Behind the headlines
Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain, but was she judged for more than her crime? Writer Kelly Jones tells DQ how she wanted to present the “real woman” caught up in tragic events in ITV miniseries A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.
A young mother who shot and killed her lover, Ruth Ellis was condemned to a notorious place in history when she became the last woman in Britain to be hanged.
Now, a four-part drama reveals secrets about the case that have been hidden for decades, shedding light on one of the country’s most infamous murderers.
Set across two parallel timelines, A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story explores how Ellis entered the dizzying world of upper-class London, living a glamorous lifestyle as a nightclub manager while suffering in an abusive relationship at the hands of racing driver David Blakeley – the lover she later gunned down.
At the same time, viewers also follow Ellis’s journey through the legal system and the ill-fated attempts to defend her before the young mother was hanged in 1955, aged 28.
Now airing on ITV in the UK following its debut on BritBox in North America last month, the show stars Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody, The Ipcress File) as Ellis, with Laurie Davidson as Blakely, Toby Stephens as Melford Stevenson, Toby Jones as John Bickford and Mark Stanley as Desmond Cussen.
Produced by Silverprint Pictures and directed by Lee Haven Jones (Passenger), the miniseries is written by Kelly Jones, who also wrote on fellow true crime drama Des, about serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Here, she took inspiration from Carol Ann Lee’s biography A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story to shed new light on a story that has previously been told on the big screen in 1985 feature Dance with a Stranger.
“I knew who Ruth Ellis was. I probably only knew her name, to be honest, but my parents instantly knew all about her,” Jones tells DQ. “There’s a kind of notoriety with Ruth Ellis’s name. There’s still that residual feeling that she’s in that bracket of notorious female murderesses.”
When she read Lee’s book, Jones was immediately struck by the “cinematic” nature of Ellis’s experiences. In particular, she wanted to highlight Ellis’s story beyond the shooting and follow her through the British legal system – a journey Jones describes as a “wild ride.”
“Despite the notoriety of Ruth, so little is known of the reality of what happened,” she says. “It really was a kind of establishment cover-up. Not explicitly maybe, but the machinations of the British establishment just absolutely went to work on her.”
As explored in the series, Jones points to the fact that Ellis shouldn’t have been the only one on the stand facing the consequences of Blakely’s murder. “She had two boyfriends, David Blakely and Desmond Cussen. David is the glamorous but abusive one who she kills, and Desmond is this slightly thwarted, much quieter man who develops this absolute hatred for David – and gives Ruth the gun,” the writer explains.
“It might have looked very different had the jury been aware of the fact that actually there was this powerful other figure who was really, in a sense, calling the shots. Ruth was a very strong character in lots of ways, but by the time she committed the murder, emotionally, psychologically, she was a mess.”
As a result, Cussen “is the villain of the piece in lots of ways,” Jones says. “He presents himself as Ruth’s saviour. You want them to get together because he’s a good man. He’s just a nice, normal man, not like David Blakely, who’s entitled and a bit damaged and a bit all over the place.
“You see the process of jealousy and embitterment in Desmond, and how he sees himself as the one who can save her from a life of sex work and misery with abusive men. That complex is what really does for them both.”
That doesn’t mean Ellis should escape blame or judgement, Jones adds. In fact, the writer describes Ellis as her own harshest critic, immediately taking responsibility for what she did and unwilling to beg for sympathy.
“She was so completely determined to not be a victim and to cast herself as this quite callous, cold-hearted woman who’d done what she felt needed to be done. She wasn’t sorry for it,” Jones notes. “She didn’t regret it, so she does that work for herself as a character without you having to put too much into it. That was the real woman.”
To build up a picture of who Ellis was, Jones delved into her background, which included sex work and a series of violent relationships. “She was really psychologically damaged, but never, ever showed it in the sense that she was so brilliant at putting on the red lipstick, the heels and the big smile and going out and giving men what they needed,” Jones says. “She’s really such an interesting mix of real complexities and subtle paradoxes, where she was totally determined to prove that she wasn’t a victim, that she didn’t deserve sympathy.”
Jones hopes the series paints a portrait of a “real woman” at a particular moment in time, one in a post-war world where men who, having been fighting across Europe a decade earlier, were offered the chance to feel like heroes again at the clubs where Ruth worked. “Ruth’s offering them a real fantasy to fill the void that’s left by the end of the war,” Jones says. “That kind of fantasy world is just interesting, and it’s one they all fall victim to in their own ways. I just hope people enjoy it and see a bit more of the truth of who she really was, because she was fascinating.”
Telling the story across two timelines, A Cruel Love heads towards the dual crescendo of murder and execution. It’s a narrative structure Jones felt was “necessary” to establish how Ellis went from the point of first arriving in London to killing Blakely, and also presents the “more urgent” storyline that begins with her arrest and takes her to her death.
Because the story was “inherently” dramatic, Jones never “agonised” over writing the four episodes, and found the two timelines often informed each other as her work progressed.
While working on Des, Jones felt a responsibility to the survivors and relatives of Nilsen’s victims. Though it is set three decades earlier, there was a similar responsibility on A Cruel Love, not only to Ruth’s descendants and those of other real people featured in the series but to the “posthumous legacy” of Ruth as well.
“That’s the hardest thing, really, with true crime,” she says. “I really like writing true stories because you don’t have the void of your own imagination. I quite like the parameters of truthfulness, but it feels like a heavy responsibility as well, because these are real people and it matters to lots of people who are still alive.”
Jones also opted not to tell the story through a modern lens, noting Hilary Mantel’s approach to writing about Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall and its sequels, where “these people don’t feel the hand of history upon them. These people are just living their lives and experiencing what they’re experiencing, and they’ve got no idea of the future,” she says. “You have to try to write like that. That’s always something I try to do.”
That the series opens with a title card stating that A Cruel Love “is a true story,” one based on published accounts, also hints at how Jones stuck stridently to the facts of the story, even using verbatim court transcripts in the series.
“I don’t think anything is made up in Ruth,” says Jones, who points out that the only fictional character in the series is a journalist built as a composite from several real journalists. “Everyone else is a real character. Everything they do is real. The only things you fictionalise, because you have to, are emotional responses. You don’t know exactly how somebody responded emotionally in that moment. But all of the facts and all of the characters are real versions of that.”
Her biggest challenge was finding the balance between truth and entertainment. “But with Ruth, I don’t honestly remember it being that hard because the real facts of her case just lent themselves so immediately to dramatisation.”
Through the series, which is distributed internationally by ITV Studios, Jones hopes viewers come to see Ruth as a real person and not as the “hysterical” woman or “cold bitch” she can be portrayed as.
“That idea that she got what was coming to her does persist,” the writer adds. “I would just like people to see her as a real person – very difficult in lots of ways, her own worst enemy in lots of ways, but just a real complex, interesting, fascinating person.
“Lucy does such a brilliant job of getting the brilliance and shininess that Ruth is so good at projecting, but then there’s this real, flawed woman underneath who was struggling with lots of things, but who was completely determined never to be a victim.”
tagged in: A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, Britbox, ITV, ITV Studios, Kelly Jones, Lee Haven Jones, Lucy Boynton, Silverprint Pictures