This four-part drama series from BBC2 followed the life of Julia Almond (Francesca Annis) from leaving school in 1913 to her execution for murder in 1922.
Julia – the daughter of a lower-middle-class family – is a romantic, imaginative creature living in a world of dream lovers and glamorous situations. But she is also practical, intelligent and ambitious.
Her parents are shocked when she launches out on her own and gets herself work in a West End shop.
Her romance with a young subaltern ends tragically when he is sent to the Western Front and Julia marries another soldier, Herbert Starling (Bernard Hepton), solid and bourgeois, but temporarily glamorised by a uniform.
Returning from the war he immediately becomes a dull and uncongenial husband, very jealous of the freer and more glamorous world in which Julia manages to earn much more than he does.
The serial was fiction but based on the case of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters who both went to the gallows in the 1920s for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy.
Julia Almond/Starling
Francesca Annis Herbert Starling
Bernard Hepton Mrs Almond
Mary Chester Mr Almond
Ron Pember Anne Ackroyd
Petronella Barker Gipsy Danvers
Charlotte Howard Leonard Carr
John Duttine Bertha Starling
Georgine Anderson Emily
Sylvia Barter Elsa Beale
Rosemary Blake Mildred Beale
Margaret Flint Marian Lestrange
Jill Melford George Beale
John Nettleton Mrs Carr
Maryann Turner Julia’s counsel
Anthony Roye Mrs Humble
Queenie Watts
