Charles in the cast of The Woman In White

JESSIE BUCKLEY will star in BBC television’s big blockbuster drama The Woman In White, based on Wilkie Collins’s melodramatic, Victorian-era page-turner about an outlandish murder plot.

Buckley (right) will play Marian Halcombe, one of three women caught up in the web of a bloodthirsty schemer, who is out to steal an inheritance using devious methods .

The Woman In White is a popular mystery tale that’s been filmed by the BBC twice before (in 1966 and 1997) and has also been on the cinema screen and adapted for Radio 4.

Ms Buckley, who played Princess Marya Bolkonskaya in the hit War And Peace and is appearing in BBC1’s Taboo, along with Tom Hardy, will be joined in the Collins dramatisation by Charles Dance, Olivia Vinall, Joanna Scanlan and Henry Goodman.

Key roles are going to Dougray Scott and Vicki Pepperdine.

Director Carl Tibbetts, who made some of the Black Mirror dramas, will start filming the series on locations in Belfast at the end of this month.