Lynda La Plante
Lynda La Plante made her name with the ‘ 80s TV series Widows as well as the iconic policewoman, Jane Tennison. Now she is back with a new book and a Hollywood remake. Donal O’Donoghue meets her
With Widows on the big screen and her new Jane Tennison novel on the shelves, the award-winning writer talks Donal O’Donoghue about the best and worst of times
“It has been the lowest and the highest,” says Lynda La Plante of the recent past, which saw her banned from an ITV set, undergo unsuccessful eye surgery and have her rst-ever TV series remade by Hollywood. “I walked away from ITV’s mishmash of Prime Suspect 1973, which was the lowest moment of my professional life. en it swung to such a high place with the movie version of Widows by Steve McQueen, which has restored my con dence. But I still nd it very odd that ITV has thrown away a very successful franchise in that they will not give me the on-screen character Jane Tennison.”
La Plante has described herself as ‘a little tsunami.’ Even at 75, and slightly crocked, she remains a force to be reckoned with. Following surgery in January, her eyesight was severely impacted (“lawsuits ying back and forth”) to such a degree that she had to dictate her next novel, e Dirty Dozen. “Is that picture coming out of the wall?” she asks pointing at a sculpture at the far side of the room and is relieved that she isn’t seeing things. Today she is in pain, her head inclined to one side, with a disc in her neck giving her trouble for some time. But her schedule is chock-a-block as she has a book to sell and people to see.
Right now, La Plante’s fourth Jane Tennison novel, Murder Mile, is riding high in the bestseller charts. It is a tale of grisly murders in East London in 1979, with newly promoted detective sergeant, Jane Tennison, looking for clues amid the red herrings and prime suspects. Yet its author is more interested in talking about other matters, still vexed by Prime Suspect 1973, the 2017 prequel that pulled in an audience of six million, was savaged by the critics and axed by ITV following artistic di erences with La Plante. “I got a text from them saying I was banned from the set and not to go near the actors,” she says. “ ey threw all my scripts out and hired another writer.”
It’s a subject she returns to again and again like a terrier with a bone. “I should have walked at the beginning. e breakdown was at every single level. Every actor I suggested or brought in they turned down.” Top of her director list was Aisling Walsh (the Irish director of Maudie) and she wanted Freddie Flinto as the male lead. e former England cricketer and TV personality did a screen test but didn’t make the cut. “Instead they put in an actor who needed not only an acting coach but also a voice coach,” says La Plante. “For some bizarre reason they are throwing away a huge franchise.” In the wake of that Prime Suspect 1973 experience, La Plante wrote Murder Mile, her fourth book chronicling the early days of Jane Tennison. So what’s it like having Tennison in your head all the time? “A pain in the neck,” says La
Plante with a chuckle. “From the moment where she walks into the original Prime Suspect, I have a big journey to take her on. e trouble is I want to get there too soon. People ask me ‘Does she get married?’ and I tell them ‘I don’t know yet’. But the experience I had with ITV recently will be very useful and I will use it in every possible way. e frustration and the anger I felt will be all part of it.”
Lynda La Plante was born in Warrington in 1943 and spent her childhood in Liverpool. Her parents sent her to elocution lessons (she still has the clipped tones), where her teacher recommended she apply to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (her father thought it was the name of a pub). Later, she worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the TV roles she was picked for were usually as the mouthy prostitute. So she decided to write a part for herself, a two-page treatment that eventually became the ground-breaking 1983 TV series Widows. Inspired by the true-life story of a group of London women who turn to crime when their husbands are killed during a botched robbery, La Plante climbed into the belly of the underworld to research her characters. It was a global hit.
“Since writing Widows I’ve been like a hamster on a wheel,” she says of her breakneck writing life, which also included a period when she ran her own TV production company and created the seminal female crime procedural, Prime Suspect (and detective, Jane Tennison) in 1991. “Nobody knew what a huge success Widows would be. People would ask ‘Are you doing this to empower women?’ I never thought about empowering women. e reality is
that I just wanted to write myself a great big part but in fact I wrote myself out of it. en I bashed out a novel ( e Legacy) having never written one before.”
irty- ve years a er the original production, Widows is back in La Plante’s life thanks to the big-screen remake by Steve McQueen. “I met him rst at a charity event in Buckingham Palace,” she says of the Oscar-winning director ( 12 Years a Slave). “He’s a big man and loomed up to me saying, ‘Are you Lynda La Plante?’. I said yes and he told me then that when he was a teenager Widows was an absolute obsession of his and now he wanted to make a movie of it. It didn’t happen overnight but it was such a boost to my con dence and so insightful. One time he asked me ‘Why is there so much humour in your work?’ and I said that if you want to like somebody you need humour.”
Humour is part of what keeps her going. When her 15 year marriage to the American musician Richard La Plante ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1996, she would say later that the only thing she got out of it was his name. For years she had dearly wanted a family but had four miscarriages and her husband wasn’t interested in adopting. Following the divorce she was at a friend’s house when she saw a girl walking towards her with a two-year-old baby on her hip. She thought, “I’ll never have that”, but the very next day she got a call from an adoption agency.
She was 57 years old when she became a mother to Lorcan in 2004. “ e responsibility just bypasses you because you have this gorgeous baby in your arms,” she says. “Everything is wonderful in that moment because you never thought it could happen. But the reality is that motherhood is not easy in any way at all. I nd when people say I have a son they always add the word adopted, as in ‘adopted son’. When he was ve years old, a friend from his school said to him: ‘You’re adopted, do you know that?’ Fortunately, Lorcan just batted it away because he knew he was a very special child.”
Her son is everything to her but she is also happy to help him trace his birth mother whenever that day comes. “ ere is also the age thing of course. Lorcan is now 15 and so I have to bite the bullet and ask: ‘Should I go tomorrow, where is his protection?’ People seem to think that I’m incredibly wealthy but I’m not in any way at all. at is the other thing that is a bit of a gripe. When I had my own production company we used to pour the money back into it because I was so demanding of quality and would forego my fees. I should have made a lot of money but I didn’t.”
She dislikes gratuitous nudity on screen (that was another issue with Prime Suspect 1973) and is wary about #MeToo. “It’s putting the fear of god into people if you have to question whether you should lean forward and kiss someone on the cheek and then think ‘Oh I can’t do that’. Of course people like Harvey Weinstein need to be challenged but the awful thing about the accusations are the bribes, you know: “You give me what I want [sexually] and I’ll give you that part. So what do you want?” In some ways, the decision is made by the accuser. So you have to say, ‘Be careful’ about this.”
e legacy of her eye surgery from last January is signi cant. “I can’t read as everything I see seems slightly underwater. at is terrifying for me as a writer. Now I have to talk my novels as I can’t use a computer. ey’ve said that if they remove the lenses that they have put in my eyes there is a 50% chance that I will be totally blind. I nished Murder Mile on the computer but now with the next book it is excruciatingly di cult. I will read a line and keep saying it back and I use a big magnifying glass to go through the manuscript.”
But she carries on with her work, the books being her lifeline now. She is “polishing” the h Jane Tennison novel, e Dirty Dozen, is commissioned to write a sixth and has four new storylines worked out. “I’m probably taking stu from my own life and putting it in alongside what I’m being told by all the police o cers when I’m researching the books,” she says. As for herself, she will soldier on as long as her body allows. “It has been very tough physically but I’ll get through it,” she says. I don’t doubt that she will.
Murder Mile by Lynda La Plante is published by Za re
I can’t read as everything I see seems slightly underwater. at is terrifying for me as a writer