NOW IT’S NAPPY VALLEY: TV psychopath James Norton plays controversial test-tube baby pioneer in new film about Louise Brown
As the psychopathic Tommy Lee Royce in the BBC drama Happy Valley, James Norton was responsible for ending more than one life.
But in his next – more inspiring – role, the acclaimed actor will play a Nobel Prize-winning doctor responsible for bringing countless lives into the world.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the 38-year-old medical pioneer will play Robert Edwards, whose research resulted in the world’s first ‘test tube baby’ – and ultimately more than four million children born via in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
Norton was spotted last week filming scenes for an upcoming film about that work, titled Joy, on the cobbled streets of Cambridge.
With him was Thomasin McKenzie, the New Zealand-born star of Last Night In Soho, who will play nurse Jean Purdy, whose key role in the groundbreaking research was overlooked for three decades.
ON SET: Happy Valley’s James Norton and Bill Nighy play gynecologist Patrick Steptoe
Bill Nighy plays gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, the third member of the medical team whose then controversial work led to the birth of Louise Joy Brown at Oldham General Hospital in 1978.
Wearing a blue long-sleeved polo shirt, Norton was filmed peering out of a window and seeing 23-year-old Ms McKenzie walking down a side street.
In another scene for the film – directed by Sex Education’s Ben Taylor and scheduled for release on Netflix – Ms McKenzie was filmed reading a copy of the medical journal The Lancet.
The area would have been familiar to Norton, who graduated from Cambridge in 2007 with a first-class degree in theology after studying at Fitzwilliam College.
His character was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010 for his work in developing IVF, but Edwards could not share the honor with his colleagues because they had already died by then, and the award is not given posthumously.
Edwards began studying human fertilization around 1960, and in 1968 he succeeded in achieving the fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory.
He then started working with Steptoe.
Purdy was the first to see that a fertilized egg, which would become Louise Brown, was dividing to make new cells.
Thomasin McKenzie, the New Zealand-born star of Last Night In Soho, who will play nurse Jean Purdy
Pictured: gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, embryologist Jean Purdy and physiologist Robert Edwards at the birth of Louise Brown on July 25, 1978
Edwards began studying human fertilization around 1960, and in 1968 he succeeded in achieving the fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory.
Although she co-authored 26 articles with her colleagues, Purdy’s name was omitted from a plaque in Oldham marking their work – an error that was only corrected in 2013. She had died in 1985, aged just 39, from malignant melanoma.
The history-making birth of 8-ounce baby Louise on July 25, 1978 was exclusively reported in the Daily Mail with a front-page photo and the headline: ‘The beautiful Louise.’
Mrs Brown, now a mother of two, said last night: ‘I am aware a film is being made but I have not been involved. I look forward to seeing it when it comes out.”
Edwards died in 2013, aged 87, and Steptoe died in 1988, aged 74.
