‘I get it’, says actress playing wife who helped fake her husband's death

In 2007 John Darwin walked into a London police station and said contrary to press reports and what his wife and children believed, he hadn't died in a canoeing accident in 2002. Instead, he said he was  the victim of amnesia incurred from the accident and had no memory of the previous five years.

At first the public and police seemed willing to give Darwin, a former teacher and prison officer, the benefit of the doubt, but it soon emerged that he had engineered the story to get himself out of crippling debt and that his wife Anne had been his accomplice. She'd claimed  his life insurance payout and had lied to police and their children about what had happened.

The story that gripped the world’s attention for a few moments in 2007 has been adapted as a miniseries for Britbox starring Eddie Marsan as Darwin and Monica Dolan as Anne.

Dolan, who won a Bafta award for her performance as notorious serial killer Rosemary West in 2011’s Appropriate Adult, is no stranger to playing real-life characters who are difficult to empathise with. She remembers, at the time of Darwin’s appearance, people saying a man they thought was the person who'd gone missing in a canoeing accident had visited a police station in central London.

“The thing I remember is that everyone was excited about it, wondering, 'Oh my goodness, he lost his memory and he’s turned up. Isn’t it amazing?' It’s sweet because it shows you the general optimism of people, thinking that’s what had happened.  Then of course, a few days later, [the truth] came out.”

The dramatisation is told from the perspective of Anne, who published a memoir in 2016, but Dolan believes that when playing these types of roles there are always two aspects to the research.

“There’s the real-life research and there’s the research of the script. Ultimately, as an actor, you’re serving the writing and that has to override any real-life research.  It’s good to do both and then to use your discretion in what you bring in.” She says though she read the book and approached the real Anne Darwin to find out if she might be willing to talk to her, she refused. “,” says Dolan. “She’s had so much of that in her life and she wants to move on.”

When Dolan was first approached to take on the role, she was struck by the way in which writer Chris Lang didn’t try to dilute that Anne was lying to her sons.  “She lied  to the Home Office, the coroner and the police.” Because of this the theme of forgiveness, which emerges later in the series and is what the story is really about, is even more powerful.

A large part of the British public believed Anne was even more villainous than her husband at the time his lie was exposed. She was seen as the perpetrator of the fraud because she'd lied to her children.

Dolan admits she found the script challenging. “There were so many points where I thought, 'You could have done something different here, you could have made a different choice, yet you didn’t'. I found that hard, particularly calling the police and saying her husband was missing when she knew he wasn’t. Also, right in the beginning when he went missing, he couldn’t have done that without her.”

The Darwins were eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to six years in prison for their crime. Some people argue that their fraud was essentially victimless, but Dolan disagrees. “It’s easy to think that because it’s just an insurance company that's been defrauded, but you have to remember that every time an insurance company gets ripped off, all of our insurance premiums go up. We’re having a cost-of-living crisis in this country and that kind of thing isn't helpful. I certainly think the moral aspect of the story and the way she deceived her children was something people found difficult to stomach.”

Ultimately, Dolan says the series will show that "when you cross a moral boundary you become capable of something you wouldn't have done before". Dolan is also careful to remind audiences, “Anne Darwin in the script is not necessarily the Anne Darwin in real life. The Anne Darwin that we depicted in the series is hopefully opening a conversation about the idea that often we look at coercion as something direct and bullying, something we clearly know when we see it, but it’s often more complicated than that.” 

• ­'The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe' is streaming on Britbox.