A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is a four-part limited series.Des Willie/Brit Box/Supplied
If Ruth Ellis stood trial for the murder of her lover today, would there have been a different outcome? That’s one of the central questions viewers will ask after watching BritBox’s four-part limited series A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.
In 1955, Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, for the murder of David Blakely. The 28-year-old nightclub hostess and mother shot her abusive lover and was arrested at the scene. Three hours later she told detectives, “I am guilty. I am rather confused.” Ellis was executed three months later, despite international protests and evidence that was never presented in court.
It was a two-day trial that took roughly 20 minutes to decide and it left plenty of questions about Ellis’s story. A Cruel Love attempts to change that 70 years later by dramatizing her tale with a script from Kelly Jones, written at the request of Ellis’s grandson Stephen Beard.
“She was portrayed in the media in a way that was so narrowed and skewed by misogyny and classism of the time,” says actor Lucy Boynton, who portrays Ellis in the series. “Jones’s script has really humanized her for audiences. It’s a thorough investigation into who she truly was.”
Over four episodes, Boynton’s take on the historical figure follows two timelines: the events leading up to the shooting and those that came afterward. The script uses court documents and transcripts that haven’t previously been made public to offer something new even to those who know the story.
Instead of going all the way back to Ellis’s abusive upbringing, her societal reinvention or even her tumultuous first marriage, those events are hinted at through present-day scenes. When the series does address the abuse – including an incident resulting in miscarriage – from Blakely (Laurie Davidson), it does so honestly without ever feeling gratuitous. An intimacy co-ordinator on set helped establish that sensitive balance, while a predominantly female team created the tone during a seven-year development period.
A major exception was director Lee Haven Jones, whose male gaze helped inform the way Ellis’s case played out and was covered in real life.
“Her life and story were so influenced by the patriarchy and men and the male gaze,” Boynton says. “It was the excruciating thing at the time. It was a more misogynistic era that was allowed to be much more blatant. The mostly male jury [10 men and two women] really does speak to the extremity of the patriarchy at the time.”
A Cruel Love also explores the role Ellis’s other love interest, Desmond Cussen (Mark Stanley), played in the case. There is evidence that Cussen provoked Ellis into the murder after she returned home one day badly beaten. It was Cussen who gave Ellis his British Army revolver and taught her to use it. He also promised to watch after her children if things went wrong, and he drove her to the crime scene that night.
Then he acted as a witness for the prosecution team, which included his cousin.
“In 1955 the general public knew that it was a miscarriage of justice. It was very clear that it was provocation and therefore diminished responsibility should have been a factor,” Boynton says.
Two years later, the Homicide Act of 1957 introduced diminished responsibility and provocation as partial defences to murder in Britain as a result of Ellis’s case.
“It was just infuriating the way that misogyny was allowed to be so blatant and such a central part of her court trial,” Boynton continues. “I feel very grateful to be a part of contemporary society, and I know that as a contemporary woman, that’s part of the frustration. We at least have our own voices now, in a way that Ellis couldn’t advocate for herself at the time.”
In 1955, it was John Bickford who defended Ellis. Toby Jones stands in for the solicitor in A Cruel Love, depicting a man who desperately wants to help, but cannot when his client refuses to speak on her own behalf. Boynton believes Ellis’s silence was the result of life experiences and the refusal to see herself as a victim – even with her own life on the line.
“She had been put through so much in her life, and a central element of that is abuse at the hands of men,” she says. “She didn’t know to expect anything else. She thought that’s what men were like and what relationships were like. But she also didn’t want to be seen as weak and weakened by these men. She was ambitious and self-assured, self-aware and so incredibly strong and resilient. That’s what she wanted her identity to be.”
In researching the story and speaking with victims of domestic abuse, Boynton has learned that most perpetrators of violence were trusted implicitly by those they abused. So, when help is offered by others, a survivor has already lost their ability to trust.
“Why would you now trust this person when that trust has been so betrayed and broken in the first place?” she adds.
Boynton hopes A Cruel Love highlights how far society has come in its treatment of women but also the work that still needs to be done. She feels that Ellis would have had a different outcome had she stood trial today, but she also considers how male voices are so often the authors of history. In past interviews Boynton described Ellis as a modern woman ahead of her time, but wonders now if that was indeed the case.
“We are all held back by misogyny, by that bigotry that is so insidious and is so undermining and diminishing of what is true and real and so maybe women like Ellis are just clocked into that, as I think most or all women are,” she says.
“I think rage does live, either dormant or very at the surface with women, and so maybe it’s just that these writers are bringing that to the forefront. I’m very keen to excavate that truth and bring that to audiences with this story.”
