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Box office. $9.8 million [1][2] Red Joan is a 2018 British spy drama film, directed by Trevor Nunn, from a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero. The film stars Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell Moore, Tom Hughes, Ben Miles, Nina Sosanya, Tereza Srbova, and Judi Dench. The film is based on a novel of the same name written by Jennie Rooney, which was ...
- Tereza Srbova
In 2019 Srbova co-starred in the spy drama Red Joan opposite...
- Tom Hughes
Tom Hughes (born 18 April 1985) is an English actor. He is...
- Tereza Srbova
Red Joan: Directed by Trevor Nunn. With Judi Dench, Nina Sosanya, Laurence Spellman, Nicola Sloane. The story of Joan Stanley, who was exposed as the K.G.B.'s longest-serving British spy.
- (15K)
- Biography, Drama, History
- Trevor Nunn
- 2019-04-19
Apr 19, 2019 · The public were shocked when elderly woman Melita Norwood was uncovered as a KGB spy. Standing in her suburban front garden in 87-year-old pensioner Melita Norwood read from a crisp sheet of paper ...
- Overview
- HISTORY Vault: Great Spy Stories of the 20th Century
Melita Norwood was a great-grandmother when her espionage was finally revealed.
In 1999, an 87-year-old British woman held a press conference in front of her home to announce that for nearly four decades, she’d worked as a spy for the Soviet Union.
In fact, Melita Norwood was the Soviet Union’s longest-serving British spy. From World War II through the Cold War, she stole nuclear secrets from the office where she worked as a secretary and passed them to Moscow.
Norwood was coming clean because a Cambridge historian had discovered her espionage while writing a book, but she was unrepentant. She told The Times of London that “in the same circumstances, I know that I would do the same thing again.”
Norwood was a long-time member of the Communist Party who supported the Soviet Union’s attempt to bring communism to Eastern Europe and feared a world in which the United States and Western Europe held unchallenged nuclear power. She began her spying career in the 1930s while working as a secretary for the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London.
This innocuous-sounding association was actually part of a secret nuclear weapons research project with the U.S. called “Tube Alloy.” When no one was looking, Norwood would sneak into her boss’ office, open his safe and take pictures of the secret documents inside. She’d then pass the camera off to her contact in the KGB, who knew her by her code name “Hola.”
Delve into celebrated espionage cases of the 20th century involving spies, moles, dead drops, disguises, gadgets and more.
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In 1996, the government decided that the information in the Mitrokhin papers should be available to the public, and handed them over to the Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew so he could write a book about them. Norwood’s secret finally came out in September 1999, when The Times of London began to publish Andrew’s book serially.
The revelations came as a total surprise to Norwood's daughter, Anita Ferguson, who didn’t find out her mother was a spy until she read about it in the paper. As the news of Norwood’s espionage broke in The Times, Norwood held a press conference to confirm that she was a spy and explain why she’d done it.
Melita Norwood, pictured here at age 87 in 1999, standing outside her home in Bexleyheath, where she reads a statement to the press concerning her involvement in passing over atomic secrets to the KGB.
“I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service,” she told the press in front of her home. “I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany.” She added that, “in general, I do not agree with spying against one's country.”
Apr 28, 2019 · Judi Dench as Joan Stanley in Red Joan, a film based on the true story of Melita Norwood (Photo: Lionsgate) By Alex Nelson April 28, 2019 10:02 am (Updated October 7, 2020 3:32 pm )
Apr 19, 2019 · Instead, the film trundles back and forth in time from 2000, when Joan is arrested and is being interrogated, to the late 1930s, when she was a fresh-faced undergraduate at Cambridge University.
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Apr 19, 2019 · April 19, 2019. 4 min read. A based-on-a-true-story spy thriller, Trevor Nunn ’s conventional yet sneakily absorbing “Red Joan” eases into the familiar mold of “ The Imitation Game ” at once. As it toggles between two separate eras, Nunn’s period piece frames its story by introducing us to the 80-something Joan Stanley (Judi Dench ...
