You may have a vague memory of Noele Gordon, affectionately known as Nolly. The actress was the centre of TV soap Crossroads until she was unceremoniously – and very publicly – sacked at the age of 61.
She was largely forgotten but, thanks to Dr Who writer Russell T Davies, her story is now set to captivate us, just as it captivated the series’ star, Helena Bonham Carter.
“I honestly didn’t particularly know Noele Gordon until I read Russell’s script, and she came into my life like a life force straight from page one,” says Bonham Carter. “I thought, ‘Why the hell have I not been aware of her’?
“She told it how it was, she was really appallingly badly treated and she said exactly what she felt – she wasn’t going to be bullied. Any other person might have crumbled. She didn’t.”
In Nolly, a three-part drama, Davies has documented the rise and fall of the actress who according to Bonham Carter was an “extraordinary woman”.
For Davies, who worked on Crossroads as a young writer, the strange tale of Nolly was one that came to him as a drama during lockdown.
Likening it to a “story of a Queen losing her crown”, he explains: “The more I work in television and the more I work with actors, the more mysterious that treatment seems.
“We’ve all seen actors being chucked out of soaps and we’ve all seen people falling from grace, but the very public and ruthless nature of that seemed odder and odder as time went on.”
“Part of the reason I got interested in the story was, in the industry she’s very much spoken of as a bit of a monster,” he adds. “And yet when I spoke to the cast, the opposite picture came out. I thought, ‘You’ve given me the public version’, but I scratched and scratched and I realised she was adored.
“Of course, there’s the whole #MeToo movement, which is brilliant and vital and needed, but actually I think the sexual stories are just scratching the surface of how women are treated.
“They’re not always treated badly because of a sexual story. The whims and tempers of men are vast and that’s what happened to Nolly.”
Talking about casting Bonham Carter, Davies says: “My lovely producer Nicola Shindler was very clever.
“She said, ‘Let’s try Helena Bonham Carter’. And I just thought there wouldn’t be a chance in the world. And then, miracle of miracles… We couldn’t believe we were so lucky.”
Nolly, ITVX, from Thursday
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