our bits. It doesn’t bother me at all showing them off.”
Since then, like many starlets of the small screen, she has plied her trade on reality shows. She won Hell’s Kitchen in 2004, appeared alongside Jeffrey Archer in 2007’s The Verdict and can currently be found on Living TV as the co-host of the American based programme Dirty Dancing – Time Of Your Life.
She is, additionally, one of the best things about The Cottage, a twisted new British horror-comedy from Paul Andrew Williams, the much-trumpeted young director of London To Brighton. Pitched somewhere between Shaun Of The Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film sees Ms. Ellison in formidably mouthy form as a troublesome kidnap victim.
“It was a great part”, she says. “And I love horror films. I love The Exorcist and The Shining. She was really different and lippy and loud.”
And Liverpudlian.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s the way we are alright. Liverpool women are mothers and mothers have to do everything so they have to be strong. They have to be lippy and loud.”

The Cottage is released March 14