Hostage To Fortune

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NEW DRAMA

Trust

Wednesday, BBC2 Hd, 9pm

The fascinating story of one of the world’s wealthiest and most dysfunctional families, the Gettys, is brought to life in the new 10-part series Trust, beginning on BBC2 this week, and starring Donald Sutherland, Hilary Swank and Brendan Fraser.

In the 1970s, the clan’s patriarch, American oil magnate J. Paul Getty, was worth $2billion. He was also notoriously mean and miserly, even installing a payphone at his 16thcentury country house, Sutton Place in Surrey, for guests to use.

The five-times-divorced Getty, as played by Donald Sutherland, is portrayed as a cruel, unfeeling and arrogant man, treating everyone with disdain, including his four mistresses who all live with him at Sutton Place. Meanwhile, his sons, or ‘simpering idle wasters’ as he calls them, are a profound disappointment, throwing their lives away on drugs and pointless pursuits.

The first episode, directed by Danny Boyle, opens with the shocking death of one of them, George, who stabs himself to death with a barbecue fork while high on drugs in 1973.