Widows (TV series)

Widows was a British primetime television miniseries aired in 1983.

The six-part series revolved around a group of mafia widows who resolved to pull off the heist in which their husbands had been killed. It was written by crime writer Lynda La Plante, and set the tone for police procedural TV dramas which followed, including Prime Suspect.

Plot

Three armed robbers - Harry Rawlins, Terry Miller and Joe Pirelli - are killed during an armed robbery. They are survived by their widows, Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell), Shirley Miller (Fiona Hendley) and Linda Pirelli (Maureen O'Farrell). With the police applying pressure, and a rival gang intending to take over Harry Rawlins' crime business, the widows turn to Dolly for leadership.

She uses Harry's famous "ledgers", a cache of books detailing all his robberies over the years, to find the details of the failed robbery, and, enlisting the help of a fourth woman, Bella O'Reilly (Eva Mottley), they resolve to pull off the raid themselves. At the same time, they discover the "fourth man" in the raid escaped - leaving their husbands for dead. Dolly must contend with the police and the gang, as well as her fellow widows, agitating for vengeance.

Template:Spoiler Widows concluded with the widows successfully pulling off the raid, and escaping to Rio. In the final scenes, however, they discovered that the "fourth man" was in fact Harry Rawlins (Maurice O'Connell), Dolly's husband.

Sequels

Template:Spoiler Widows was followed by Widows 2 in 1985. The second series saw the widows return from Rio to track down Harry Rawlins, revealed at the conclusion of the original Widows to be the surviving "fourth man" from the original raid. Harry is determined to pay back the widows for staging his raid, and the widows have a score to settle with him for running out on their husbands. For this second series, Debby Bishop took over the role of Bella, after Eva Mottley had died from a drugs overdose.

Widows 2 was followed by She's Out in 1995. The third (and final) series began with Dolly Rawlins release from prison after serving a nine year sentence for the murder of Harry, her husband. She teams up with several other parolees and make plans to stage a train robbery on horseback. Dolly's new companions in crime were - Ester Freeman (Linda Marlowe), Julia Lawson (Anna Patrick), Gloria Radford (Maureen Sweeney), Connie Stephens (Zoe Heyes), Angela Dunn (Indra Ove) and Kathleen O'Reilly (Maggie McCarthy).

US re-make

In 2002, it was re-made for the US market as Widows, but the plot was changed. Instead of a traditional armed robbery, the US version united the three widows and the fourth woman in a plan to steal a famous painting. The US version starred Mercedes Ruehl as Dolly Rawlins, Brooke Shields as Shirley Heller (note: the character name was changed from Miller), Rosie Perez as Linda Perelli and N'Bushe Wright as Bella O'Reilly.