These were just some pieces of the thousands of dollars’ worth of Golden Age Hollywood memorabilia that Christopher and Susan Edwards had amassed by the time they turned themselves over to police in London on Oct.
The reclusive British couple, who were convicted the next year of murdering Susan’s elderly parents and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison, are now the subjects of a tragicomic four-part television drama that leans surprisingly heavily on their Hollywood fixation.
The series, which stars Olivia Colman and David Thewlis as Susan and Christopher, is the first scripted drama to be written by Colman’s husband, Ed Sinclair, an actor and producer.
In a stylistic choice that may polarize viewers, Sinclair opted to explore the couple’s interior lives through the prism of Susan Edwards’s unusually fertile, movie-fueled imagination.
But the result of these quirky elements is less a true-crime dramatization than a fantastical exploration of an emotionally fragile criminal whose misdeeds appear to have been driven by a sense of her own victimization.
The letters gave Sinclair a chance to add texture to the couple’s back story, but there was no discussion of the crime.
Bringing this imaginary universe to life was the task of the Japanese-English filmmaker Will Sharpe, who directed all four episodes.
Sharpe used a variety of techniques to express the vagaries of Susan’s imagination and Walter Mitty-like existence.
“Or maybe just being mixed-race means that in Japan I feel British, and here I feel Japanese.