Film & Books
Marjorie Wallace is a bestselling author, screenwriter, and writer. Her best-known book, The Silent Twins, has been turned into three films, numerous plays, documentaries, and operas since publication. This section provides an overview of her books, writing, and screenwriting work.
The Silent Twins (1986)
When identical twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, were three they began to reject communication with anyone but each other, and so began a childhood bound together in a strange and secret world.
As they grew up, love, hate and genius united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five-week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a gruelling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor.
Award-winning investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace delves into the twins’ silent world, revealing their genius, alienation and the mystic bond by which the extremes of good and evil ended in possession and death.
Reviews
On Giant’s Shoulders: The Story of Terry Wiles (1976)
The extraordinary story of how three people fought against appalling odds in the face of the Thalidomide scandal. Leonard Wiles, an ex-lorry driver, badly wounded in the war, living in poverty but with a latent genius for engineering, marries Hazel. Hazel is 20 years younger, married three times, born in a caravan, and illiterate until the age of 18.
Leonard and Hazel discover Terry, an illegitimate, abandoned, severely physically disabled little boy without arms or legs with only tendrils of flesh from his torso as a result of Thalidomide. The story of this unlikely trio is the triumph of love, determination, and skill over one of modern science’s most tragic mistakes.
Suffer the Children: The Story of Thalidomide (1979)
Thalidomide was hailed as a ‘wonder drug’ that provided a ‘safe, sound sleep’. But when given to pregnant women, Thalidomide was a catastrophic drug with tragic side effects. It caused startling birth malformations and death to babies. Birth defects included deafness, blindness, disfigurement, cleft palate, and phocomelia.
This book tells the story of Thalidomide in Great Britain and how the parents overcame the formidable obstacles placed in their way to secure a just settlement for their children. Around the world, in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, the victims of the drug Thalidomide and their families entered into class action legal suits against the various drug companies who manufactured and distributed the drug.
The Superpoison (1981)
Magerison and Wallace expose how the power to manipulate the chemical world has fast outstripped society’s and scientists’ ability to control this new force.
The book explores this theme by meticulously dissecting the Dioxin disaster at the ICMESA plant in Seveso, discussing the early accidents in numerous chemical plants that should have acted as a warning. It also relentlessly and tirelessly exposes the mercenary motives of Hoffmann-La Roche, the company that owned ICMESA.
Campaign and Be Damned! (1990)
The result of a Guardian Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, Campaign and Be Damned! The pamphlet acts as an exciting history, from Charles Dickens to Harold Evans, of campaigning journalism.
“Marjorie is an extraordinary journalist who never fails to pull out something memorable to the hearts and minds of the public.”
— Sir Harold Evans
“A remarkable and finally tragic story which, in its depth, penetration and detail, no less than its extraordinary subject matter, must be seen as outstanding, a testimony to something extraordinary in the author herself.”