Latest news with #ACruelLove:TheRuthEllisStory
The Independent
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
One Day star among actors reading from International Booker Prize shortlist
One Day star Ambika Mod and The Tick actor Peter Serafinowicz are among the famous faces selected to bring their 'hugely gratifying' readings of the International Booker Prize shortlist to a series of films. Booker, which has been releasing the films with well-known actors for its two annual prizes since 2022, believes the extract readings encourage more people to get interested in the prestigious book awards, especially on social media. The 2025 line-up also includes Bohemian Rhapsody and A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story actress Lucy Boynton, Stath Lets Flats actor Jamie Demetriou, Black Doves actor Omari Douglas, and Slow Horses actress Rosalind Eleazar. Mod, who was born in Hertfordshire to Indian parents, read a part of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, a book about the lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Serafinowicz, who recently appeared as a love interest in Amandaland and presents the Netflix psychological game show Million Dollar Secret, recites from French author Anne Serre's A Leopard-Skin Hat about friendship and mental health. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: 'It's hugely gratifying to see this come to fruition. 'Since we started making these 'film trailers for books' three years ago they have been seen over a hundred million times, and their release has become one of the most anticipated moments of our prizes calendar. 'We're hugely grateful to the incredibly talented people we've been lucky enough to work with on these short films, including our director for this year's International Booker Prize shortlist films, Roxy Rezvany. 'We hope that as well as inspiring more readers to pick up the books, they showcase the best contemporary fiction in translation for the award-winning screenwriters and directors of tomorrow.' The films are part of a tradition of Booker Prizes adaptations, after more than 70 longlisted or shortlisted books have been filmed for the big and small screen, including Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day, Sally Rooney's Normal People and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. The six shorts were directed by Roxy Rezvany, who has been Bifa-nominated for domestic abuse short Honesty, and released the opera-documentary Photo Booth (2022) about penguins, Palestine, and queer themes. Previous performers include London-born singer Dua Lipa, Poldark star Eleanor Tomlinson, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, Homeland actor David Harewood, Bridgerton actress Adjoa Andoh, Irish comedian Aisling Bea, and Outlander actor Tobias Menzies. Rezvany said: 'All the books hold such vibrant worlds, so the approach was simply to lean into what excited us about the writing. 'It was a privilege to bring the work of all the nominated writers to life in some small way through these films.' Boynton read On The Calculation Of Volume I, a story of waking up on the same day every day, by Solvej Balle, and Douglas recited English Channel migrants fiction Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix. Eleazar read from Under The Eye Of The Big Bird, speculative fiction about humans nearly dying out, by Hiromi Kawakami and Demetriou took Perfection, focused on a couple feeling trapped in a middle class existence, by Vincenzo Latronico. The 2025 International Booker Prize winner, who will receive £50,000 to share with their translator, will be announced at the Tate Modern, London, on May 20.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ITV's new "rags to riches" royal drama confirms Natalie Dormer in key role
ITV's new royal drama The Lady has confirmed the casting of Natalie Dormer in a key role. The "rags to riches" tale follows the real-life story of Jane Andrews, the Duchess of York's former royal dresser who was later convicted of murdering her fiancé. It has now been confirmed that Game of Thrones' Dormer will portray Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, opposite How To Have Sex's Mia McKenna-Bruce as Andrews. Related: Best streaming services Outlander's Ed Speleers will play Thomas Cressman, the man whom she falls in love with and eventually murders. Other stars include Life on Mars' Philip Glenister, Outnumbered's Claire Skinner, Gavin & Stacey's Laura Aikman, Minx's Ophelia Lovibond, Happy Valley's Mark Stanley, Litvinenko's Daniel Ryan and Skins' Sean Teale. The Lady "charts the rise and fall" of Andrews, "whose rags to riches fairy tale fell apart when she was convicted of murder", according to the synopsis. Related: The synopsis continues: "Once a young working-class girl, Jane answered an advertisement in a magazine and to the astonishment of her friends and family, became the Duchess of York's dresser at Buckingham Palace. "Moving amongst the highest social circles in Britain, Jane managed to secure a place in the upper-classes, only to lose her job with the Duchess after nine years of service. "Still reeling from her fall from grace, Jane went on to meet charismatic businessman Thomas Cressman and fell deeply in love. Soon cracks began to develop in the romance Jane had pinned all her hopes on, with disastrous consequences." Related: The four-part series has been written by Humans' Debbie O'Malley and directed by A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story's Lee Haven Jones. Speaking previously of the project, O'Malley noted that behind the headlines of Andrews' 2001 conviction "lay a much more complex, painful and thought-provoking story", namely "an exploration of female ambition and human frailty and a devastating chain of events that ended in the taking of a man's life". "And this story, tied up with our national preoccupation with class and our ongoing obsession with the Royal family, feels every bit as relevant now as it did twenty years ago," she added. The Lady will air on ITV. You Might Also Like PS5 consoles for sale – PlayStation 5 stock and restocks: Where to buy PS5 today? IS MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 THE BEST IN THE SERIES? OUR REVIEW AEW game is a modern mix of No Mercy and SmackDown
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in TV: Get Millie Black; With Love, Meghan; A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story; Towards Zero
Get Millie Black (Channel 4) | Love, Meghan (Netflix)A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (ITV1) | Zero (BBC One) | iPlayer Well, here's something. New five-part Channel 4 detective drama Get Millie Black, mainly set in Kingston, Jamaica, is the first TV show created and written by Booker-winning Jamaican author Marlon James (A Brief History 0f Seven Killings), and its literary bent is evident from the off. Each episode showcases the internal narrative of a different character. First, the titular heroine (Tamara Lawrance), a study in dualism, one moment speaking in measured English tones (Millie was sent to the UK in her teens), the next in fluent patois. Returning to work as a Kingston police detective after the death of her mother, she must deal with the rage of her transgender sister, Hibiscus (a raw debut from Chyna McQueen), and a case that takes in drugs, violence, homophobia, lingering colonialism, corruption and missing children. This is a drama rich in complexities. In a virtuoso performance, Lawrance holds the centre as the bold, uncompromising Millie Black. White people barely feature, apart from Joe Dempsie's Scotland Yard detective, whom Black dismisses and teases ('He's only a white man, darling. All balls, no cock'). Pretty much every time you meet a new character, they come fully loaded with traits and backstory. When James set out to write this series, he really wrote it. Kingston itself is presented as a volatile contradiction of staggering beauty (blue waters, sandy beaches), bleak reality (poverty, criminality, brutality) and vibrant culture (if you're interested, Get Millie Black's brilliant theme tune is Ring the Alarm by Shanique Marie). There are some energy dips and missteps, not least an untidy tangling of plotlines towards the end, but in the main it's an impressive and original screenplay from James and a star-making turn from Lawrance. Meghan Markle's new eight-part lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan, landed on Netflix in a fragrant detonation of essential oils, edible flowers and homemade beeswax candles. In what may be the last chance for the Sussexes to hang on to their $100m Netflix deal, as well as a curtain-raiser on Meghan's Desperate Trad-Wife merch flogging via her new company, As Ever, the stage was set for lifestyle greatness. Or something. Filmed in radiant Montecito, California, but not at the couple's actual home, the setup involves Meghan receiving different guests each episode (friends, chefs, etc). Thus positioned, she bestows her upcycled Martha Stewart hostess worldview (there's no royal gossip like there was in those documentaries) while wearing stealth-wealth clothes, serving mountainous platters of crudites and banging on about how everything is 'amazing!' and 'exciting!' Despite being postponed from its original release date because of the California fires, with the outside world darkening by the moment and the bulk of Meghan's enthusiasms costing more than most weekly household budgets, With Love, Meghan is TV tone deafness in extremis. The format ('Guests stand at kitchen island making stilted small talk and praising Meghan') could also do with a rethink. The first guest, a makeup artist called Daniel, obligingly turbo-gushes: 'Why does no one present peas like this? They're like little pearls.' However, the next guest, The Office's Mindy Kaling, addresses her hostess as 'Meghan Markle'. 'You know I'm Sussex now,' says the duchess a little sharply (does she give Kaling the stink eye?), quickly adding that it's her children's surname. It's so awful (and brilliant), I'm impressed that Netflix (and Meghan) didn't cut the scene. Elsewhere, her cooking isn't at all bad, and she's not that stiff (she's not above day drinking cocktails with her guests). For some, With Love, Meghan may hit the spot as an escapist irony watch. Others may balk at the interminable lifestyle churn (homemade bath salts, herb picking with trugs). Harry is only briefly wheeled on at the end, like a confused child who's about to be put to bed. A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, a four-part drama by Kelly Jones, based on Carol Ann Lee's book A Fine Day for Hanging, marks 70 years since the 1955 execution of 28-year-old Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Ellis, played by Lucy Boynton, never denied shooting her lover, racing car driver David Blakely (Laurie Davidson), but the drama addresses the myriad injustices of her case: Blakely's psychological and physical abuse (he punched Ellis in the stomach, making her miscarry); how the trial was 'rigged' to protect others (including a sleazy type played by Mark Stanley); the fact that Ellis's peroxide-blond hair, nonconformist ways and class ('common little tart') were as much in the dock as the single mum of two. Initially, it's hard to warm to Boynton's chilly, unsympathetic Ellis, whose faux-clipped tones Blakely mocks ('What is your real voice?'). Ellis is too proud – and disturbed – to let her lawyer (Toby Jones) make a proper case for clemency until it's too late. Incidentally, Nigel Havers plays his real-life grandfather, Sir Cecil Havers, the judge who presided over the trial; upset by the death sentence, Havers wrote to the home secretary asking for a reprieve for Ellis, and after her death sent money for her son's upkeep every year. A Cruel Love is marred by crass melodrama, including preparation for the hanging (dangling nooses et al), though arguably the barbarity of capital punishment should be shown. In later episodes, Boynton brings Ellis's humanity and vulnerability to the fore (sitting in her cell doing jigsaws; nervously eating her last breakfast) and it's very powerful. Over on BBC One, Rachel Bennette's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero kicked off. It's set at the windswept fictional Gull's Point, where Hollywood royalty Anjelica Huston camps it up as a wealthy aristo. Languishing in a vast posh bed, tinkling servant bells, she resembles a haughty pin cushion. Elsewhere, the cast includes Clarke Peters (The Wire) as a lawyer and Anjana Vasan (We Are Lady Parts) as a lady's companion, while Matthew Rhys plays a moody sleuth, staggering around clifftops, coat-tails flapping. This three-parter is enjoyable enough (I'm always up for a Christie) but is too febrile, and at one point (spoiler alert) there are highly sexed-up shenanigans atop a staircase involving (don't look, Miss Marple!) heads up skirts. Whatever your thoughts on Agatha Christie, never mistake her for Bridgerton. Star ratings (out of five) Get Millie Black ★★★★With Love, Meghan ★★A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story ★★★Towards Zero ★★★ Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties(BBC Four) A poignant, revelatory documentary about the 1960s British artist Pauline Boty, who blazed a trail for feminist art and died of cancer at 28, refusing treatment while she was pregnant. The Leopard(Netflix) Intense Italian-language period drama based on Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's 1958 novel, which also inspired Visconti's 1963 film, about Sicilian aristocrats in the 1860s. Imagine: The Academy of Armando(BBC One)The Thick of It, The Day Today, Alan Partridge, Veep… an in-depth profile of the influential Scottish comedy writer-director Armando Iannucci. Interviewees include Chris Morris, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Peter Capaldi and Jesse Armstrong.
Telegraph
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A Cruel Love, review: Lucy Boynton's Ruth Ellis is less criminal, more feminist hero
'A woman like her, they were never going to let her off,' says the barrister in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story (ITV1). Ellis was a nightclub manager, a former escort, a neglectful mother, a bottle blonde. She was also a domestic abuse victim. The man she murdered, David Blakely, was a violent womaniser who had recently caused her miscarriage by punching her in the stomach. If the case were heard today, she could plead diminished responsibility; the book on which this drama is based, Carol Ann Lee's A Fine Day For a Hanging, argues that she was suffering from PTSD. But this was 1955. A jury found Ellis guilty in under 15 minutes, and she became the last woman in Britain to be hanged. Then again, should the jury really have found otherwise? Ellis shot Blakely four times. He went down after the first shot, and she fired the other three bullets at close range while he lay helpless on the ground. At her trial, she coolly said: 'It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.' It's a complicated case, and A Cruel Love reopens the debate over whether or not the verdict was justified. It's a thought-provoking drama powered by a strong central performance from Lucy Boynton, who seems to offer little more than clipped tones and a gimlet glare in the early scenes but comes into her own in the final episode as the minutes tick by until the execution and Ellis tries to suppress her fear. Those last moments are a horror. The story has been told several times, including in Mike Newell's excellent 1985 film, Dance With a Stranger. The key difference between these two is the role of Desmond Cussen. In the earlier telling (played by Ian Holm) Cussen was an essentially benign figure, hopelessly in love with Ellis and concerned with protecting her. Mark Stanley plays him in the new version as a weasel who gives Ellis the loaded gun and ultimately betrays her. Toby Jones is here as John Bickford, the doleful solicitor who tries in vain to convince Ellis to reveal Cussen's involvement. He gets the key speech, when he says that Ellis represents everything that the Establishment fears: an ambitious woman with no respect for class or sexual boundaries. In a neat bit of casting, Nigel Havers plays his real-life grandfather, who was the trial judge in the case. What the drama lacks is chemistry between Ellis and Blakely (Laurie Davidson). In the film, Miranda Richarson and Rupert Everett had it in spades, making it clear why neither party could stay away from this toxic relationship. This Blakely is forgettable, but perhaps that's intentional in a drama that wants to reframe the case with Ellis as the victim.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story review – the sad, shocking tale of the last woman to be hanged in Britain
For obvious reasons, the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged by the state, has been told and retold in many different versions over the years, in film, theatre, radio and, of course, television. In A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, Lucy Boynton brings it to the small screen once again, playing the woman sentenced to death for shooting her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, north-west London. It is a sad and complex story, and while the performances are excellent, this solid four-parter can only march them grimly towards their inevitable conclusion. It begins on the day of Ellis's execution, in 1955, as she refuses an offer of drugs to 'calm' her. It skips back several months to the night of her arrest – the night of the shooting – and then back again a few years, to where it all began for the purposes of this interpretation. Ellis, who was just 28 when she was hanged, is being interviewed for a job as the manager of a high-end(ish) London nightclub. The proprietor asks her to prioritise the final seat left vacant in the establishment: should it go to the aristocrat, the businessman or the actor? Boynton delivers the first of many wonderfully theatrical monologues in reply, establishing the framework of a fragile and shifting class system in postwar Britain. Here is where A Cruel Love is most effective. Ellis has adopted a cut-glass accent, but she wears it like a costume. She has become, as she likes to remind people, the manageress of the nightclub, but she is also a sex worker under the thumb of her grotesque boss and landlord. She is presented as street smart, tough and eloquent, but is clearly vulnerable as the single mother of two small children. When she meets racing driver Blakely (Laurie Davidson), she is drawn into his wealthier world, and that of his friends, the Findlaters, 'those malicious snobs' who look down on Ellis. Blakely and Ellis begin a toxic and violent relationship. His friends only see sport in his relentless philandering and appear to encourage his growing cruelty towards Ellis. Ellis is a perpetual outsider. In court, she must attempt to convince a jury of 12 men that she is not a bad mother, not immoral, that there were mitigating circumstances (the concept of diminished responsibility came into law two years after Ellis's execution, we are told, in a telling note at the very end) and that Blakely was abusive. There is a claustrophobia to the cinematography, which is simultaneously beautiful and suffocatingly close. The camera does not shy away from Blakely's acts of violence, and I wonder if it lingers on them a touch too long. The performances, though, are outstanding. Boynton really is fantastic as Ellis, driven to breaking point by the awful obsessions of privileged men, who are, ironically, the only ones who might be able to save her life in the end. Toby Jones is predictably great as her conflicted lawyer John Bickford, who seems entirely out of his depth with a woman who readily admits her guilt – 'I took David's life. I don't expect you to save mine' – while she is silently pleading for an empathy that seems out of reach for almost everyone. A Cruel Love is as well acted as it is handsome. The supporting cast is so strong that actors like Juliet Stevenson and Nigel Havers just drop in, briefly. Havers plays his real-life grandfather Justice Havers, the judge who sentenced Ellis to death. It is not always the case, but it can be difficult to sustain a true-crime drama when you know what happens at the end. Here, there is no hope of a reprieve, only a smouldering sense of impending doom. It pours in from all sides. Ellis has another man in her life, Desmond Cussen (a wonderfully slippery Mark Stanley), who is obsessive and sinister; his role in the murder went ignored and unpunished. Bickford cannot – and later will not – deliver what Ellis needs in order for her to live. 'Oh, for God's sake, Ruth, make these people understand what you've been through,' he tells her, in a moment of exasperation. At times, A Cruel Love seems similarly hamstrung and never quite feels as if it gets to know Ellis. Perhaps that is the point. There are no clean lines. As she famously said after her arrest: 'I am guilty. I am rather confused.' It picks up pace towards the end and the final episode is much more cohesive, laying out Ellis's account, Cussens' involvement and the many stages at which her death sentence might have been commuted. But it wades through a lot of murk before it gets there. A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now
