Mention the name Ross Kemp and a tough-guy image is the first thing that comes to mind. From his role as Grant Mitchell in EastEnders to the leader of a crack SAS troop in Ultimate Force, Kemp seems to revel in playing hard-as-nails characters.

So it is reassuring to find him in pleasant and jovial mood when we meet in a London private members’ club. He breezes in, hand already outstretched and with a wide grin on his face. Either he’s always like this or it’s because we were at secondary school together in Brentwood, Essex (and I’m hoping he doesn’t remember too much about that).

“Of course I bloody well do, mate,” he laughs loudly. “You were the lead in the school play I seem to recall.”

He’s over-generous with his praise: in fact I wasn’t the lead, just a narrator. He looks back to his own Brentwood days with a mixture of nostalgia and gratitude for real-life lessons learnt from a comprehensive education. For example, he says growing up in Essex taught him the hard way that having aspirations to be an actor didn’t have too much pulling power with the ladies. What mattered to Essex girls was the kind of vehicle you drove.

“The first question an Essex girl asks is not ‘What do you do for a living?’ it’s ‘What do you drive?’” he says. “To which I had to say, ‘Not very much’, and that seriously hampered my love life. Most of my friends went straight into banking and bought snazzy cars.”

He’s clearly making up for lost time now, though (with the cars, that is). As one of the most recognisable faces on TV he can afford to splash out and two years ago he bought a Porsche 911 Turbo. “Well, it’s like that old joke, isn’t it?” he says with a disarming smile. “What is the difference between a hedgehog and a Porsche? With the Porsche the prick’s on the inside.”

In his own case the assessment about Porsche drivers is perhaps a little harsh — while it is easy to imagine the kind of havoc Grant Mitchell would cause if he got his hands on one, Ross comes across as a real gentleman on the road.

“I never get aggressive: there’s no point. I value my life. Boy racers see that it’s a Porsche and they want to race it,” he says. “That’s especially true if they see it has me inside it. So I tend to wear a baseball cap when I’m in the car, but they still recognise me.”

Ross grew up the son of a detective superintendent and his mum was a hairdresser. He knew from an early age that he wanted to act so he kept his head down at school and went to the prestigious Webber Douglas drama school as soon as he had completed O-levels. Since leaving drama school he’s only been out of work for a total of five months. After 10 years of menace and moodiness in EastEnders, Kemp left in 1999 and walked straight into a £1.2m “golden handcuffs ” deal with ITV, starring in such dramas as The Crooked Man and the SAS series Ultimate Force.

He says he’s driven Porsches ever since he could afford them, claiming that with brakes more powerful than the engine it’s an extremely safe vehicle to choose. Not that safety is his primary motive for owning the car. There is obviously still a streak of the Essex boy racer in Kemp and he is not afraid to indulge it when he gets the chance.

“But there’s nowhere you can actually drive them properly in this country,” he says. “The only time I’ve ever been able to open it up was on holiday with a mate of mine. We went all the way round France, down through Italy, then back up through Switzerland, into Germany, back through Belgium and then France. And there you could really drive the car.”

Despite these memories he thinks that his sports-car-owning days are coming to an end. Ross turned 40 this year and in his own estimation he’s getting a bit too old for his Porsche.

“I’ve got to the midlife crisis stage,” he says. “I’ll probably buy something like a Mercedes 4x4 or a Range Rover — which sounds a bit pathetic, really.”

Not as flash as the Porsche maybe, but still a long way from his first car, a midnight-blue 1.6 litre Ford Capri bought with earnings from Emmerdale Farm when he was 20. He had problems with that one before he even got it home — not from the car, but from the insurers, who phoned his mother to renege on the insurance deal. It seems they were even less keen on actors than the young ladies of Essex.

Since then he has driven many different vehicles during the filming of his various parts, and says he loves doing his own stunts — although such is his value now as an actor that he is contractually forbidden to do so on Ultimate Force.

Not that this was always the case. He remembers making an army training film in Belfast at the height of the Troubles when he found himself in a car at night driven by an actor who didn’t know how to drive (he turned out to have lied at the audition). Ross ended up changing the gears for him as they went along.

“But even more hair-raising was an escapade with an explosive car in my early days working on Emmerdale Farm. My character was supposed to blow up a car for which they used an old dilapidated Ford Escort. The problem was that they insisted I use the same car in the scenes leading up to the explosion.

“Bits of the car were dropping off and there were holes in the wells under both seats. As I was travelling along sparks were coming up from somewhere below and the cameraman was going, “Right, stop the car. I am not filming in this car — I want the health and safety people out’.”

Kemp, on the other hand was not at all fazed by driving such a death trap. “I was just a young actor going, ‘What’s your problem?’” he says. “I carried on driving it all day.”

Perhaps there is something in that hardman image after all.

ON HIS CD CHANGER

I listen mainly to Radio 4 in the car, but if I want music I’ll probably listen to Classic FM. When I’m out on the open road I’ll probably listen to Radio 2, Heart or Magic (which shows how old I am). Or if I put on a CD I’ll go for Ben Folds Five – Whatever & Ever Amen, The Kinks – You Really Got Me, and Lenny Kravitz – Are you Gonna Go My Way?

A new series of Ultimate Force starts on January 8 on ITV1

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