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<\/a>. The filmmaker saw hundreds of women of the right age and type \u2013 yet wasn\u2019t satisfied. Then someone recommended a complete unknown doing rep theatre in Lancaster. \u201cShe came into the casting director\u2019s office in the middle of Soho just as a police car went past,\u201d Newell recalls of their first meeting. \u201cShe said, \u2018Oh, I like a bit of trouble,\u2019 and danced over to the window. I thought, \u2018Well, that\u2019s good news\u2026 because you\u2019re it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The year was 1984, and the troublemaker in question was Miranda Richardson<\/a>, who was auditioning for her first feature-film role. \u201cHis story is probably better,\u201d deadpans Richardson, who recalls this first interaction less flamboyantly. \u201cHearing the noise on the street is true, but I was also quite pissed off. I\u2019d come all the way down from Lancaster on a train, and had to get back to do a theatre show that night. I hadn\u2019t met him. I\u2019d 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.\u201d The shape was, of course, Newell, and \u2013 after a second audition \u2013 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 1955, when Ellis \u2013 a platinum-blonde, 28-year-old nightclub manager and mother of two \u2013 shot dead her abusive lover, David Blakely, outside The Magdala Tavern in Hampstead, the mythologising began instantly. The topline details were tabloid heaven (\u201cI INTENDED TO KILL HIM\u201d screamed the Dundee Courier), but a more serious and critical undercurrent has persisted due to Ellis\u2019s fate. A jury took 23 minutes to find her guilty of murder, ignoring the mitigating factors \u2013 including Blakely\u2019s violence against her and a miscarriage that followed \u2013 that would have lessened the charge to manslaughter and saved Ruth\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Ellis has achieved a type of cultural immortality, with legal campaigners and concerned artists seeking to reclaim her from the patriarchal forces that condemned her to death. This year brought a miniseries, A Cruel Love, adapted from the 2012 book A Fine Day for a Hanging by Carol Ann Lee. It is also the 40th anniversary of Dance with a Stranger \u2013 which won the Award of the Youth at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. At the time of its theatrical release, critic Roger Ebert awarded full marks for \u201ca film of astonishing performances and moody atmospheric visuals\u201d, while Time Out magazine put it in the same bracket as the dark social parables by the German New Wave iconoclast Rainer Werner Fassbinder. \u201cIt\u2019s shot, designed and acted with an imaginative grasp that puts it straight into the international class,\u201d the magazine wrote. Even publications not fully sold on the film bowed down before Richardson\u2019s performance, with Vanity Fair wondering whether we were \u201cwitnessing the emergence of the next Maggie Smith or Vanessa Redgrave.\u201d<\/p>\n Newell, whose chameleonic career has gone on to include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is 83 and full of bonhomie when we talk over Zoom during the shoot for his next film. \u201cVery good, my dear, I have all the time you need. Simply ask your questions. Don\u2019t feel you have to move on until I have properly answered them!\u201d<\/p>\n Dance with a Stranger has folkloric origins of its own. How it came to Newell, he admits, is brewed partly in reality and partly in his own dramatic imagination. While producer Roger Randall-Cutler was on holiday in Gozo, an island in Malta, he met a man in a bar who introduced himself as Ruth Ellis\u2019s solicitor. As Newell tells it, he was from a small, high-street firm. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t powerful, so when it got to court, he was talked down to \u2013 belittled \u2013 by these great big powerful, rich, posh QCs. He believed that he had not done right by Ruth, so he had retired and was now drinking himself to death.\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n The real Ruth Ellis, with a friend, in 1950. She was hanged at Holloway Prison five years later (Getty)<\/p>\n At the time, Newell was an established TV director and a relative newcomer to filmmaking, with only the supernatural horror The Awakening and the thriller Bad Blood under his belt. For a third feature, his agent offered him a choice between a spy movie and Dance with a Stranger \u2013 he chose the latter in part because of its socially acute screenplay by Shelagh Delaney, famed for the play A Taste of Honey, and partly because the character study it contained struck very close to home.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew the woman,\u201d says Newell. \u201cThe things in the world that bullied Ruth into submission were the things bullying my mother into submission.\u201d Although his mother was middle-class rather than working-class like Ruth, and although she was a housewife rather than a nude model turned escort turned nightclub hostess, her potential, like that of Ruth, was winnowed down by the gender roles that prevailed at the time.<\/p>\n We meet Ruth as an aspiring working-class woman intent on improving life for her son, and on guard against any sharks tempted to chew on a young, Marilyn-esque blonde in a social job in 1950s London. When her \u201cfriend\u201d Desmond (a creepy, poker-faced Ian Holm \u2013 awarded Best Supporting Actor by the Boston Society of Film Critics) brings wealthy racing driver David to her club, the whole film depends on us understanding why she wants to risk her independence to dance with this stranger.<\/p>\n The search for an actor who could make David alluring for all his destructive entitlement while offering a name with audience appeal led to Rupert Everett. He\u2019d shot to prominence a few years earlier in the role of a gay public schoolboy turned spy in the play Another Country, which was adapted into a film in 1984. What\u2019s more, he was raw. \u201cLike all good actors, it\u2019s as if he had a couple of skins too few,\u201d says Newell. \u201cHis inner self, emotions and tensions were on the surface, and he was prepared to put them out and leave them out.\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Dangerous to know: Rupert Everett and Miranda Richardson in \u2018Dance with a Stranger\u2019 (First Film\/Goldcrest\/Film 4\/Nffc\/Kobal\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n Everett\u2019s performance holds both charm and repulsion. He is irredeemably cruel and, seconds later, a lost boy who needs Ruth. When they first meet in her club, he is rude and she is sure to give it back; later, when he is forlorn and wants to take her home, the camera is held rapt by his delicate eyelashes. There is no attempt to create distance between the auteurial perspective and Ruth \u2013 her psychology becomes our reality.<\/p>\n Following five years of rep theatre and a tiny bit of TV, Richardson was now carrying a feature film weighted with real lives, playing a role that required her to show every dimension of a person as they spin out of control. \u201cIt\u2019s a responsibility, of course, playing somebody who is known to people,\u201d says Richardson. \u201cI don\u2019t think I realised at the time, because I was just playing the story. I was flying blind, learning as I went, so there was a lot of instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s \u201cnot brilliant\u201d, even now, at asking questions during filming, she says. Back then, not wanting \u201cto appear stupid\u201d, she hardly queried a thing and ended up burnt out. \u201cThe schedule was heavy-duty, but I didn\u2019t know any better, so I was just trying to keep up. It did become enjoyable, but I didn\u2019t look after myself particularly well.\u201d<\/p>\n The volatile chemistry between her and Everett \u2013 sometimes imbued with cruelty, sometimes with tenderness \u2013 flourishes in intimate moments that include sex scenes and a lovely one of her shaving him in the bath. This was an era before intimacy coordinators. \u201cMike didn\u2019t make it awkward \u2013 it was just another work day,\u201d she remembers. \u201cHe was extremely close to us. He wasn\u2019t pushing bits of us around or anything, he was just in the room, which actually I was very comforted by if I needed comforting. I remember being quite practical about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Her advice to new actors is to talk these scenes through in advance. \u201cThings like that slightly loom. Intimacy coordinators, generally speaking, are a good idea. But you don\u2019t want to over-talk something, you don\u2019t want to kill it.\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Taken in: Everett, Richardson and Holm in \u2018Dance with a Stranger\u2019 (Everett\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n Looking back on her formidable performance right out of the gates, Richardson is understated. \u201cI think I did a good job.\u201d Newell is more fulsome. \u201cShe clambered inside the character,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I have loved her ever since.\u201d Not only did Dance with a Stranger launch Richardson\u2019s highly varied screen career \u2013 which went on to include Blackadder and film collaborations with Stephen Spielberg, Robert Altman, Neil Jordan, Tim Burton and Louis Malle \u2013 it created a decades-long friendship and partnership with Newell. When we speak, they are shooting their fourth film together, a period drama about Wallis Simpson starring Joan Collins and Isabella Rossellini called The Bitter End.<\/p>\n Forty years after it was released, and 70 years after Ruth shot David, Dance with a Stranger still resonates. Why? There is the grisly stuff, of course. The Magdala Tavern in Hampstead has \u201cbullet holes\u201d outside, even if these were drilled into the wall by a former landlady to add value to the pub in murder-mystery tours. As Richardson says, \u201cRuth\u2019s sort of an icon, like Billy the Kid, and she\u2019s not around to defend herself.\u201d <\/p>\n Unlike non-fiction artifacts \u2013 such as the 2018 investigative BBC documentary The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story, or books by Ruth\u2019s daughter Georgina as well as her hangman, Albert Pierrepoint \u2013 Dance with a Stranger is not purely governed by factual impulses. It balances being the true story of a real person (Newell wanted to fill in the gaps in the jury\u2019s considerations by \u201coffering a set of motivations for what she did\u201d) with being a bigger, almost archetypal illustration of a primal female fear \u2013 that dancing with a stranger will end in violence.<\/p>\n The film stops short of showing Ruth\u2019s death, and ends on a note she wrote from prison to David\u2019s parents: \u201cI have always loved your son, and I will die loving him.\u201d Yet as the scholar bell hooks wrote, \u201cLove and abuse cannot coexist.\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Killer looks: Miranda Richardson and Ian Holm in Mike Newell\u2019s \u2018Dance with a Stranger\u2019 (Everett\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n Our legal culture is in the foothills of understanding the psychological elements of abusive relationships, with terms like \u201cdiminished responsibility\u201d and \u201ccoercive control\u201d emerging from the case of Sally Challen and the activism of her son David. In 2019, Challen \u2013 who served nine years and four months in jail for killing her husband after decades of emotional abuse \u2013 walked free, after her murder conviction was quashed and her manslaughter plea accepted. <\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/GettyImages-2120154269.jpeg\")
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