Earlier this year, ITV broadcast a drama called See No Evil: The Moors Murders. Anyone apart from a commissioning editor for drama might have thought that would be it for primetime appearances of an infamous female killer. But here, with a certain predictability, comes another take on Myra Hindley.
In Channel 4's Longford, the Moors murderess is once more in a supporting role to a male lead. This time, it's not Ian Brady but Frank Pakenham, Lord Longford, the Labour peer who devoted a swathe of his declining years to campaigning for Hindley's eventual release. The drama has impeccable pedigree. Peter Morgan's Midas touch when writing scripts for real figures extends to The Deal (Blair and Brown), The Queen (the royals and Blair), Frost/Nixon and, coming soon, The Last King of Scotland (Idi Amin). As the steely moralist with a dithering exterior, Jim Broadbent, in the title role, gives one of his truly great performances, while Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings) has a chilling cameo as Brady. As for Hindley, the producers have chosen boldly.
When Samantha Morton heard on the grapevine that actresses were auditioning for See No Evil, she says she 'had a few reservations about whether they should'. Yet when she was approached by the producers of Longford, her prejudice was more professional than moral. Having got her break on television in an episode of Cracker and turned to prostitution in Band of Gold, she was soon careering through a spectrum of period roles, playing naive in Emma, demure in Jane Eyre and lusty in Tom Jones. All of that, remarkably, came before she was 20. She is 30 next year, and has neither wanted nor needed to work in British television for nearly a decade.
'I had been reluctant to look at television projects,' she says. 'My opinion was that, rightly or wrongly, I'd noticed a decline in the quality of our dramas. I thought, if you're going to do a drama about Myra Hindley, it might not have the time in preproduction it might need. So I said I wasn't interested.' Her agent insisted she think again. Even after she was bowled over by the script, she took the precaution of showing it to friends who had known Longford. 'And they thought it was very, very good. It just seemed to tick all the boxes to do with respect, talent, doing it for (I believe) the right reasons. So here I am.'
The resulting portrait is a far cry from that infamous image, ruthlessly exploited for every last sale by the tabloids, of the basilisk-eyed, bleached-blonde killer in the police mugshot. Steely, hypnotically still, but much more human than Serkis's psychotic Brady, Morton gives a performance faithful to the moment in the script when, after their first meeting in Holloway prison, Longford reports back to his wife that he finds Hindley 'charming, intelligent, attractive, even'.
Whether that is the real Hindley is not Morton's concern. 'I had to say to them from the start, "You're not getting a lookalike mimic.' But they cast me because of the intellect behind the performance. The fact that she was called Myra Hindley, I tried to put to the side. Whether she was called Myra or Barbara, it was what was on the page.' Thus, for example, Morton has the unpleasant task of finding the motivation behind the lie Hindley tells Longford in that first encounter. He asks her if there's anything she'd like to tell him before he takes up her cause. She says no. 'She hasn't known this person very long. She doesn't trust anybody, and she is desperate to see Brady, the man she's lost, and eventually visit him as a free woman.' It takes another 20 years for Hindley to admit that she knows the whereabouts of two more bodies on the moors.
Longford may have looked like an owl, but here he is the prey. It may not seem a compliment to say Morton is perfect casting but the scenes with Broadbent demanded a heavyweight, and she came closest to fitting the bill. Of the young British film actresses with an international reputation, Morton is the least knowable, least quantifiable. In her own eyes, her looks are 'relatively average'. She mentions one film part she didn't get 'because I wasn't pretty enough. I'm not stick thin. I've got a pair of boobs and hips. Sometimes people don't want normal people representing women in film'.
Yet normal is the last thing Morton is. Cinematographers seem to love the strangeness of her open face, uncommonly blue eyes and baby-toothed smile.
She started acting at 12, in a children's educational programme, playing Allie the Alien. Ever since, she has been most at home portraying women who somehow come from someplace else. In Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, she played a woman deprived of the use of speech, with infinite charm. For most of Minority Report, she lay, shaven-headed, in a pool of gloop, plugged very plausibly into the future. In Morvern Callar, her character steals the identity of her dead writer boyfriend and, in doing so, obliterates her own.
She's even been a mermaid in a U2 video.
It was a shock to see her turn up last year in Lassie, because what she doesn't do is play the girl next door. She plays what she calls 'complex young women'. It's not a pure coincidence that in Sweet and Lowdown and Jesus' Son, both made in 1999, there are scenes in which her character doesn't wait to be seduced by the man she has fallen for, but greedily rips off his clothes. She is attracted to girls who don't play by the rules, because those roles 'tend to be better written. If you're just going in and playing the forlorn wife, it's incredibly draining, because you're not being challenged'.
The result is that Morton has remained at arm's length from conventional stardom. Yes, she has twice walked the red carpet on Oscar night ‹for Sweet and Lowdown, in 2000, and In America, in 2004) but, she says, 'I'm not a Hollywood star. I don't get recognised. I never get, Samantha Morton, can I have an autograph?' On the very, very rare occasions where I get 'You really look like that Hollywood actress', I do say, 'Yeah, I'm an actress.' And they go, 'No, you're not!' There are certain things you have to do to be box-office. The women I know who do that and earn incredible amounts of money really, sincerely, do not have lives. I've got a daughter. I'm not prepared to do that.' There's a particular reason why Morton would be keener than some of her peers to have a life. Her Nottingham childhood was stripped of all comfortable certainties. After too much tabloid prurience in this area of her life, she no longer answers questions on the subject, but there seems little doubt that the combination of a broken home, a multitude of step-siblings and a truncated education have created an actress who is fearless in both her performances and her opinions.
One result of playing Hindley is that she is on her best behaviour. She walks on eggshells when talking about Longford. There are relatives of the victims she would rather not offend; indeed, she would have written to them if the producers hadn't assured her that those people had given the film their blessing. She even wanted to write to Hindley's relatives. The gift for diplomacy hasn't always been there. 'I do try to bite my lip. If you start working at 16, not having gone to drama school and not developing at an early age a way of communicating thoughts and feelings coherently, perhaps working relationships in the past have been fraught. What's happened to me recently is I've grown up. Mellowed, I suppose.' That tendency to shoot from the lip is also attributable to a work ethic. 'I arrive at work having done my homework incredibly well, and if I meet people that don't do the equivalent, I call them the 60-per-centers. It shocks me sometimes. Why are you doing the job if you don't care?
So I have to say that not everybody is going to like me. People either love working with me or hate it. Some people really do want you to come in, stand on the mark, say the line and go home. They need to be in control of every little nuance of their film. And that's fine. But I'm the wrong person for that type of director.' This is why Morton prefers working with auteurs, or, as she puts it, 'people that have had the balls to get their film off the ground'. Recently, a lot of directors have got theirs off the ground at once, which means that, after taking nearly two years off, she has half a dozen imminent films. Two were shot in America. She plays a traffic warden in Expired, a romantic comedy by the first-time writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi, and a Marilyn Monroe lookalike in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely. In this country, she has played Ian Curtis's wife in Anton Corbijn's Control, and Mary, Queen of Scots in The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur's follow-up to Elizabeth. And, in an apparently turbulent shoot in New Zealand, she played the lead opposite Kiefer Sutherland in River Queen, set in the 1860s.
Not that she will see any of them. Since half her role in The Libertine ended up on the cutting-room floor, Morton has taken the decision not to watch her performances. 'You just have to bite your lip and go, 'It's not about me; it's about the bigger picture.' It is an egocentric job that requires some form of identifying with your vanity. But more often than not, I've loved the making of the thing rather than the finished thing. I think the film belongs to an audience after it's finished, and to the director. It's their movie. My favourite bit is putting the clothes on and being somebody else for 15 hours.' Even if it's Myra Hindley.
Longford is on Channel 4 on Oct 26 at 9pm
