MY MATT'S PERFECT
By Rachel Richardson
EASTENDERS babe Lacey Turner says her ideal romantic leading man is her BOYFRIEND. Lacey, who plays feisty Stacey Slater, reckons barber Matt Kaye can "almost do no wrong". Talking to the News of the World after being nominated for a major Best Actress award, she sighs: "He's practically perfect. I'm really happy. We are very similar?we both like staying in and watching TV and films. He makes me laugh and that is everything I look for in a boyfriend."
The couple, both 18, first got together three years ago. Then Lacey went out with Jake Gotlib?the student she was caught romping with on hotel CCTV. Now Lacey has learned her lesson, settled for a quiet life and has been back with perfect gent Matt for the last year. She explains: "It's difficult to trust people, especially men. You never know what their intentions are." But she reckons she has learned to spot the users. "I have a very good bulls**t radar," she warns. "I can tell very quickly whether someone likes me for me, or for my fame."
Lacey says she's so glad she can put her trust in Matt?even enough to do her hair! "I get him to give me trims and tidy it up," she chirps. "I'm not so sure about letting him do something major though, because if he got it wrong I'd kill him." She says they haven't made any long-term plans?but it's definitely not a case of hair today, gone tomorrow. "We are really happy but we are taking it slow," she declares. "We are still so young?we haven't really thought much about the future. I know that I want to be a mum, but not for many years yet. I'm just getting started with my career so that is way off." The star, who lives with her parents and two sisters in Hertfordshire, reckons she's pretty easygoing but does have her "Stacey moments".
She explains: "I'm not like Stacey at all, but I sometimes forget myself and make a cutting comment like her. I've done it to my mum when she's asked me to tidy my room and I've answered her back. And with Matt I have moments when I want things my way, but generally I'm very laid back."
Apart from when she's pictured in the press looking ropey?like on her 18th birthday when she was pictured in an unflattering pink dress. "It looked like a marshmallow," Lacey recalls with horror. "It was bright and awful, I really don't know what I was thinking. I saw the picture in a magazine?then burnt the dress." Lacey tells how she got good advice on handling fame from Natalie Cassidy, Walford's Sonia Fowler: "She explained that being an actress and being a celebrity are two completely different things. She asked me which one I wanted to be and it didn't take me long to figure it out. Sound advice."
And Lacey has been glad of Natalie's support when handling some of her hard-hitting plotlines, like the harrowing abortion story. Stacey was shown looking terrified at the clinic next to the grisly medical equipment. Lacey reveals she was only half acting?she was genuinely shaken. She says: "It was scary to see the hospital bed, the stirrups and doctors' equipment. I could really empathise with the fear that a young girl would feel. I got loads of letters from girls who were going through the same as Stacey. Many were very touched. I enjoyed acting out those scenes as I knew it was something girls my age go through."
It was thanks to performances like this that viewers voted her on to the shortlist for the National Television Awards Best Actress gong. She is up against last year's winner Dr Who star Billie Piper, Lost's Evangeline Lily, Corrie's Sue Cleaver and Emmerdale's Ursula Holden-Gill.
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