If you’ve watched Harry Styles’ new movie, you may be wondering if My Policeman is based on a true story and what the real inspiration was for the movie about a policeman, his male lover and his wife.
My Policeman is based on the 2012 book by Bethan Roberts of the same title. The novel tells the story of Tom Cullen (Harry Styles), a policeman in 1950s Brighton, England, who has a secret relationship with a man named Patrick Hazlewood (David Dawson) behind the back of his wife, Marion Taylor (Emma Corrin.) My Policeman follows Tom as he navigates both relationships until one of them breaks and all three lives are destroyed.
In an interview with Billboard in September 2022, director Michael Grandage opened up about what it was like to direct Styles in his first lead film role. “No time did I ever feel I was working with any newcomer or beginner or novice,” he said. “He’s somebody who is adept at going out in front of thousands of people a night, and he knows that that isn’t just about walking out and going up to a microphone; it’s about walking out and performing. All that happens when you take on a role like Tom Burgess. You just have to take all of those skills of trying to play to an audience and bring it into a very different arena. But he’s got all the skills, Harry.” He continued, “[Styles is] very easy at taking direction. In fact, very open and asks for it a lot. He takes great care in checking I’m happy. The way most directors work is you tend only to give notes if something is not working — but Harry loves the dialogue, just to check everything is going okay. And, as soon as he realizes, and he did quite quickly, that part of the way of taking direction is to wait for a dialogue about shifting something, then he’s completely open to that as well.”
Grandage also revealed Styles’ reaction to the queer sex scenes in My Policeman. “He’s an actor, and actors are required to do what is in the script. But it’s just worth saying that all the stuff surrounding all of the intimacy in the film was done on the basis of a very strong level of trust,” Grandage said. “I told all the actors that I would never ever put anything in the final edit that they haven’t seen and approved of. We had, obviously, an intimacy coordinator working with us, who was a very wonderful facilitator about making sure that the language we were using was very much what I wanted to use in the film — which is a choreographic language, almost sculptural, the way the hands and flesh all interacted. There was a vision for the sculptural nature of that right from the beginning, because it isn’t just about intimacy; it’s about the way you portray hands, generally, throughout the film.”
So…is My Policeman based on a true story? Read on for what we know about if My Policeman is based on a true story and what the inspiration was for the story starring Harry Styles.
Image: Courtesy of Penguin Books.
Is My Policeman based on a true story?
Image: Courtesy of Prime Video.
Is My Policeman based on a true story? The answer is yes. My Policeman is based on Bethan Roberts’ 2012 book of the same name
, which was inspired by the real-life love triangle between writer E.M. Forster, policeman Robert “Bob” Buckingham and his wife May Buckingham. Like Tom Burgess and Patrick Hazlewood in My Policeman, there was also an age gap between E.M., who was 51, and Bob, who was 28, when they met. Also like Tom’s wife, Marion Taylor, Bob’s wife, May, was also a nursemaid for E.M.—in the later years of his life.
In an article for The Guardian in February 2012, Roberts, the author of My Policeman, reported that May and E.M.—the author of books like A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India—shared Bob, and the policeman wasn’t with one or the other more. Roberts described the relationship as a “functioning triangular arrangement was firmly established with the two of them sharing their beloved Buckingham; the long weekends were for May, the short ones for Forster. Such an arrangement may only have worked in conditions of complete silence about the true nature of Forster’s relationship with Buckingham; but it did, at least, work.”
Bob and E.M. were together for 40 years until E.R. died of a stroke at the age of 91 on June 7, 1970 t the Buckinghams’ home in Coventry, England. In the early years of Bob and E.M.’s relationship, Roberts wrote that the two spent most of their time, which Forster described as a “domestic and sexual life,” at E.M.’s Brunswick Square apartment. May was with E.M. and held his hand when he died. “I now know that he was in love with Robert and therefore critical and jealous of me and our early years were very stormy, mostly because he had not the faintest idea of the pattern of our lives and was determined that Robert should not be engulfed in domesticity,” May later wrote, according to The Guardian. “Over the years he changed us both and he and I came to love one another, able to share the joys and sorrows that came.”
Robins explained that the main inspiration for My Policeman came from a conversation May had with biographer P.N. Furbank about the grief she experienced over the early death of her and Bob’s child, son Robin Morgan, who died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1962. E.M. was a godfather to Morgan. “These two people, novelist and nurse, lover and wife, comforted one another and their relationship became rather like that of a mother and her grown-up son: to Forster’s biographer PN Furbank, May remembered Forster as a bad patient, getting under her feet and insisting on engaging her in conversation when all she wanted was to get on with the housework. It was this anecdote, more than anything else, which inspired me to investigate the story of this fascinating triangle and use it as the inspiration for my new novel, My Policeman,” Roberts wrote at the time.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar in 2022, Roberts explained how E.M., May and Bob’s unique relationship inspired Patrick, Marion and Tom’s dynamic in My Policeman. “That idea took hold in me, I wanted to write about how you get to that point,” he said. Roberts also told Vogue in 2021 that, though he’d read E.M.’s works for years, it wasn’t until he read his his biography that he learned about his relationship with May and Bob. “I’ve loved Forster’s work for a long time. His work—and his life—were quietly revolutionary in a way I really admire. I adore his humor and his warmth and his satirical eye. I had an idea to write some sort of fiction about Forster himself,” he said. “I researched his biography, and that was where I read about May Buckingham, the wife of Forster’s lover of 40 years, the policeman Bob Buckingham. And I read that, despite the struggles the three of them had in sorting out how this triangular relationship might work, particularly in an era when homosexuality was an imprisonable offense, May was actually the one who was there, holding Forster’s hand, as he died. I began to wonder how that came about. At the same time, I’d wanted to write about my adopted hometown of Brighton for years, so I thought, perhaps I could transpose a similar story to that location.”
My Policeman is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Here’s how to watch it for free.
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