Mia McKenna-Bruce to Star in True Crime Royal Drama 'The Lady'

Left Bank Pictures made its name as the studio that pitched and sold The Crown to Netflix in 2014. But the streaming service that once took swings at prestige glory by greenlighting six seasons, sight-unseen, of ripped-from-the-headlines royal drama has changed in the last decade. While an Edward-based Crown spinoff and a film version of Patriots stay stuck in limbo over there, Left Bank has moved ahead to work with ITV and BritBox for its next series based on a royal family scandal from the Second Elizabethan age, The Lady.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this royally connected crime drills down into the women of the royal family that The Crown mostly glossed over, centering itself in The Duchess of York's household, Sarah Ferguson, and her relationship with her working-class dresser, Jane Andrews. If the name is familiar to you, it's due to Ferguson's royal dresser being the center of a "trial of the century" circa 2001. At age 21, Andrews was hired as the royal dresser to Ferguson in 1988 as the newly married Yorks transitioned to their own staff. She worked for the Duchess for a decade but was let go in 1998, supposedly due to the palace's cost-cutting in the wake of Diana's passing.

Cut off from the luxurious life she had become accustomed to, Andrews pinned her hopes on the man she was dating, Thomas Cressman, to marry her. Instead, one night, after a massive row, she took a cricket bat and a knife to him and wound up on trial for murder.