THE FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt casts off sensible lady’s maid Anna to play a real-life multiple murderer in Dark Angel, a compelling new ITV drama...

When Downton Abbey ended, Joanne Froggatt said she’d like her next role to be a murderer. And this week she has her wish. The actress, who became a household name playing maid Anna Bates in Downton, is back on TV as Britain’s first female serial killer in ITV’s twopart drama Dark Angel.

Little known outside her native north- east of England, Mary Ann Cotton poisoned three of her four husbands in the mid-19th century and probably murdered several of her 13 children as well. ‘We’ve settled on nine victims in our version of the story,’ says Jake Lushington, Dark Angel’s producer. ‘But it could have been many more. And yet Mary Ann has largely gone under the radar. Given our predilection for ghoulish stories from the past, it’s surprising she’s not better known.’

That will change once the nation has seen Joanne as Mary Ann. The killer uses arsenic to bump off her first husband, William Mowbray, and the £35 she gains in life insurance – equivalent to more than six months’ wages – gives her the taste for more devilish deeds. Two more husbands go the same way plus various offspring and her own mother, although stepfather George Stott manages to escape. She also has a long affair with handsome miner Joe Nattrass during and between marriages.

Well-to-do shipbuilder James Robinson, her only husband to avoid death by poisoning, discovered she’d ordered his children from a previous marriage to pawn his belongings on her behalf. Mother Teresa she most certainly wasn’t. ‘That was part of the appeal of the role, totally different from Anna Bates, who was so nice,’ says Joanne, 36, speaking on set in the Yorkshire seaside town of Saltburn, which doubles as Seaham Harbour in County Durham where Mary Ann lives for a while and continues her affair with Joe.

‘I did talk about playing a murderer after Downton, I just never expected to be offered one with so many victims! I think fans of Downton will be shocked when they see me in this role, primarily because of the way Mary Ann goes about her business. She’s very calm and calculating, she’s not mentally ill, she just sees an opportunity and goes for it. She’s leaving people to die in utmost agony, yet

she’s unmoved by their fate.’ Fans of Downton may also be shocked by the bedroom scenes. ‘I was a little nervous about them but also aware there wouldn’t be any nudity. And the sexual content certainly isn’t there to titillate, it’s just that you can’t tell her story properly without it. Mary Ann was a psychopath and the research I did for the role said psychopaths are often promiscuous because they don’t form an emotional attachment to the people they sleep with.’ And Joanne’s blushes were spared by the fact Joe is played by Jonas Armstrong. The pair worked together in 2009 on BBC series Robin Hood, in which Jonas played the lead.

‘I was Robin Hood’s girlfriend Kate so spent a lot of time with Jonas and got on really well with him,’ says Joanne. ‘So there wasn’t as much embarrassment between us on Dark Angel as there might have been had the other actor been a total stranger.’

Dark Angel, Monday, 9pm, ITV.

JOE NATTRASS (Jonas Armstrong) The miner strikes up a relationship with Mary Ann after the death of her first husband, William Mowbray. He becomes her lodger after her fourth husband dies.

In real life the pub landlord had a difficult relationship with his stepdaughter Mary Ann, but in Dark Angel he’s more caring towards her. Born in a Durham mining village in 1832, she leaves home at 16 to work as a domestic, later turning her hand to...