The platinum bombshell hell bent on going to the gallows

As a brilliant new TV drama explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis, its author on the cold fury of the last woman to be hanged

- By Carol Ann Lee

FROM where I'm standing, seemingly in a sunlit gallery overlooking a court room in the Old Bailey, there's no mistaking the blonde woman in the dock. Dressed in a beautiful black suit, her platinum hair immaculately set, 28-year-old Ruth Ellis looks every bit as glamorous as the journalists reporting her case had led us to expect.

Only the white-knuckle grip of her hands on the wooden dock betrays her inner turmoil, as she contemplates the final question put to her by the prosecution: what had she intended to do when she shot her lover, David Blakely, on April 10, 1955? She answers, in a voice clear with candour: "It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him." A frisson of shock ripples around the court. In just 13 words, Ruth Ellis has ensured her name will soon be entered into hangman Albert Pierrepoint's accounts book.

"That's it, everyone!" The voice of director Lee Haven Jones brings filming to a close. Like a stage hypnotist bringing a volunteer back to reality, his call returns everyone to the present.

We're 70 years too late to anticipate that Ruth Ellis's trial might realistically have a better outcome.

But such is the overwhelming power of this adaptation of my book, A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (now entitled A Cruel Love), that while filming those scenes, I felt eerily optimistic she would somehow avoid fulfilling her fate as the last woman to hang in Britain.

There's a flurry of movement as everyone takes advantage of the break to check their phones, use the loo, grab a coffee or something to eat.