A MYSTERY IN THE MIND?

Glenda Jackson returns to TV as a dementia sufferer obsessed with finding her friend in a poignant one-off drama mystery...

Enticing two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson back to screen acting after 27 years was always going to take a special project. And BBC1’s intriguing, poignant, mystifying Elizabeth Is Missing really is exceptional.

In this feature-length adaptation of Emma Healey’s bestselling book, Glenda plays Maud, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s who’s obsessed with finding her best friend Elizabeth.

After Elizabeth fails to turn up at an arranged meeting, Maud is convinced there’s been foul play.

But no one will listen to her – and so she decides to investigate herself. It’s a search that brings back troubling memories from 70 years earlier, when Maud’s elder sister Sukey also disappeared, never to be seen again. While the two mysteries will be involving for the audience, so will Glenda’s intensely moving portrayal of a woman with dementia. ‘This story deals with a woman and her family who are going through the realisation of what Alzheimer’s really is and how terrible it is. It’s a subject of enormous importance,’ says Glenda, who spent most of the 27 years since her last screen appearance as a British MP. ‘It was interesting to explore a life lost and how society has tried to maintain those people whose health is also damaged.

‘The Elizabeth story runs concurrently with the time in Maud’s teenage years when Sukey disappeared. She’s sometimes in the present, more often the past, and at times, bleakly, in the future.’

While Maud fusses about Elizabeth, her daughter Helen and granddaughter Katy are more interested in ensuring she’s safe. They’re unsure whether Maud even understands what she’s talking about. ‘Anyone who cares for someone with dementia will recognise Helen,’ says Helen Behan, who plays her. ‘Horrendous things happen every day and she doesn’t have time to cry or be upset.’

But this is also a tale of love and family, and deception. ‘We didn’t want to make a really grim drama,’ says producer Sarah Brown. ‘Although dementia is at the heart of it, we wanted to take the audience on an entertaining journey too. This is a unique way of looking at dementia.’

The overarching interest for me is this problem of how we deal with the fact that we’re living longer. It’s a blessing and it can also be a curse,’ added Glenda.

SUKEY (Sophie Rundle) Maud’s glamorous and effervescent sister whose marriage to husband Frank may not be all that it appears. YOUNG MAUD (Liv Hill) She adores her big sister Sukey but becomes caught in the middle of her sibling’s marital problems. MAUD (Glenda Jackson) In her late 80s, she becomes obsessed with the disappearance of her friend Elizabeth, which stirs up memories of an earlier mystery.