Director: Lee Haven Jones
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story is a 2025 British crime drama series directed by Lee Haven Jones. Built around a documented mid-1950s legal case, its roughly 47-minute episodes reconstruct the events surrounding Ruth Ellis, a London nightclub manager whose 1955 court case became one of the most closely recorded criminal proceedings of the period.
What is A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story about?
Set in the London of the mid-1950s, the series follows a young woman who runs a busy Soho nightclub while managing the competing demands of her job, her family, and a relationship that grows steadily more unstable. The story moves through the ordinary texture of her working life before turning toward the shooting that brings that life to an abrupt halt. From there the focus shifts to the aftermath: the police response, the questioning, the courtroom proceedings, and the appeals that continued after the verdict was returned. The drama stays close to the recorded chronology rather than inventing incident, presenting the arrest, the Old Bailey proceedings, and the final legal efforts as a matter of established historical record. Each stage is laid out in sequence so that viewers can follow the case as it unfolded in real time, from the night of the offence through the closing days of the legal process.
Cast & crew
Lucy Boynton plays the central figure, heading an ensemble that includes Toby Jones, Laurie Davidson, Mark Stanley, Joe Armstrong, Arthur Darvill, Nigel Havers, and Toby Stephens. The cast is drawn largely from established British film and television, and the production supports the period setting with an ensemble familiar to viewers of UK dramas.
Context & significance
The series is based on real events from 1955. Ruth Ellis was tried at the Old Bailey in London and, by the historical record, became the last woman to be executed by hanging in the United Kingdom. The case has been revisited many times over the following decades in books, documentaries, and earlier screen treatments, and it is frequently cited in accounts of British legal history from that era. A Cruel Love is a United Kingdom period production and carries an IMDb rating of 7.1.
Where & how to watch
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles. Reading this page is free and open to everyone; watching the series requires signing in with a K-Time account. K-Time is built for viewers across the Iranian diaspora and provides a fully Farsi interface, so the menus, search, and playback controls are all in Persian.