It has been 70 years since Ruth Ellis became the last woman in the United Kingdom to be hanged, and leading actress Lucy Boynton believes it is the right time to revisit her story in drama series A Cruel Love. “I’m so grateful to this series because I think it’s the first time that we do really examine her story with a contemporary lens, what led to this being allowed to happen in broad daylight when even in 1955 it was a tremendous miscarriage of justice,” she says.
Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy plays Ruth in the new drama, which focuses on the 28 year old London nightclub manager as she becomes embroiled in a passionate but abusive relationship with racing driver David Blakely (Laurie Davidson). Their affair was marked by what is now recognised as domestic violence, and it came to a tragic end when Ruth shot and killed David outside a Hampstead pub in April 1955. She was immediately arrested and put on trial for his murder.
“It was such a tumultuous relationship, but they couldn’t stay away from each other,” Lucy explains. “Within weeks of meeting they were already living together. They seemed to be magnetised to each other. It’s hard for us on the outside to understand it but it was clearly intoxicating. And then it quickly turned very sour.".
"He was very jealous, yet also unfaithful. He would promise her marriage, then disappear for days or weeks, telling all his friends they weren’t together anymore, then would return to her begging her to take him back. His physical abuse became so bad her friends were convinced he would kill her.”.
The series also recreates Ruth’s trial, where it took the jury just 20 minutes to convict her of murder, and Lucy says the court scenes were some of the toughest for her to film. “The days I filmed in court were very intense because for legal reasons and for accuracy, all dialogue is verbatim from the court transcripts. So we got a totally vivid experience of what that trial was like. How frustrating it was to sit through the misinformation and misrepresentation of Ruth’s experience.
Because David Blakely was a member of the upper class it was deemed inappropriate to talk about his ugly behaviour, so none of the physical and emotional abuse he inflicted was mentioned, and therefore the case was entirely imbalanced and Ruth misrepresented.” “It was an incredibly intense shoot,” she continues. “The scenes of domestic violence were also hard to let go of when we wrapped.”.
Starring alongside Lucy in the court scenes is veteran actor Nigel Havers, who plays his own real life grandfather, Justice Cecil Havers, who presided over Ruth’s trial. Executive producer Kate Bartlett reveals she and her fellow producers asked Nigel if he would appear in the series but weren’t sure he would say yes.
“We had lots of conversations going, ‘Oh, do you think he might?’ And he leapt at it,” she says. “We couldn’t quite believe it. So it was just amazing that he was playing his grandfather, it was extraordinary.”. “He was full of little observations about what his grandfather would do,” adds director Lee Haven Jones. “Apparently his grandfather used to write all the time, he’d constantly be taking notes, and he liked to bet on the horses as well. So there were all of these little details and while we didn’t include all of them, it was nice to know that the role was imbued with a sense of authenticity.”.
While Ruth’s story has been recreated on screen before – most notably in the acclaimed 1985 movie Dance With A Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett – A Cruel Love is the first time that Ruth’s family has been involved in a production about her.
“A few years ago I got an email totally out of the blue from one of her grandsons saying her true story had never been told,” says Kate. “That’s the kind of email you get and you’re immediately fascinated. I then read Carol Ann Lee’s incredibly researched book [A Fine Day For Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story] and uncovered all this incredible hidden history that we didn’t know about Ruth Ellis and the story that we’re now telling on screen.”.
One fact that screenwriter Kelly Jones wanted to feature in the series was a moment that shows how brave Ruth was leading up to her execution by hangman Albert Pierrepoint on 13 July 1955. “In the first episode there is a detail where the nurse brings her in sedative just before she’s about to be executed, and she refuses it, which actually happened,” says Kelly. “They really wanted her to take it for obvious reasons, and she didn’t want to because she wanted to be clear-headed. It says so much about Ruth’s character, I think, that she wanted to be clear-eyed about what she was going through, and she had incredible bravery.”.
