How the lord saw good in Myra Hindley

SAMANTHA MORTON, twice Oscar-nominated, was last night close to agreeing to portray Moors murderer Myra Hindley — once dubbed ‘ the most hated woman in Britain’ — in a film about her unusual friendship with campaigning aristocrat Lord Longford.

The Academy Award- winning actor Jim Broadbent will play the man who had encounters with many of Her Majesty’s most notorious guests.

The film, called Longford, will be broadcast on Channel 4 and America’s HBO channel. It explores Longford’s Roman Catholic faith, his fervent belief in the power of redemption and how he became a tireless champion of prisoners’ rights, no matter how repugnant their crimes.

There’s always much sensitivity surrounding the dramatic exploitation of Hindley and the appalling crimes committed by her and her lover Ian Brady. No doubt as a result of this, no one at C4 yesterday wanted to acknowledge even the fact that the film was being made.

Yet the script by Peter Morgan has been acclaimed by all those who have read it, for it somehow makes sense of the high- profile friendship Longford developed with Hindley over nearly three decades until he died four years ago. Hindley passed away just a year later.

As much as the public is repulsed by the horrors Hindley and Brady visited on their young victims, they’re fascinated, too, and want to learn more about them.

Indeed, as this page revealed last month, Maxine Peake and Sean Harris are portraying the evil couple in another drama, Granada’s See No Evil — although that one actually focuses more on their killing spree.

Longford published a diary five years ago which revealed, in extraordinary detail, the vast extent of his visits to all manner of inmates. Mr Broadbent and Ms Morton will begin filming in January. Tom Hooper, who shot the recent Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren, will direct.