There was a time around the mid 2000s when Keeley Hazell was a regular on the newspaper’s now-extinct Page 3 carousel of topless women. She was even voted the second sexiest woman in the world by magazine. Now, nearly two decades on, she’s a comedian, actor and writer who’s appeared in (though not in the part she wanted – more on that later), written for the show too, and has a new Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, , based on her memoir of the same name.

“The nerdy theatre kid in me is just very, very happy,” she tells me. “There’s something about telling my story to an audience that I really find quite powerful.”

It is a heck of a story. Hazell grew up in Grove Park in southeast London, where, she writes, “people sold drugs, got into fights, drank themselves silly, and went to jail”. Her dad was a window fitter and her mum worked as a dinner lady. It was a childhood scarred by domestic abuse – her dad would hit her with a wooden metre stick, the metal part of the vacuum cleaner, or a belt. If her mum didn’t have dinner ready, her dad would grab her by the neck and choke her.

“The violence was absolutely horrific,” Hazell says, “but also incredibly normalised.” Hazell’s parents split when she was 13, which was when she first had therapy. “I’ve been in therapy for most of my life,” she says, and speaking to her, that is pretty evident: she comes across as someone who has spent many hours professionally revisiting her past.

Hazell spent her teenage years skipping school, stealing from shops, getting drunk and setting fire to things. “I liked watching things burn,” she explains. “There’s something just really joyful about destruction – and also the look of the flames was enchanting.” When she was 13, Hazelle and her friends robbed a pervert taxi driver by stealing his wallet while he masturbated in front of them. “It was the first penis I had seen,” she says. “It was quite sad because it really felt like all men wanted was sex, and it was really devastating to have that message confirmed in that way.”

The childhood Hazell describes is one where the most girls like her could dream of was a job at JD Sports – but that was more due to class than ability. “I was incredibly nerdy and really loved learning,” Hazell says. “If I’d had teachers who were able to understand me, and if there had been more stability and less violence at home, that could have been incredibly transformative. I was really curious and opinionated and ambitious – so maybe I could have gone to Oxford.”

Instead, she left school at 16 and started working at a hair salon, where she earned minimum wage shampooing. This was where a customer suggested she enter the ‘s “beach babe” competition, and another friend suggested she enter ‘s search for a new Page 3 model. I ask her how it felt to pose topless for the first time. “It was like a wave of numbness, embarrassment and shame,” she recalls. “It was not something I wanted to do, but the alternative was to work in a hair salon and never leave this area.”

Hazell ended up winning ‘s competition, and that changed her life forever. “You couldn’t open a men’s magazine or newspaper without seeing me semi-naked,” she writes in her memoir. “My boobs had gone national.”

Her 2007 calendar sold 30,000 copies in its few first days, she was on the cover of , and magazines all within the same 12 months, and she was repeatedly voted one of the sexiest women in the world. The success left Hazell, who was barely in her early twenties, feeling disorientated. “There was a disconnect between the image and who I was,” she says. “ and magazines felt like trash magazines, so I didn’t feel empowered by being in them – I felt ashamed.”

Still, the money was good. Hazell started buying property and investing in the stock market. “I was thinking about the long game,” she says, “so as soon as I started making money, I started to think, ‘How can I make my money make money?’” Hazell was not the only one in her world trying to find ways to make money from her success. An ex-boyfriend, whom she calls Theo in her book, sold a sex tape to newspaper.

Hazell’s boyfriends do not come out well in her memoir. She describes them variously as violent and jealous and often involved in drug dealing. “For pretty much everybody that’s in the book, I gave them an opportunity to read it,” she says, “but with the two ex-boyfriends, I’m not in contact with either of them. With Theo, I would have hoped he could read it and maybe see things now as an adult and understand how his actions caused trauma – but I don’t think that that’s happened, sadly.”

Hazell describes the impact of the sex tape as “wiping the chessboard away” – all her plans for how she imagined her career progressing ruined. She fled to Los Angeles and enrolled in acting classes in the hope of establishing an acting career. She secured a few minor roles in and , and had a film script optioned, but despite spending 10 years in LA, failed to get any breakout roles. Given that she was barely working, how did she afford to live in LA for 10 years? “I had property and investments,” she explains. “Plus I made a lot of money as a commercial actress – I’d be in an Emirates commercial for two minutes and make 70 grand from it.”

One evening, Hazell was lying on her bed doomscrolling on social media and feeling like she had screwed up her life, when a message popped up from the actor and writer Jason Sudeikis – with whom she had worked on – asking to meet. They had dinner and Sudeikis told her he had written a part for her in a new TV show about a football team. The show was called , and her character was a former glamour model who becomes a sharp, ambitious marketing executive – a character drawn directly from her own life, right down to sharing her name.

Hazell understandably believed that Keeley was a role she was born to play, and that winning the role would go on to change her life. In the end, it went to Juno Temple. Hazell was offered the smaller role of Bex instead. would go on to become a huge critical and commercial success, and Juno Temple has been nominated for three Emmys. It must be unimaginably galling to see someone else be praised playing a character that is not only based on you but even has your name. “It’s a complete mindfuck,” she says, “especially as the show rendered immense amounts of success for the actress that plays Keeley – it changed her life. It needs a lot of therapy and I’ve had a lot for it.”

Still, Hazell both acts in and is also a staff writer on the series. She admits to being hugely ambitious and would ideally like her own television show. Where does the ambition come from? “For me it was a survival mechanism that came out of my circumstances,” she says, “but it’s also about wanting to be a person that I am proud to be, because for so much of my youth, doing modelling did not make me proud.”

I ask her to picture the teenage Keeley, shampooing customers in that hair salon. If the 40-year-old Keeley overheard someone urging her teenage self to apply for that Page 3 contest, would she do it? “Probably not,” she says. “There’s been a lot of good stuff, but being true to what you feel and believe is more important. Integrity is incredibly important.”

She’s not yet sure if will have a life after Edinburgh – “It depends on how well it goes and how I feel at the end of the run” – but she is proud that the show finally allows her to reclaim her story and her name. “This is the version of me that I’m choosing to put forward, and not somebody else’s idea of me,” she says. “I’m finally playing myself.”

Keeley Hazell: Everyone’s Seen My Tits is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 29 August