Crime queen Lynda La Plante has a guilty secret. For relaxation, the award-winning author snuggles up with her huge dog, Hugo, and tunes in to her favourite Australian reality show — Border Security.
“People often ask what I watch,” chuckles the acclaimed scriptwriter, producer and novelist, whose Prime Suspect series forever changed the face of television drama with its unflinching portrait of gender inequality.
Now, after 40-odd books and countless screenplays, Lynda is settling a few old scores with her memoir, Getting Away With Murder.
“I’ve always wanted to throw a pebble in the water and watch the ripples,” she says, gleefully.
Humanity’s capacity for good and evil — not to mention sheer stupidity — never ceases to captivate her. “Border Security is so fascinating — the lies,” the irrepressible 81-year-old rhapsodises from her London home. “You know, I have it on at my place nearly every night. If you want to see absolutely unbelievable liars, just watch what people say when they get caught with stuff they shouldn’t have.”
The former actress mimics a scene at Sydney airport customs, slipping into different characters. It’s not for nothing that Liverpudlian Lynda trained at Britain’s most distinguished acting school, RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
But acting proved a tough gig. “I was always cast as prostitutes,” she grins. “I remember audition after audition, so many rejections. There comes a point where you realise you’re never going to make the big time. Every script you get offered has other people’s fingerprints all over it.”
It was while filming The Gentle Touch — British TV’s first police show with a female lead — that Lynda was inspired to try writing more realistic dialogue. Hit all-female heist drama Widows was the result, launching her new career into the stratosphere.
Today she is a fellow of the British Film Institute, winner of the BAFTA Dennis Potter Best Writer’s Award and proud recipient of a CBE for services to Literature, Drama and Charity. She is also the first layperson to gain an honorary fellowship to the Forensic Science Society.
Along the way, she has fronted Mafia dons, visited morgues, been menaced in crack dens, met serial killers (including the Yorkshire Ripper) and stripped off to her undies at a Los Angeles brothel to make the working girls feel at ease.
Lynda’s research is fearless and painstaking. No tape recorder, no notebook, just a phenomenal memory that helps her get up close and personal with her subjects. No matter how repellent a criminal may be, her acting skills hide her disgust.
“You can’t show any repugnance. You just have to chat away and wait for the jewels to drop. I think I love research so much because it’s the only way I ever get out of the house. Otherwise, I’d just be tied to my computer working like a demented ferret!”
That dedication has paid off big time — a Rolls-Royce Corniche and a holiday house in America’s upscale Hamptons — but inevitably there have been downsides. Professionally, Lynda has battled discrimination “left, right and centre” and her production company once faced bankruptcy.
Personally, too, there have been heartaches, not least three miscarriages and failed IVF in her struggle to have a child. The misery was compounded when her husband of 17 years, musician Richard La Plante, made her longtime assistant pregnant. “The betrayal,” Lynda sighs, “felt deep and very painful.”
Sadly, she reconciled herself to the crushing idea that she would never be a mother. “I had been trying to adopt for many years. I’d divorced. I’d bought another racehorse and a Great Dane and accepted that the dream was over …
“Then I got a call that if I could be in Florida in 24 hours, there was a baby being born. Holding my son for the first time was the most joyous moment of my life, the fulfilment of something I had ached for, for so long.”
It was 2003 and Lynda was 59. She worried that she might be too old to become any sort of mother, let alone a single one. But she never anticipated the ageist, sexist uproar in the British press once news of little Lorcan’s adoption broke.
“Mick Jagger had his last child aged 73! Did that attract the same headlines? Absolutely not! I hate such double standards, but they’re everywhere.”
Take Lynda’s hard-hitting prison drama The Governor, in which she wrote two confronting rape scenes – one of them involving a female psychologist, the other two male inmates. “Of course, it was the male rape that had the media frothing!”
Frustrating and infuriating? Yes. “Every time you lift your voice it’s still that barrier. If you’re a strong woman and you have a confrontation, you’re trouble.” Like her Prime Suspect heroine, DCI Jane Tennison, so memorably played by Helen Mirren.
“If you’re a man, people think, ‘He’s good, he knows what he’s doing.’ You just have to sail through all that. I keep trying, banging on doors,” the veteran feminist says vehemently. “Fear has never stopped me doing anything. And if you knock me down, it’s guaranteed I will get up again.”
For an octogenarian, it’s difficult to get meetings with producers. But as so often before, she has the last laugh. With millions of fans worldwide, her Listening to the Dead podcast is a smash hit, and she is currently working on yet another novel.
“I think I shall die on the keyboard. That’s it, I’ll just collapse one day when I’m writing. I’ve no intention of stopping until I drop off the face of the Earth.”
Best of all, Lorcan stays close and remains the apple of Lynda’s eye. “He’s 21 and has his own place, sort of — a cottage in my garden. And his girlfriend. I call them the Ninja thieves. They come in at night and suddenly all the milk and oats have gone! But he’s a trainee pilot and I’m very proud of him.
“Really, I’ve led a terrific life and I continue to live a terrific life. While the body creaks a little more these days, in my mind I feel like I’m only just beginning.”
Getting Away With Murder by Lynda La Plante, Allen & Unwin, is out now.
