Feature writing

The story of Andrews, who worked for the former Duchess of York, is dramatized in the new series The Lady.

The look on Mia McKenna-Bruce’s face says it all. In an early scene in forthcoming Britbox drama The Lady, McKenna-Bruce—playing Jane Andrews, former dresser to Sarah, Duchess of York—observes her employer, played by Natalie Dormer, in hushed conversation with a crown of blonde hair we decode immediately as Princess Diana. Andrews looks stunned, elated, to be where she is.

But this very modern fairytale—a working class girl gets a dream job at the heart of the British establishment as a trusted assistant to a senior royal family member—would go darkly awry, leading to Andrews being charged and jailed for murder. (The title of the TV drama, which premieres on March 18, comes from the name of the storied magazine of the British upper classes that contained the advertisement for help that Andrews initially answered.)

Born in 1967, Andrews grew up in the north of England, the youngest of three children born to working-class parents. On screen, her parents are presented as a solid, loving unit, although Andrews told the Guardian in 2003 that she had endured a more conflict-strewn upbringing.

“From an early age I was aware that things were not right at home,” Andrews said. “My parents were always arguing… But they were very proud… I was brought up in an environment of ‘keep it in the family.’ Don’t let the relatives think that we’re anything other than comfortably off.”

In the TV drama, a passing reference is made to an early suicide attempt, and Andrews’s parents are clearly worried about the vulnerability of their daughter. Andrews would later say she had been sexually abused by a family member (not her parents, she made clear). On screen we see her grip a bottle of pills after a blow-up with a cheating boyfriend. At 17, she became pregnant and had an abortion.

“I would sleep with someone, possibly on the first date, because I was frightened if I didn’t they would go. I allowed men to do anything they wanted to me,” Andrews told the Guardian, and the drama makes clear that her fear of abandonment was a corrosive feature of her later relationships.

“It’s exciting, compelling and tragically heart-breaking,” writer and executive producer Debbie O’Malley says of The Lady. “It also gives us a peek into the world of British royalty, but, this time, focusing on what goes on behind the scenes and below stairs. And whilst there is the aspirational ‘rags to riches’ fairytale with undeniably entertaining elements such as the excess and extravagance of the upper classes and Sarah’s Ferguson’s infamously flamboyant dress sense—there is also this very dark, serious underbelly which raises complex and thought-provoking issues.”

At 21, Andrews saw the advertisement for a dresser in The Lady that would change her life. She aced her interview with the Duchess of York, and began her dream job in July 1988, two years after the Duchess had married Prince Andrew (who is now officially known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). While the TV drama doesn’t focus on Fergie, it makes clear why Andrews became so trusted so quickly—this was a time when the duchess was being derided by the press for her looks and bearing when contrasted to Diana’s telegenic presence. In the era before stylists, Fergie came to rely on Andrews to present a more polished public image.

“I was running away from all the horrible things in my past that Grimsby represented. I arrived at King’s Cross with a suitcase and £10 in my pocket,” Andrews later said. “I got in a taxi and said, ‘Side door of Buckingham Palace’ and the driver made a joke. One of the housemaids met me and took me up to my room, and there was a little posy of flowers from Fergie and a card that said, ‘Welcome to the team, the Boss.’”

Andrews and the duchess became fast friends and confidantes (the duchess in the TV drama is seen enjoying getting all the dish on Andrews’s love life), and Andrews herself felt comfortable in her new luxe surroundings. However, the drama doesn’t drill into palace intrigues, or center on the duchess, staying focused on Andrews’ turbulent life.

Initially mocked by other palace staff for her own style, the TV drama shows Andrews giving herself a total makeover. In a blink she soon has an ’80s helmet of blonde hair and is rocking big-shouldered, pussy-bow blouses. Her Northern accent is supplanted by cut glass RP, learned from elocution-lesson tapes. A social life of glamorous partying kicks into gear.

“She was so good to know,” one close friend told the Guardian. “You can’t imagine how great it was to be with her. But she never believed that she was loved.”

This is what the TV drama illustrates most starkly about Andrews’ personal relationships—her desperation to be loved, and her fury when she felt she wasn’t. In 1989, she met Christopher Dunn-Butler, an IBM executive; they married the following year, though the relationship collapsed.

At a charity function organized by the Duchess, Andrews next met Dimitri Horne, the son of a Greek shipping magnate. A passionate relationship began, but when he told her he wanted to end their relationship (exhausted by her unpredictable behavior and outbursts) the TV drama shows Andrews stalking him and then—when he is out of his apartment—gaining entry, cutting up his clothes, and trashing the interior.

In November 1997, Andrews lost her job as the Duchess’ dresser. At the time the palace said her dismissal was down to cost-cutting, but the TV drama implies that the duchess became unsettled by Andrews’ over-familiarity, and iced her out of her inner circle. This devastated Andrews, particularly as the Duchess had, she claimed, only a matter of weeks before told her, “I’ll never get rid of you, you’re with me for life.”

Andrews’ final, fatal relationship was with Thomas Cressman, a former stockbroker, who she met in August 1998 and was determined to marry. (Ed Speleers, Jimmy in Downton Abbey, plays Cressman in The Lady.)

“I was the ultimate in insecurity,” Andrews said. “He was the ultimate in commitment-phobia. I would threaten to leave. He would tell me to leave. Then he would reel me back in. He knew which carrots to dangle. He knew which strings to pull.”

Praising the “emotional intelligence, subtlety, and vulnerability” McKenna-Bruce brings to her “mesmerizing” performance in The Lady, O’Malley says, “I was especially struck by her chameleon-like ability to inhabit the different ages and incarnations of Jane—beginning as a gauche fourteen year old dreaming of becoming a princess, through her self-assured and polished twenties and ending in the desperate unravelling of her thirties.”

Andrews claimed Cressman was abusive to her; his friends believed she was manipulative. A friend of both said that the relationship was destructive on both sides. Andrews claimed Cressman was physically and sexually abusive, and that she was too scared to leave him; his parents and friends denied her claims.

In September 2000, Cressman told Andrews that he didn’t want to marry her, and that he wanted her to leave the property they shared. As shown in the series, Cressman called emergency services, telling the operator, “We are rowing and someone is going to get hurt. I would like somebody here to stop us hurting each other, because if we don’t have somebody here soon, somebody is.”

A further cycle of arguments and violence unfolded that day and night, with Andrews ultimately killing Cressman by beating him with a cricket bat and stabbing him with a knife. Andrews was eventually discovered by police in the back of her car under a blanket, hundreds of miles away, having taken an overdose of pills.

In the subsequent court case Andrews was found guilty of Cressman’s murder, and given a life sentence. The Guardian reported that a year after her incarceration she was diagnosed as suffering from a borderline personality disorder, “a condition characterized by extreme variation in mood, a chaotic sense of self and an ‘I hate you, don’t leave me approach to interpersonal relationships.”

Speaking to the paper in 2003, Andrews said, “I’ve caused all this heartache and grief to so many people and there is absolutely nothing I can do about that. To even say the word ‘sorry’ is so feeble, insignificant. But I am. I’m a much stronger person now, and if I was given the chance I could talk about things that I was incapable of talking about at the trial. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to blame anyone else for Tom’s death. I was responsible and I have to live with that every second of my life. I just want people to understand what has happened and hopefully make some sense of it.”

Andrews was released from jail in 2015, re-incarcerated in 2018 after allegedly harassing a former lover, and then re-released in 2019 after police found insufficient evidence of harassment.

In 2020, the Sun reported she had a job stacking shelves at a supermarket. Then earlier this year the Mirror reported Andrews, now 58, was working for a charity-funded animal hospital, publishing pictures of her in the organization’s blue uniform. When asked about her charity work, Cressman’s brother Rick told the Mirror: “I can never be sympathetic. She’s served her sentence. I can only say she has a life to continue with, but the sentence for me and my family continues for the rest of our lives.”