Widows

"Dolly Rawlins is a mob wife. She’s married to Harry Rawlins, a gangster boss. She’s the main woman of all crime, but because she’s female, she doesn’t do any crime herself. None of the women do, they’re just the wives of the criminals, and they do as they’re told. The men are all very sexist. It’s very much that era of The Sweeney , “Hello me old China, shut it!” But then there’s a security van heist and things go wrong. Harry and his men are caught and some of them die. With Harry dead, Dolly—who in the screen adaptation is played by the wonderful Ann Mitchell—looks at his ledgers. She finds out about a robbery they had planned. She and the other widows have nothing now, so they decide to do the job themselves. They take it on, and they pull off this massive robbery. It’s just brilliant. It’s groundbreaking. It’s still fresh to this day. They just remade it a couple of years ago as a Hollywood movie. It was rubbish. I didn’t like it at all. But the point is, it’s still on the radar. But the original TV series, I must have watched 100 times and never got bored. It’s so good. Again, it’s about women taking control. It’s brilliant. It’s massively complicated, and it’s brilliant. There were two books, Widows and Widows’ Revenge and a later one called She’s Out. I get the chills just talking about it because we’d never seen or read that before. We never read about women who would get together and carry out a hardcore robbery with shotguns. I think they blow up a track and rob a train, which is how they transported all the money around in the old days. Widows has always been my favourite. I was actually on the set of Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren, but nothing compares to Widows. If you haven’t yet, watch Widows . Don’t even read the book. Go to the TV series because it’s faithful to the book, which a lot of them aren’t. Lynda La Plante wrote it and she also produced it with Verity Lambert. It was written, produced and made by women. Treat yourself to watching it: you will not forget it. You can tell I am not a woman who is grifting. I know my topic! And make sure you finish my book because it is brilliant, if I say so myself. When you know that you’re ending something, you give it your all. Vengeful Women is the last in the series so I put everything into the book, everything."