Yahoo News Mrs. Wilson is outrageous, but based on a TRUE story
BBC One's upcoming drama series Mrs. Wilson features twist after implausible twist, telling one of the most far-fetched stories to grace the screen in years... and it all actually happened.
Based on a memoir written by lead actress Ruth Wilson's grandmother, the three-parter sees its title character Alison discover a wealth of secrets about her late husband in the wake of his death.
The truth about spy Alec Wilson (Game of Thrones star Iain Glen) begins to unfurl when another woman arrives at Alison's door, claiming that she is the real Mrs. Wilson. It soon transpires that Alec had many more women in his life, with further revelations sending Alison on an incredible journey of discovery.
The wild story is all based in truth – though in reality, Ruth's grandmother only discovered the existence of one other of Alec's wives. The full truth of his deception (in total, he'd married four times, and had seven children, under a variety of different names) only emerged after she'd died.
"So in the drama, we've amalgamated the truth with my grandmother's memoir," Ruth explained. "It was about 12 years ago we started finding out about the bigger story, and it's taken the last 3 years to put this together.
"It was a scary process," she added. "being so vulnerable and exposing the family in that way. It's something that we talked about a lot, and tried to be very sensitive towards."
Adapted by writer Anna Symons, Mrs. Wilson was produced with help from Alec's surviving children, some of whom feature as characters in the drama. "My grandmother was an ordinary woman," said Ruth. "She wasn't anyone famous. But she had an extraordinary journey. It's been such a privilege to dig into that."
[Ruth Wilson at the Mrs. Wilson launch, with (L-R) director Richard Laxton, executive producer Ruth Kenley-Letts and writer Anna Symon]
Though she describes playing Alison as "perhaps the most profound experience of [her] life", Ruth admitted that she did have some reservations about taking on so personal a project. "Early on, I felt, 'Am I going to play her? Am I too close? Can I do this?' – and I wished, a week into it, that there was someone else playing her. 'Is Claire Foy available?'
"But I knew that if I played her, I could play the complexity of her. I wanted to protect her, by playing her in all her complexity. That for me was protecting her, showing all sides."
Ruth never knew the other key figure in Mrs. Wilson's story, her grandfather Alec, who died before she was born. "So he's sort of a man of mystery to me," she said, revealing that, even after 70 years, the intelligence services still won't release details of exactly what Alec was doing for them.
"So we don't know if the marriages... were they for work? Were they for love? We still don't have clarity on that. So he's a man of mystery.
"During filming, because I was inside my grandmother's skin, I hated him. But when I first found out the story, I thought, 'Oh my God, what a legend! How'd he get away with it?' – It was sort of amazing that this thing existed in our family, our very ordinary family.
"But then, actually playing my grandmother, I was like, 'No, what a shit!'. Nothing's black and white. I had mixed feelings, and still do."
Mrs. Wilson will premiere on Tuesday, November 27 on BBC One.
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