About the Work
Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. A part-time actress and nightclub hostess she shot one of her two lovers in a Hampstead pub. She insisted that she alone was responsible even though her other lover had supplied the gun and driven her to the pub where the target was known to be drinking. In the dock her sexy appearance and hair, freshly-peroxided as advised by her barrister, damaged her image with the judge and the jury. Her impending execution provoked huge press coverage, questions in Parliament and a substantial petition. But a puritanical Home Secretary refused a reprieve.
Here is Ruth Ellis hearing her sentence being passed.
Mother
The women I portrayed in this work were role models for my mother, Muriel. Together they make up her personality and like her they had charisma and chutzpah.
Muriel, a war-widow's daughter, left school at 12 to bring some money into her poverty-stricken family. Hardly able to read and write, she sold programmes and did odd jobs at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. When she was 14 she was talent-spotted. Beginning as a hoofer in a chorus line, she became a lead dancer and singer with the stage-name Muriel Melford in a long-forgotten musical at the Prince of Wales called Bonjour Paris.
When she was in that show she met her future husband, my father. He was an Oxford-educated schoolmaster over twice her age. He introduced her to a middle-class world of unfamiliar concepts such as politics, ethics and causes. Muriel took notice. Married and back in the Midlands she spoke up about what were embarrassing issues in the provincial England of the 1940s and 50s - pacifism, the abolition of the death penalty and the sexual liberation of women.
Details
Size and Material
6ft x 2ft / 183cm x 61cm
Digital Photograph
Location
Tags
Video
″I still use the same approach to my work: I get an idea, think of the title and then make the work. So not much has changed since 1964″
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