In real life, Frances insisted Reg was never physically violent towards her.
In the film, Reg and Frances’s eight-week marriage falls apart when he beats her up and rapes her. It’s a pity the filmmakers haven’t given her more to work with, especially as her story frames the entire movie. Characterisationĭespite a perfectly decent performance by Browning, Frances comes across as a bland and forgettable ingenue: there’s little of the spark that enraptured Reg in real life. The Krays’ gang, like the royal family, was called The Firm. Ron was known on the gay scene as “the Queen Mother”. The film goes with Pearson’s maximally lurid account, wherein both Boothby and the Labour politician Tom Driberg were said to be guests at fetish-filled orgies in Ron’s flat at Cedra Court, Clapton. The true nature of Boothby’s relationship with Ron Kray is difficult to establish: letters and witnesses attest that they were close, but Boothby received a substantial libel payout from a newspaper after it linked the two of them. Ron carouses in London’s gay underworld, making friends – and perhaps more – with Conservative peer Lord Boothby. The brothers paid, rather than threatened, a psychiatrist to certify Ron. Reg waited for enough time to pass, then proved his true identity with his driving licence. Then the two picked a moment to switch places: Ron, pretending to be Reg, told the nurse he was going to the hospital scullery to fetch some tea – and walked out to a waiting car. Reg arrived with an overcoat over the top to make it less obvious. The twins arranged to wear the same clothes when Reg came to visit: a dark blue suit and red tie. His only friend was a radiator – “It was warm,” he explained – and he became convinced that one of his fellow patients was a dog. Strangely, this is much less inventive than what happened in real life, according to the Krays’ biographer John Pearson, on whose book, The Profession of Violence, Legend is based.
Reg (also Tom Hardy, also excellent) finds a psychiatrist, and has him threatened into certifying Ron sane. The film begins with Ron (Tom Hardy, excellent) incarcerated in Long Grove mental hospital. By the 60s, they were rubbing shoulders (and allegedly more) with politicians and celebrities. They were East End toughs who became gangsters. Reginald and Ronald Kray were twins born in 1933.
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