A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story - ITV drama explores life of last woman hanged in UK
For actress Lucy Boynton, every element of the notorious case of Ruth Ellis is “fascinating”.
The 31-year-old, who played a young Beatrix Potter in 2006’s Miss Potter and later Mary Austin in Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, is leading a new four-part historical drama series exploring the aftermath of Ellis’s shooting of her abusive lover David Blakely in 1955, a killing which led to her being the last woman to be hanged in the UK.
Ruth Ellis’s execution by hanging in July 1955, just a month after her conviction of premeditated murder, was highly controversial.
Ellis, 28, shot Blakely dead outside The Magdala pub in Hampstead, London, following a tumultuous relationship involving infidelity on both sides, an aborted pregnancy, and physical abuse by Blakely – including a punch in the stomach during an argument that led to a miscarriage.
She confessed her guilt and her trial’s jury took just 20 minutes to convict her of murder, a charge which carried the mandatory death sentence.
The British public were already questioning whether capital punishment had a place in 20th century society, and Ellis’s case was politicised in discussion of the death penalty as a method of punishment in modern Britain.
“Some people felt passionately that she should be hanged because they worried it set an example for other women who would get an idea and want to stand up for themselves, and that speaks volumes,” says Boynton.
“And then, even at the time, in the Fifties, people knew that this was barbaric, and the appetite for capital punishment had vastly diminished by this point. So it really was a political move…”
In A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, Boynton and her co-stars – which include Laurie Davidson as Blakely, and Toby Jones as Ellis’s lawyer John Bickford – explore the aftermath of Ellis’s crime, and the events in her life that preceded it.
We learn about the rebellious young woman who worked as a nightclub hostess, had plenty of admirers, and had two beloved children, but who dealt with domestic violence at the hands of the man who would become her victim.
Boynton’s detailed research into the real story of Ruth Ellis also led to the discovery of childhood sexual abuse – in the late 1990s, Ruth’s sister Muriel revealed that not only had their father raped her at the age of 14, producing a son who was brought up as her brother, he had also abused Ruth.
l A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story starts on ITV1 at 9pm on Wednesday, March 5.