'Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait,' was the Wilkie Collins maxim. The Victorian public went nuts over 'The Woman in White', queueing around the block to buy the next episode in Charles Dicken's magazine All the Year Round. Perfumes were named after it, ships and waltzes. It gave generous helpings of vice and virtue to the readership -- two heroines, two villains, masterly plotting, wonderful characterisation, and enough cliffhangers to hinge its serialisation. Critics, confronted with a new genre of 'sensation novel', took against it. Wrote the Pall Mall Gazette: 'Mr Collins is nearly as clever as anyone who has ever fried a pancake in a hat.'

'The Woman in White' is the story of inseperable sisters, Marian and Laura, who are dragged apart by Laura's marriage, and subjected to every vile deceit in the book -- forgery, impersonation, embezzlement, doping -- by the husband, Sir Percival Glyde, and his silky accomplice, Count Fosco. Victorian heroines tend to be a wimpish crew. Not so Collin's Marian. Clever, direct, unswerving and resolutely independent of men, she is almost a forerunner of Ripley in 'Alien' or Clarice Starling in 'The Silence of the Lambs'.

'Marian is a strong girl who has a great facade, covering up her ignorance of the world and her naivety with a rather forthright manner with men,' explains Tara Fitzgerald, the film's Marian. 'She is very protective of her younger sister, stepping in as substitute mother, father and guardian. It's very difficult for her to deal with the fact that she's about to lose her sister to a man. Out of the protectiveness she feels for Laura comes this premonition that there's something not quite right about Sir Percival.'

Laura is so impressively played by Justine Waddell that she subsequently landed the lead role in 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' for LWT. The complex villain, Baron Fosco, is played here with demonic energy by Simon Callow. Andrew Lincoln came hot-foot from Egg in 'This Life' to play Walter Hartwright, the drawing tutor who falls, way above his station, for Laura, and is cosequently ruined.

David Pirie wrote the script. Adapting the book, he'd been struck by how cleverly put together it was. 'I had to find the central thing that really struck me when I first read it, which was the character of Marian, and how modern she felt. What an extraordinary creation! I decided to narrow the focus on to her. A woman who has moved through the forces of cruelty. Her sister Laura says to her, "I know my husband is cruel. Half the men in England are cruel. I can't do anything about it." But Marian can and does. The notion of an abused woman is implicit, but it couldn't be spelt out in the Victorian era. There are things that I suspect Wilkie Collins would've put in the book if he could have -- they're almost there -- and I've amplified them. For example, I saw TheWoman in White as the sort of itinerant that men took advantage of, and I think Sir Percival Glyde, who was certainly cruel, was also a sadist.'

'Wanting in feminine pliability' was the writer's verdict on Marian, and Collins assigns her no romance at all, no fortune and an incipient moustache. 'We didn't take it quite that far!' laughs Pirie. 'I brought in the laudanum because we knew that Collins was associated with it, and also Rossetti's painting of his dead wife "Beata Beatrix", because Collins knew the Pre-Raphaelites. They're always kissing gravestones in the book. It's that world, isn't it?'

Director Tim Fywell ('Cracker', 'Gallowglass', 'A Dark Adapted Eye' and 'A Fatal Inversion') saw it as a sort of Victorian 'Rosemary's Baby'. 'Yes. Who can Marian trust? Who is on whose side? It starts like a ghost story, but the whole thing is actually like a slowly unfolding waking nightmare. Although it's a period piece, it isn't a museum piece. I wanted to look at it as a contemporary thriller, and for it not to tip over into unbelievable melodrama. I wanted a heightened realism. You must believe in these characters.'