Hannah Baxter
| Hannah Baxter | |
|---|---|
| Secret Diary of a Call Girl character | |
 |
|
| First appearance | Episode 1.1 |
| Last appearance | Episode 4.8 |
| Created by |
Lucy Prebble Brooke Magnanti (source material) |
| Portrayed by | Billie Piper |
| Information | |
| Aliases | Belle de Jour Olga |
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Independent escort, writer |
| Family | Jackie Baxter (sister) |
Hannah Baxter is the lead semi-fictional character and protagonist of the British ITV2 television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Hannah secretly has a double life as a high-class call girl as her alter ego Belle, for which she acknowledges and comments directly to the audience, throughout each episode.
The character Hannah Baxter is based on the real life published memoirs of former London call girl Dr Brooke Magnanti, who is better known by her pseudonym, Belle de Jour. The character Hannah/Belle is portrayed by actress Billie Piper.
Hannah is portrayed as a very wise, confident, intelligent, and at times, an outspoken or cheeky character. Although a university graduate with a degree in English Literature, Hannah chooses a career as a call girl for the sake of the money; she reveals that she makes a yearly turnover of £105,000 (though, she claims, it takes £20,000 "to be Belle"). She further claims her career is ideal since she is "fundamentally lazy", in control, and also because she genuinely enjoys the pleasures of sex (in a video blog she reveals with some degree of satisfaction that she lost her virginity to her 40-year-old chemistry teacher). Open minded and truly a professional when it comes to her role as a high end prostitute, Hannah has gone as far as considering a breast augmentation to better appeal to clients, and will likely attempt a variety of fetishes and bedroom scenarios with them. Furthermore, Hannah wants to pride herself on her skills in the bedroom and her ability to size her male clients, such as predicting what kind of lifestyles they lead based on what their sexual interests are and the price, ratings, and styles of the hotels they pay for on "out calls".
It is demonstrated throughout the series that Hannah is very meticulous when it comes to organising her private life with her work, for which she keeps the two completely separate, and will go great measures to keep her occupation concealed from family and friends, which often means she relies on lying, such as telling others that her occupation is a legal night-time secretary. Despite Hannah's discretion and lengthy attempts to keep both worlds apart, the issue of secretly juggling both identities frequently reoccurs in the series, often resulting in negative inner turmoil for her and feelings of loneliness. Often Hannah deals with how much balance is placed on either her personal life or work, for which she is, usually, focused on work – leaving her personal life sometimes neglected, such as when she misses the birth of her sister's child. She claims that romantic relationships are typically avoided, since her profession merely complicates them, which is demonstrated in the second series where she develops a relationship with a man that ends badly.
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