U BE DEAD U Be Dead Press Release (issued) Page 2 - 3 Foreword by Gwyneth Hughes Page 4 - 5 David Morrissey plays Dr Jan Falkowski Page 6 - 7 Tara Fitzgerald plays Debbie Pemberton Page 8 - 9 Lucy Griffiths plays Bethan Ancell Page 10 Monica Dolan plays Maria Marchese Page 11 - 12 Synopsis Page 13 - 14 Cast & Crew Page 15 - 16 Press Contact: Kate Richards 020 7157 3039 or kate.richards@itv.com Picture Contact: Pat Smith 020 7157 3044 or patrick.smith@itv.com 1 U BE DEAD David Morrissey stars in the true story of a dangerous stalker Everyday, across the world, someone becomes obsessed with another person’s life. In 2007, Maria Marchese was sentenced to nine years in prison for viciously stalking a London doctor, his family and even the lawyer who prosecuted her. The Metropolitan Police called it “one of the worst cases of stalking we have ever had to investigate”. This is the story of an obsession that almost cost one man his freedom. Based on an extraordinary true story – told with the help of the very people who suffered at the hands of Marchese - U BE DEAD stars DAVID MORRISSEY (Five Days, State Of Play, Mrs Mandela), TARA FITZGERALD (Waking The Dead, Jane Eyre, Brassed Off), LUCY GRIFFITHS (Collision, Robin Hood) and MONICA DOLAN (Wallis & Edward, The History of Mr Polly, Poirot). The film is produced by Darlow Smithson (Touching the Void, Clapham Junction, The Diary of Anne Frank) for ITV1. Dr Jan Falkowski (Morrissey) and his fiancée Debbie Pemberton (Fitzgerald) could think of no-one who would want to stalk them with threatening texts and phone calls. Even when the stalker professed to being in love with Jan, they refused to take her increasingly manic behaviour seriously. That is until she broke into their houseboat and opened the gas taps, threatened Jan’s family and attempted to cancel their wedding. In fear for their lives, they moved to an address nobody, including their parents, knew. In an attempt to flush the stalker out, Jan and Debbie eventually staged a fake wedding. Although Jan had now fallen in love with a younger woman, Bethan Ancell (Griffiths), he agreed to go through with the charade, shadowed by plain clothes officers. Warning texts and phone calls rained down on everyone connected to the wedding and Debbie was told to “prepare your funeral, not your wedding.” Finally, the police began to close in. As a final text arrived - “U BE DEAD” - they surrounded the phone box it was sent from and arrested the woman who had been stalking Dr Jan Falkowski for two years. Maria Marchese (Dolan) was an unlikely stalker who had only met Jan a handful of times through a patient of his. After initially denying she was guilty of harassing Jan, she then claimed to be texting him because he had raped her. And she had DNA evidence to prove it. Jan’s nightmare had just got much, much worse. The DNA evidence on Marchese’s underwear was compelling. As a rape suspect he was suspended from his psychiatric practice and, if found guilty, could be jailed for life. An extraordinary trial followed which fascinated the media and public alike. ‘This is not only a disturbing criminal case and nail-biting thriller, but it's also a fascinating insight into human relationships, desperation and endurance. Some of the facts of this case defy belief and Gwyneth Hughes has worked tirelessly with the victims, police, families and lawyers to really get under the skin of what Maria Marchese put everyone through,' said producer Elinor Day. U BE DEAD is written by Gwyneth Hughes (Miss Austen Regrets, Mysterious Creatures, Five Days). The Executive Producer is John Smithson and the producer is Elinor Day (The Diary of 2 Anne Frank for the BBC, Clapham Junction, Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Silk Stocking). Jamie Payne (Primeval, Life Line, The Baby War) directs. Darlow Smithson Productions is one of the most prestigious and celebrated independent production companies in the UK and has achieved worldwide industry recognition for its groundbreaking docu-dramas, series and documentaries. The quality of Darlow Smithson’s work has been recognised with more than 30 international awards. 3 Foreword by Gwyneth Hughes It’s one of the strange things about true stories that they are often very difficult to believe. So I’m very glad I never had to pitch the story of U Be Dead as a piece of fiction. Exciting, yes, amazingly so – but credible? Imagine: a mystery stalker who pursues a psychiatrist and his fiancée for two years, threatening murder and mayhem on their wedding day. A victim, Dr Jan Falkowski, who never knows the identity of his anonymous tormentor. A sham wedding, set up to lure the stalker out of her hiding place. And an arrest – but no end to the nightmare. For the arrested woman now claims Dr Falkowski has raped her. And she has the evidence. Shop assistant Maria Marchese shows the police a pair of knickers, on which forensic DNA testing confirms the presence of the doctor’s semen… And a nightmare rollercoaster ride follows, as Dr Falkowski fights to prove his innocence and clear his name. No mystery about what attracted me to his story, then. It’s full of revelations and surprises, agonizing suspense, moments of terrible darkness, challenges to characters’ deepest ideas of themselves… all the things writers like best. But true stories are not just often stranger than fiction - they are also always much more complicated. Right and wrong don’t divide up so easily. Human motivations are more obscure and deeply buried than is convenient for Hollywood. And real life goes round in ragged circles, where thriller fiction barges along in search of its goal. When I met Dr Falkowski, it soon became clear that his long ordeal had left this confident and successful man reeling. His relationship with his fiancée had not survived. Indeed, he had begun a new, secret relationship with a younger woman, Bethan Ancell, during the worst times. It meant there was an “eternal triangle” love story running alongside the crime narrative. Potentially, this might mean that a television audience would lose sympathy with our hero. But, as you will see in the film, that new relationship was to provide the key to his forensic demolition of Ms Marchese’s rape claim. So even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell one story without the other. So I want to pay sincere tribute to the courage and maturity of three people: Dr Falkowski, his former fiancée Debra Pemberton, and Bethan Ancell. All three of them accepted the need to tell their stories fully and with total honesty. They gave me their unstinting help and consent at every stage, knowing that some embarrassing and humiliating aspects of their private lives would be on display. I’m very proud to say that all three of them feel the film does them full justice. As for Maria Marchese – if you ask me why did she do it, I have to say I don’t know. It’s only in fiction that the perpetrator comes conveniently equipped with an evil mother or something otherwise nasty in the woodshed. She was examined by psychiatrists for her trial reports, and they found no evidence of mental illness. Neither the detectives, the lawyers or indeed the Falkowski family can cast any light on her motivation. 4 All I know is that she had put her considerable energies and inventiveness into doing good, she could have moved mountains. As it is, she received a very long sentence for her crimes, which she still denies. She is serving nine years. Our other characters enjoyed much happier endings. Jan and Bethan got married in December 2008. And Debbie married John in September 2009. 5 David Morrissey plays Dr Jan Falkowski On Jan… Jan was very successful, both in his professional life as a psychiatrist and in his private passion of P1 Power Boat racing. He was very much in love with his partner Debbie and enjoying planning their wedding together. But, just as life couldn’t get any better, everything started to fall apart. He and Debbie started to get abusive phone calls and their relationship began to crack under the strain of not knowing who was attacking them. Jan is a man who is used to getting what he wants, and he’s extremely competitive in everything he does. He’s a winner. He’s also fought in war zones with the Territorial Army. So when he’s attacked by a faceless enemy, he’s emotionally ill equipped to deal with it. He’s not used to not knowing what to do and this inability to share his fears and anxieties with the people he loves, or to have a sympathetic ear for Debbie in her agony, meant I was worried he could come across as a cold fish. On meeting the real Jan… I met Jan purely to fill in gaps about his job and power boat racing, but in no way am I doing an impersonation of him in U Be Dead. It’s a drama closely based on true events and, although I read up on the case and met with all the main protagonists, apart from Maria Marchese, in the end I had to create a character, not impersonate a person. Likewise, meeting Bethan and Debbie was of interest to me because it painted a picture of their life and their circumstances during such a very difficult time. But in the end you have to go away and use your imagination, helped by their experiences. I always feel a responsibility to my characters, whether they’re real people or not. But my real responsibility is to the drama, to the writer and director. For me, everything is fictional. On the appeal of the role… I found Jan’s character very interesting. He never reacted to a situation in the way I would have imagined. His apparent coldness and inability to express his feelings, his almost cruel attitude towards Debbie, was something I’d not really seen in a television drama before. I found him to be an extremely complex and not immediately attractive character. But, in the end, you really feel for Jan and want him to come through this awful situation. I’ve been a fan of Tara Fitzgerald’s for a long time so it was wonderful to work with her, and although I didn’t know Lucy at all before doing the show, I thought she was brilliant. I also really enjoyed working with the director Jamie Payne. Schedules are always tight and sometimes you find yourself chasing the day to get all the scenes in and it can become a bit crazy. I had to do some particularly fraught scenes on our first day of filming - breaking up and making up with Bethan. I hate first and last days when I’m shooting and this was particularly stressful due to our schedule. But Jamie always managed to keep the pace fast without ever making us feel rushed. 6 On stalking… I hope the film shows how psychologically damaging stalking is. Having a faceless enemy and the constant barrage of threats can drive someone to madness. The film also shows how a man and a woman have different needs and reactions to being stalked. By the same token, I think the performance of Maria Marchese by Monica Dolan gives great insight and sensitivity into a character that could easily be demonised. 7 Tara Fitzgerald plays Debbie Pemberton On Debbie… I can only describe Debbie as the character I play rather than the real Debbie herself, which is a very important distinction for me as an actress. I wasn’t attempting to emulate her in any way but to play the character Gwyneth Hughes had written. What she wrote was a fantastically vibrant personality. Debbie is a lover of life, someone very intelligent, open, warm and sensible, yet pretty fearless. She obviously enjoys being out in the open, meeting people, pushing her own boundaries with confidence. She appears to have the ideal life; a life most people would aspire to have. She’s a smart woman with a good job, her fiancé is very successful and a champion in powerboat racing and they are about to get married. Although I hadn’t met her before I began filming, I wanted to capture the real Debbie’s spirit, which Gwyneth very much put into the writing. Having now met her, that spirit certainly comes from Debbie herself. Despite Debbie being a victim of a stalker, I at no time playing her felt I was allowing myself to be victimised. She seems to be blessed with positivity - a lot of people would have surrendered [to the ordeal] a lot earlier. One of the biggest challenges was to show that sense of degradation of confidence and lifestyle without turning her into a victim. That, for me, was quite a delicate line to tread. On meeting the real Debbie… Debbie came onto the set when we were filming in Poole. She was very, very respectful in terms of my process and I was very respectful of her identity and what I understood would be a very complicated situation for her emotionally. What she seemed to be was incredibly open and warm. It was a warmth that her experience obviously hadn’t stamped out. The fact that she wanted to participate in the film said a lot as well. It’s a strange and vulnerable feeling as an actor to play somebody real. I just hope she feels that her spirit is represented, as I have an enormous amount of respect for her, and that her bravery means other people may find support from it. I would always feel a responsibility towards any character I am playing, especially if it’s compounded by the fact that I feel moved by their journey. I went to a drama school that was very method based so we were always trained to find every detail we could, to the extent where you’d almost eat the same breakfast as your character. I didn’t really feel that necessity; I wasn’t trying to emulate Debbie exactly. Had I been I guess it would have taken on a different meaning to me. As well as knowing Debbie was behind the film, what I really did love was working with the real Detective Constable Lee Rutter, who was so involved in the case. That gave enormous pleasure to the job - it had a tremendous affect on me as an actress having those people on set and involved. On the appeal of the role… I’m afraid you don’t often get offered scripts as good as this - a great script is like gold dust. Given that it straddled reality and fiction, it seemed very pertinent. It also seems to address some things quite fearlessly in the writing - it was brave enough to stay honest to its story. Debbie is a very evolved character on the page – she’s a messy complicated human being like we all are. And she is that much more interesting to play for it. It’s not been simplified in the way that things often are by separating people into good and bad - that lies with Gwyneth not judging people. It’s really 8 powerful that she manages to leave her own ego to one side and allow the real people to come through without placing an overview or writer’s judgement on them. I read the script not knowing the story and then assumed certain things about the characters and the plot before I’d finished reading it. I was convinced somebody was going to die for instance – that’s my conditioning from watching this genre of film. The fact is that this doesn’t conform to those genre expectations. Maria Marchese is one of those examples - she is not who we ‘expect’. The fabric of these people is far richer and it’s far more interesting for it. On stalking… Wouldn’t it be lovely if stalking gets taken more seriously as people’s attention is drawn to it? This film shows that the potential to destroy someone’s life is very strong; the access into a life is so virulent. Jan and Debbie were convinced that they had been bugged for Maria to have known certain details about their lives. Once you suspend that level of belief – the possibility that a stranger could bug you - you really are into a very dangerous dimension. The big grand gestures often draw attention to themselves but it’s the small, day-to-day things which really have the corrosive effect. The drip, drip, drip of ten texts a day saying, ‘I’m watching you. You are going to die’ or ‘I know where you are going.’ This day-to-day drip, drip, drip, is what must really wear a human being down - it’s a form of mental torture. Maria Marchese became a central point in Jan and Debbie’s lives - she was an unavoidable factor. To live with that must be horrendous. Hopefully people are now aware that stalking is not just aimed at the celebrity culture and that it’s something that could happen to any of us. 9 Lucy Griffiths plays Bethan Ancell On Bethan… Bethan is a very kind, caring and quite selfless person who’s very self confident for someone so young. She seems to really know what she wants. She also seems to me a very brave person because she takes on all of Jan’s emotional and legal baggage without really blinking an eyelid. I think Bethan’s strength of character is one of the main components which keeps them together. They don't seem to be a couple whose relationship was fuelled by an irresponsible, meaningless affair. They simply fell in love at an inopportune moment. The option for her to leave simply doesn't exist because she genuinely loves him. On meeting the real Bethan… Bethan was exactly how I expected her to be, as I think Gwyneth Hughes’ writing is pretty true to her character. If meeting her shaped my portrayal of her, it was a subconscious thing. I had quite a good idea of how I wanted to play Bethan before I met her and when I did meet her, the real person didn’t conflict too much with that. Luckily Gwyneth and the director Jamie Payne were responsive to my thoughts on Bethan as a character, and were happy to work collaboratively on how I played her. Had there been some controversial scenes where Bethan might have come across unfavourably, I may have been more conscious of doing her ‘justice’, but all of them show her in a very sympathetic light. I think you’d only really worry about letting someone ‘real’ down if you came across some scenes which showed them in a negative light – thankfully I didn’t have that worry. On stalking… With the massive increase in people who are communicating over the internet, I think it’s much easier to keep track of someone these days. I would imagine anybody who was thinking about stalking before the internet and thought it was a bit difficult now knows that has been made much easier! There’s also the fact that we are constantly being watched - there is some crazy figure about how many cameras you are caught on in a day in central London. Not that it has much to do with stalking but there is now a general feeling of people knowing more about each other and the world getting smaller and smaller. I think this drama will make people think more about the effect stalking can have on a person’s life. A drama is a bit more accessible than a news bulletin – you can be emotionally removed from the news because it merely states the facts. When you watch a drama, though, you are actually following people’s emotional journeys. It’s even more accessible if the audience like the actors, as it brings it closer to home. 10 Monica Dolan plays Maria Marchese On Maria… I was really aware that the other actors in this drama could meet their 'people'. But of course that wasn't possible with Maria so I had to approach it a bit differently. People may look at a part like this and think it must be really difficult but the crucial point is that Maria was very focused. Let’s face it; if you had that kind of focus for something positive in your life you could achieve anything! She is obviously an incredibly resourceful, clever and determined woman, but lacks the confidence to believe that she can have an effect, so all these things come out in a negative way. Maria has a particular kind of mind that is brilliant at finding out things and getting what she wants or what she thinks she wants. While we might disagree with the premise of her thinking, I could not say whether she had a mental illness. That was certainly not something that was proved. There are stalkers who do, but there are people out there for whom being in love is just something they seem to do on their own. Jan Falkowski, the focus of Maria's attention, was involved in powerboat racing so I decided to do some research about it. I went on the internet and looked at footage and it was so, so glamorous. It really gave me an idea of the lifestyle that Maria dreamed of. It gave me a sense of what she was aspiring to. I think she is a very romantic person. I think she had an idea of being swept off her feet. We saw her a lot on her own when she is quite distressed; being on the phone to Jan but not speaking to him; or speaking to police. But there would have been a whole area of her life where Maria would have had to have been really charming in order to get the information she did. After all, she cancelled Debbie and Jan's wedding and also managed to find out things which Debbie only shared with her best friend. For her to find out all of this information there would have to be a very disarming side to her. Maria worked on the cheese counter in a well known store. She had a job as a shop assistant and interacted with customers and gave advice so she'd have been very resourceful in dealing with people on a day-to-day basis. I think there must have been a terrific rush, like an addiction, that came with the actual texting of threats and having an effect on the outside world, because so much of Maria’s emotional life was trapped in her head. There must be a degree of excitement that comes with that but the effect she created and the outcome cannot have been what she wanted. On the appeal of the role… I researched the subject and actually stalkers are predominantly men not women. In terms of research for my portrayal of Maria, I felt the accent was a big part of my capturing her. I was at the Royal Court Theatre when I got the audition so I went to the theatre bookshop for help from an expert - Gillian Lane-Plescia. She looks at the sounds in English that Spanish people find it difficult to say and in that way you approach the accent from the inside – rather than trying to reach for something. There was a lot to take in. 11 This was a really rewarding role because there was so much to fight against for her, so much world to create, and it went on for so many years. In this story the drama came from Maria's world really conflicting with everyone else's reality so my main job was to make her reality really strong. It is strange knowing someone so well but actually not knowing them at all. A good thing about being an actor is, and it's callous to say, but letting these roles get under your skin and then being able to drop them when you finish. Sometimes it's not necessarily helpful to really try and understand the workings of a person's psychology intellectually. If you look at what that person wants and use your actors' instinct for human behaviour, then it will, hopefully, come out in the performance. Often when you are playing a character that does something very extreme like Regan in King Lear or Lady Macbeth, people ask "how can you identify with your character?" But really morals are just another aspect of a person's character so if you are playing someone to whom morals are irrelevant they are just focused on the end results so how they get there isn't a problem. A mistake actors can make is to think 'I don't understand why the character is doing this so I'll make it smaller to fit me, to fit my understanding'. Sometimes it takes time to figure out a role and that part you don't understand at first could be the key to their whole raison d'etre. You have to be willing to take imaginative leaps. Every character you play stretches you in different directions so you learn more about why people do things. 12 Synopsis Based on an extraordinary true story, U BE DEAD begins in Oct 2002, when London psychiatrist Dr Jan Falkowski was living with his fiancée Debbie Pemberton on a houseboat in an East London marina. Both successful boat racers, the couple were happily planning their forthcoming wedding. One day, out of the blue, Jan received a text on his mobile from a stranger claiming to be in love with him. Jan received more than 20 text messages over the course of that evening. More followed the next day. And the next. At the start, the messages were more baffling than threatening and the couple tried their best to ignore them. But then the phone calls started… Over time, the texts and calls, made from public phone boxes so as to be untraceable, got uglier, filled with accurate details about the couples’ lives – where they worked, where they sailed, where they went for dinner. They proclaimed undying love for Jan and murderous intent towards Debbie. The police began to monitor the stalker’s messages, as the couple were forced to perform the soul-destroying task of logging every text. One night Jan came home to find all the lights on his boat switched on. A few nights later he and Debbie were overwhelmed by the smell of gas as they stepped on board. The stalker was relentless - cancelling their wedding arrangements, targeting their families and threatening those close to the couple. In fear of their lives and with their relationship floundering under the strain, Jan and Debbie moved from the boat to a flat where nobody, not even their parents, knew the address. To try and flush the stalker out, Debbie came up with the idea of staging a fake wedding in Poole, accompanied by their family and friends. What she hadn’t yet realised was that Jan had now fallen in love with a younger woman, Bethan Ancell, who worked on the boat racing circuit with them. Frustrated with Debbie’s crumbling nerve, Jan had already embarked on a passionate affair with Bethan. Jan, however, agreed to go through with the wedding charade, shadowed by plain clothes officers. Texts and phone calls rained down on everyone connected to the wedding, with warnings that the wedding food had been poisoned: “Prepare your funeral, not your wedding” Debbie’s tormentor warned her. The messages grew more and more desperate as the ‘wedding’ approached, with police following the trail of phone boxes used by the stalker. Finally, the police began to close in. As a final text arrived - “U BE DEAD” - they surrounded the phone box it was sent from and arrested the woman who had been stalking Jan and Debbie for two years. The stalker caught in the act was Maria Marchese, a 45-year-old woman from Argentina. With Maria in custody Jan and Debbie believed their nightmare was over. However, this was no open and shut case…Marchese didn’t fit the usual profile nor did she seem to have a motive for her obsessional pursuit of Jan – Jan had only met Marchese a handful of times, when she visited his surgery with a patient of his. Marchese initially denied she was guilty of harassing Jan and then delivered the most crushing blow of all – a rape accusation. As a rape suspect Jan was suspended from his psychiatric practice, pending the trial, and if found guilty faced a life sentence. The Crown Prosecution Service 13 dropped the stalking case against Marchese. Having lost all sympathy for Jan, Debbie fled to France to begin a new life, leaving Jan free to pursue his relationship with Bethan. Marchese claimed to have DNA evidence that Jan had raped her – his DNA in her underwear. Two days before Jan was due to stand in the dock at the Old Bailey, tests finally revealed that a third DNA trace came from Bethan – whom Jan did not meet until a year after the date Maria claimed he had raped her. The police concluded that Marchese had stolen a condom from Jan’s dustbin and smeared its contents on to her knickers – an extraordinary forensic detail which propelled this real life case on to the front pages of the tabloids. But still it was not over, as the police decided to revive the case against Maria for harassment. Jan prepared to meet his stalker in court, but his case was hampered by the fact that Debbie, still hurt by Jan’s new relationship, refused to testify. It looked like Marchese would get off once again. Debbie finally caved into the prosecution lawyer’s pleas and made a last minute appearance, moving the jury to tears with her description of the hell she and Jan were put through. Maria Marchese was found guilty and given a nine-year sentence, a testament to the severity of what Detective Sergeant Malcolm Davies, of the Metropolitan police, called “one of the worst cases of stalking we have ever had to investigate”. 14 Cast DR JAN FALKOWSKI .............................................................................................. David Morrissey DEBRA PEMBERTON .............................................................................................. Tara Fitzgerald BETHAN ANCELL ........................................................................................................Lucy Griffiths MARIA MARCHESE .................................................................................................... Monica Dolan DC LEE RUTTER ....................................................................................................... Thomas Craig DS MALCOLM DAVIES ............................................................................................ David Kennedy BERNICE FALKOWSKA .......................................................................................... Dearbhla Molloy WOJCIECH FALKOWSKI ........................................................................................... Michael Elwyn BRIAN PEMBERTON .................................................................................................. John McArdle IRENE PEMBERTON ..................................................................................................... Jan Francis KAY SCUDDER ......................................................................................................... Lucy Robinson MARK FENHALLS ......................................................................................................... Daniel Betts GEMMA .................................................................................................................. Alexis Zegerman LAURA WARING ..................................................................................................... Susannah Wise DC SIMON NATION ................................................................................................... Sean Blowers DC “FOGGY” HORNE .............................................................................................. Simon Snashell PAUL MORRIS ................................................................................................................. Sam Bond DI STEVE THORPE.............................................................................................. Richard Lumsden DAMIAN FALKOWSKI ................................................................................................. David Groves DREW LANGDON ............................................................................................................ Alex Lowe MR PETER HIGGINSON ................................................................................................ Pip Torrens JUDGE JOHN PRICE .............................................................................................. George Pensotti HELENA WARREN..................................................................................... Kate Steavenson-Payne STEPHEN PERRIAN ....................................................................................................... Guy Henry 15 Crew Executive Producer .................................................................................................... John Smithson Producer ........................................................................................................................... Elinor Day Director ......................................................................................................................... Jamie Payne Writer ..................................................................................................................... Gwyneth Hughes Line Producers ........................................................................... Piers Vellacott, Graeme MacArthur Director of Photography ...............................................................................................Mike Southon Production Designer ..................................................................................................... James Lewis Make-Up & Hair Designer ........................................................................................... Sarah Grundy Costume Designer ........................................................................................................... Jacky Levy Location Manager ................................................................................................ Rebecca Rawcliffe Editor ........................................................................................................................ Eddie Hamilton Casting Director ................................................................................................................. Gary Day 16