FIVE years ago, Hayley Atwell’s name was relatively unknown, until a double bill of period dramas that year propelled her into the limelight. Her role as Lady Elizabeth Foster in The Duchess won her two supporting actress nominations, and she was praised for her performance as Lady Julia Flyte in the film version of Brideshead Revisited.

Fast-forward to 2013 and she’s everywhere – a lead role as spy Eva Delectorskaya in BBC2’s adaptation of William Boyd’s Restless, starring in a Jimi Hendrix biopic as the girlfriend who inspired “Foxy Lady” Kathy Etchingham, and currently filming her role as Agent Peggy Carter in the latest Captain America film.

For the moment, she’s back on British TV screens in new ITV1 crime drama, Life Of Crime. Atwell plays WPC Denise Woods over three decades as she rises from rookie to senior officer. We first meet her in 1985, on the morning of her graduation, as a fully-fledged member of the Metropolitan Police Force.

Over celebratory drinks in the pub, she soon learns she will never just be “one of the boys” when she’s groped by a fellow officer. Seconded to work with Detective Sergeant Ray Deans (played by Richard Coyle), she gets knocked out during an arrest and wakes up in hospital to find a girl crying in the next cubicle. The young girl is called Amy and is later found dead.

The idealistic Woods is determined to bring Amy’s killer to justice, by whatever means possible. “There’s one particular case that haunts her throughout her career.

She’s trying to solve it, but it renders her slightly morally ambiguous. She takes the law into her own hands, so it’s about the possible consequences of that,” explains Atwell.

The actress admits it was this “moral ambiguity” that she found most appealing about the role. “You have this extra element to her where you don’t know whether you like her or not or if she was right to do what she did,” she says.

“Life Of Crime goes into what happens when someone who starts off with the right intentions makes a pretty immature decision and a selfish one that can potentially ruin other people’s lives.”

The three episodes are set in 1985, against the backdrop of the Brixton Riots; in 1997, just before Princess Diana’s death, and in 2013. It was an added challenge to portray the same woman throughout three decades of her life for 31-year-old Atwell. “The young Denise is quite a people- pleaser – her actions are based on her emotions. As she gets older, especially by the third episode, she doesn’t really have time for any drama or nonsense and she’s very matter-of-fact about things,” she says.

TO go from a 20-something to a woman in her late 40s, Atwell spent time in wardrobe and make-up to capture Denise’s changing looks. “We had to do a lot of work on the colour of her skin and hair and her dress sense changing. Because each episode is in a different decade, it’s a big leap.”

She also spent time with police officers.

“I went to a police station in Brixton for a cup of tea with one of the police officers.

He was a huge help because he’d been there a good 20 years, so he would definitely have been around at the time Denise’s character would have been coming up through the ranks.

“I also spoke to a retired police officer and she was very similar in terms of status to Denise. She did very well for herself and was able to divulge a bit of what it would have been like for Denise, and the unashamed bum-slapping and comments about her sexuality.

“There was a big change in the 1980s when women were allowed to walk the beat. If you wanted to work in that job, you found a way of dealing with it and sticking up for yourself.”