Can Havers play his own grandfather? You be the judge...
ACTOR Nigel Havers is playing his grandfather — the judge who sentenced Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain — in the forthcoming prestige TV drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.
Producers ITV confirmed that Havers was on the cast last month, but has kept quiet about his precise role — and the family connection which will make it so fascinating.
I hear that he is going to play his grandfather Cecil Havers, who was the trial judge in 1955. A jury took just 20 minutes to find Ellis guilty of murdering her lover, who she had shot five times, and he passed sentence.
Ellis was hanged in HMP Holloway on July 13, 1955. She was 28.
There were widespread protests and the novelist Raymond Chandler, who was at the time living in Britain, wrote about the ‘medieval savagery of the law’.
In an interview in 2010, Nigel Havers said that his grandfather had always regretted the outcome, feeling that it had been a crime of passion which could have resulted in a sentence for manslaughter rather than the mandatory death penalty for murder.
He added that his grandfather had written to the British Home Secretary recommending a reprieve, but received a curt refusal. It was later revealed that Cecil Havers sent money to Ellis’s son every year from her death until the judge passed away in 1977.
Ellis, a nightclub hostess and sometime prostitute, killed her boyfriend, the racing driver David Blakely, in April 1955 outside the Magdala pub in London’s Hampstead.
On trial at the Old Bailey, prosecutor Christmas Humphreys asked: ‘When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?’
She replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In 2003, the verdict was referred to the Court of Appeal. Michael Mansfield QC argued that Ellis was suffering from ‘battered woman syndrome’ after being ‘disgracefully treated’ by Blakely and said that the judge and barristers had misinterpreted the law.
The Court, however, ruled that the verdict should stand.
Lucy Boynton — who played Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend Mary Austin in Bohemian Rhapsody — will play Ellis in the four-part drama. It is based on the book A Fine Day For Hanging.