Who was Alexander Wilson?

Piecing together Alec's life

"I think Alexander Wilson’s story is a little bit of an enigma and it remains so today, because of his history of working with the secret service," says Ruth Kenley-Letts, the show's executive producer and one of the first to develop Ruth Wilson's family story from an idea into a fully-funded production for the BBC.

"There is no doubt that he worked for MI6. He was clearly a highly intelligent man. He spoke seven languages, which must have been incredibly useful to the intelligence service during the Second World War. Alison met him whilst he was working there as a translator and she was his secretary."

But what happened to him after WWII? This question has intrigued the family for years and is something the show's makers have toyed with ever since screenwriter Anna Symon's initial research into the subject. According to Kenley-Letts, Alison believed that he worked undercover for many years, taking on low-level jobs in order to infiltrate various organisations that he’d been tasked to spy on. "There are others who say he was fired from the Secret Service," she says. "That he was a fantasist and lied."

As Symon delved into Wilson's wartime background, she admits she continued to find new things at every turn. "I kept changing my mind," she says. "Was he a good man? Was he a flawed man - or an absolute charlatan?"

Symon believes that the work Wilson undertook damaged him psychologically, that the freedom and fiction of his occupation led him to create fictional lives for himself. He was known for his linguistic skills and was considered a talented writer. According to Symon, women fell at his feet.

"He was incredibly charming. He remains an absolute enigma. In fact in Alison Wilson’s memoir, she says he will remain an enigma in an unmarked grave."

Deciding on the right path

Ruth Wilson agrees: "We decided to retain Alec as a man of mystery, because he still is for all of us, as a family. We still don’t know the real truth about who he was. About why he got sacked from MI6. We don’t know the reasons why he married these women. We don’t have any written account from him about his feelings, his justifications.

"We have his children’s memories, we have my grandmother’s memoir and we have his books - that’s all we have."

What Alexander Wilson became in Symon's script is what Ruth Wilson describes as "a construct of everyone's memories".

However, what is evident is the positive and loving reaction the family has when discussing Alexander Wilson: a loving father, a storyteller, full of life, gregarious, fascinating and exciting to be around.

"He could sit and generate stories quite readily," remarks Ruth Wilson. "By his nature, the work that he did for the Secret Service meant you had to have different personas. You had to completely commit to them, because it was very dangerous if you were exposed in the role you were playing.

"He was in a situation where he had to be different people all the time, and I think it all got a bit grey round the edges."

Taking on the role of Alec

Iain Glen (pictured) is a multi-award-winning stage and screen actor who describes taking on the role of Alexander Wilson as "a gift of a role".

"He was fundamentally a good soul," Glen says of his character. "Whatever was going on, I think he had a good intent, he had a good heart. What seemed important to me was to play somebody who you couldn’t dismiss readily as a cad, as bad. I think he had a really profound belief in his country, a profound belief in the war and what he could do to help the cause. That, I think, was probably his central most motivating quality.

"I also think he was a survivalist. There was an aspect to him which was profoundly, paradoxically honourable. In that day and age if you got involved with somebody and they got pregnant the right thing to do was to wed them - and that’s what he did. It doesn’t excuse it, but I understand his reasoning. It’s a lovely thing playing somebody with so many different qualities to them."

For costume designer Lorna Marie Mugan, Alec represents the dashing, romantic figure so often found in spy novels.

"He was quite an exotic character, you have to believe that he was a very charismatic person to have lived this incredible life and have all these women and children adore him. He was a man in uniform who wrote novels. To young women that was so exotic and seductive."