The story of Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955 has found its own macabre niche in British folklore, and has been been the subject of several film, stage and TV treatments. Perhaps the most memorable of these was Mike Newell’s 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, in which Miranda Richardson played Ellis.
For ITV1’s new four-part drama, Kelly Jones has based her screenplay on Carol Ann Lee’s book A Fine Day for a Hanging: the Real Ruth Ellis Story, and it brings a heavy-calibre cast to bear on the story of the woman who shot dead her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead. Toby Jones plays Ellis’s painfully concerned solicitor John Bickford, Toby Stephens plays her QC Melford Stevenson, and Nigel Havers (pictured below) appears as his real-life grandfather, Judge Cecil Havers, who presided over Ellis’s trial. Ellis herself is played by Lucy Boynton, in a compelling and nuanced performance which suggests that superstardom can’t be too far off.
Ellis’s dismal fate triggered public outrage, since her defence in court was scandalously inadequate and potential mitigating factors had not been taken into account. She would be the last woman to be hanged in Britain, and the case helped to fuel the anti-death penalty sentiment which would cause capital punishment to be suspended a decade later. The novelist Raymond Chandler wrote to the Evening Standard deploring “the medieval savagery of the law.”
Many details of her story remain obscure to this day, though there was no doubt that she’d shot Blakely and she seemed uninterested in trying to avoid the noose. One critical factor that weighed against her was that she signed a confession without any legal representative being present. Even worse was her response to the prosecution in court that “it’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.”
A Cruel Love can’t avoid the fate of the “faction” genre of not being able to reveal unequivocally what really happened, but it poses a variety of questions. A key factor in Ellis’s fate was almost certainly a “she was no better than she should be” attitude from the police and legal establishment, since she had a history as a nightclub hostess and prostitute and was conducting affairs with a variety of lovers. It seems one of these, former RAF bomber pilot Desmond Cussen (Mark Stanley), may have played a significant role in Blakely’s death, not least by giving Ellis the revolver with which she riddled Blakely with holes. However, she refused to reveal this in court or to her defence. We see Bickford saying to her “someone put you up to this” and asking where she got the gun, to which she replies it was “security for a loan”. There was no evidence to back up her claim, though.
She certainly might have chosen her friends more carefully. She was evidently infatuated with Blakely, a whining, bullying, manipulative scrounger played here by Laurie Davidson. He was an aspiring sports car racer and acquaintance of the rather more successful driver Mike Hawthorne, but one of the regular beatings he administered to Ellis caused her to suffer a miscarriage. He also professed himself keen to marry her, while failing to mention he was already engaged to another woman. His unhealthily intimate relationship with Carole and Anthony Findlater (Bessie Carter and Ed Sayer) just adds further layers of murkiness to Ellis’s fatally tangled private life.
So not a very edifying story, but undoubtedly a cautionary one.
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