A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story Review

In A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, Lucy Boynton turns in a career-defining performance as Britain’s last woman to hang.

Ruth Ellis was an ambitious and ferocious young woman building a name for herself in the London nightclub scene in the early 1950s. Her rise was abruptly halted in 1955, when she was arrested for the cold-blooded murder of her lover David Blakely. The crime sent newspapers into a frenzy, as her story was filled with scandal, glamor and politics. After her trial, she was sentenced to capital punishment, marking her as the last woman to hang in Britain. A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story searches to uncover the shocking and heartbreaking truth behind the tabloid sensation.   

The series opens on July 13th, 1955, the day of Ruth’s (Lucy Boynton, of The Greatest Hits) execution. She sits at the table in her cell, which she has clearly tried to make feel like a home, as her final meal is delivered to her. She graciously thanks her ward, who has become charmed by her, and eats her meal with poise. It’s not until she drops her fork, her hands trembling, that the audience sees that, no matter how hard she is trying to keep herself together, she is terrified of what is to come. 

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story hops between the past three years of Ruth’s life, from when she meets David Blake to when she is ultimately executed for killing him. The series tries to uncover how their love story went so wrong. When Ruth met David, she was 28, a single mother of two children and freshly earned the title of London’s youngest club manager. She was a nonsense woman with bountiful ambition and seemingly no limit to her potential. 

A frequent patron of her old club, a young man named Desmond Cussen (Mark Stanley), became enamored with Ruth and determined to court her. While Ruth was initially interested, seeing him as a fine suitor to take care of her and her young children, her world is turned upside down when a generationally wealthy young racing driver, David Blakely (Laurie Davidson), enters her new club. The two spark up an instant connection and fall hard and fast for one another. 

When the show cuts to her after she is jailed for her crime, the authorities are happy to accept her guilty plea as Ruth seems resolute to accept not only sole responsibility but capital punishment for killing her lover. However, Ruth is unwillingly appointed a solicitor, John Bickford (Toby Jones, of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), who thinks there is more to this crime than Ruth will admit. Namely, that she did not act alone. 

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is a fascinating character study of a woman who refused to yield to society’s expectations of what a young woman in the 1950s should behave like. Ruth had been working since she was 14 years old; she was passionate about earning her way and paving a path for herself. While she had been married twice before, once widowed and once divorced, when she met David she had no interest in marriage or a traditional lifestyle. 

Ruth’s primary ambition was freedom, being able to control her own life without anyone holding power over her or her children. It’s why she has always worked so hard. She had always aimed to rise above her circumstances and gain an indisputable degree of power. Unfortunately, these principles that drove her forward in life are the same ones that led to her downfall.

The relationship between Ruth and David quickly turned abusive. While Bickford tried to convince her that telling the jury about the pain she had endured would be the key to earning a lesser charge, she refused to let them take pity on her. She would not let the world see her as, in her own words, “a beaten little fool”. This point that Ruth so adamantly stood by truly encapsulates the nuances of shame she suffered. 

In the years in which Ruth had been working to become a club manager, she built herself up to be able to stand on her own two feet without a husband by her side. She sought to enjoy every pleasure she could squeeze out of life with the freedom she earned herself. During her relationship with David, she lost everything she had worked so hard for. In many ways, David had killed that ambitious, fearless and free version of herself. She could not stand idly by as David got to move on and be happy while the life she had created for herself was left in ruins.  

Prior to meeting David, Ruth had been involved in several other abusive relationships throughout her life. She thought earning the title of club manager and gaining her own freedom within this patriarchal society was her way out of the cycle of abuse. Once she could no longer ignore the violent nature of her and David’s relationship, she came to the realization she never truly freed herself from this cycle. She did not want to admit to her abuse during her trial because it brought her shame to realize the freedom she prided herself on earning was only temporary, or perhaps a complete farce. 

Lucy Boynton gives a star-defining performance as Ruth Ellis. She perfectly encapsulates the freedom, charm and torment that was wrapped up in this woman who for so long has been a character in an untold story. Kelly Jones’ writing gives depth and nuance to a woman who London was happy to wash their hands of rather than put into effort to understand. Laurie Davidson and Boynton’s chemistry is pitch perfect, making audiences understand the comfort and love Ruth felt in her relationship with David as well as the isolation and madness it brought her. This show’s ability to empathetically depict a complex woman alone makes it well worth the watch.

While the series delves into the political landscape of the London court system in the early 1950s, it’s at its strongest when it puts Ruth’s story and Boynton’s performance front and center. While Bickford is undoubtedly an important piece of Ruth’s story, the plot surrounding his status amongst his colleagues emphasizes the ways in which his character’s importance is at times overemphasized. The plotlines chasing the men within the London justice system, while showing how men continuously failed Ruth, does eat away at time audiences would rather spend with her. 

There are few true crime cases quite like that of Ruth Ellis. Her trial was one of morals: an unmarried mother of two working as a club manager kills a wealthy young aristocrat. She was an imperfect victim which the courts took no pity on and worse yet, refused to try and understand. A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is a posthumous attempt to give grace and empathy to a woman who was as much a victim as much as she was a criminal. It would be an understatement to say the series was successful in finally giving Ruth Ellis’s name a sense of restitution.

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story will be now available to watch on BritBox from February 17, 2025.