The incredible true-crime story that changed UK legal history

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story ★★★½

“I am guilty; I’m a little confused.” So spoke Ruth Ellis, a 28-year-old Welsh-born nightclub hostess after firing five bullets into her lover, racing driver David Blakely, one Easter Sunday evening in 1955 London.

Blakely’s death spurred a notorious chapter in UK legal history and won Ellis enduring fame as the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Her execution brought to the boil swelling opposition to capital punishment (permanently abolished for murder in 1969) and played a part in the introduction of the “diminished responsibility” defence, allowing the verdict of manslaughter.

Lucy Boynton stars as Ruth Ellis in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis StoryCredit: 7Plus

It also shone a light on the alarmingly swift process to convict Ellis and the treatment of women, particularly those in the lower classes. It’s the latter that A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, ITV’s magnetic, if occasionally hollow, four-part true-crime drama, magnifies with swish, hypnotic eloquence.

Adapted from Carol Ann Lee’s biography, A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story, the series is so beautifully shot that the lighting, set and costume hues and poetic positioning of faces and body turn every frame into an Edward Hopper painting. The camera is either pulled back for beautiful scene compositions (the watery natural light in Ellis’ prison cell, the smoke-fugged velvet-curtained nightclub where she hosted men, the ordered establishment of the wood-panelled courtroom with a male-only jury), or extraordinarily close-up.

The hair’s breadth’s away lens is why this series belongs to actor Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody). She plays Ellis, a tiny red-lipsticked platinum blonde and single mother-of-two, with a steely and compelling delicacy. There are times watching this series when I searched her face, its pores millimetres from the camera, for any glimmer of why Ellis refused, initially, to defend herself after her arrest. Boynton’s facial movements are minute yet intensely perceptible, revealing inner turmoil and Ellis’ long-honed resolve to endure lesser treatment.

It’s clear, if a little drawn out over the series’ 160-minutes, that Blakely (Laurie Davidson), who meets Ellis at the Little Club in Knightsbridge which she managed, is a piece of work. Depicted as a privileged, hard-drinking and violent manipulator, his chaotic presence, which included repeated beatings, lasted two years before Ellis shot him. It’s clear why but the people who could have helped mitigate her actions, and sentence, are everywhere – and equally at fault.

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story has a mighty cast including Boynton, Toby Jones, Juliet Stevenson, Toby Stephens, Mark Stanley and Nigel Havers.

Stanley, who played abusive gym teacher Rob Hepworth in Happy Valley, is equally sinister as Ellis’ obsessive hanger-on (and the man who supplied the gun) Desmond Cussen. Havers, languid as ever, plays his own grandfather, Sir Cecil Havers, the trial judge who oversaw Ellis’ day and-a half trial.

Boynton with Laurie Davidson, who plays slain racing driver David Blakely. Credit: 7Plus

Jones, who plays John Bickford, Ellis’ solicitor, a defeated man who defends Ellis impassionedly but imperfectly, is magnetic. As with his portrayal of postmaster Alan Bates in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, there is something so marvellous about Jones, head-tilted, eyes squinting, looking up at figures of authority and questioning their wisdom.

But watch for Boynton. As the famous, mysterious and maligned Ellis, it’s as if she’s containing live firecrackers in her stomach with inured resolve.

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is streaming now on 7Plus.

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