FATAL ATTRACTION

As ‘Dance with a Stranger’ turns 40, Sophie Monks Kaufman talks to director Mike Newell and star Miranda Richardson about bringing to life the tale of Britain’s last hanged woman

- By Sophie Monks Kaufman

Mike Newell was looking for an actor in her mid-twenties who could expose the interior life of a working-class woman who shot dead her upper-class lover. The filmmaker saw hundreds of women of the right age and type – yet wasn’t satisfied. Then someone recommended a complete unknown doing rep theatre in Lancaster. “She came into the casting director’s office in the middle of Soho just as a police car went past,” Newell recalls of their first meeting. “She said, ‘Oh, I like a bit of trouble,’ and danced over to the window. I thought, ‘Well, that’s good news... because you're it.”

The year was 1984, and the troublemaker in question was Miranda Richardson, who was auditioning for her first feature-film role. “His story is probably better,” deadpans Richardson, who recalls this first interaction less flamboyantly. “Hearing the noise on the street is true, but I was also quite pissed off. I'd come all the way down from Lancaster on a train, and had to get back to do a theatre show that night. I hadn’t met him. I’d only met the casting woman until, at the end of the audition, this shape came in and rooted in the fridge in the back room.” The shape was, of course, Newell, and - after a second audition - the 26-year-old Richardson was cast in his Dance with a Stranger as Ruth Ellis, the last woman in the UK to be sentenced to death.

In 1955, when Ellis - a platinum-blonde, 28-year-old nightclub manager and mother of two - shot dead her abusive lover, David Blakely, outside The Magdala Tavern in Hampstead, the mythologising began instantly. The topline details were tabloid heaven (“I INTENDED TO KILL HIM” screamed the