Netflix film Joy tells true story of world's 1st IVF baby Louise Brown (2024)

Louise Brown, the world's first baby born by IVF, caused a stir when she walked onto the set of Joy, the new Netflix film about the three scientists that helped create the first ever 'test tube' baby.

The film stars Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie as the determined British pioneers of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the treatment which gave Louise life in July 1978.

Speaking on The One Show on Thursday night, Kiwi actress McKenzie said that meeting Louise was a big moment for those working on Joy, released on Netflix today, telling hosts Roman Kemp and Angelica Bell:'The crew and cast were more starstruck when Louise arrived than when Bill Nighy walked on set. It was pretty surreal'.

It was equally emotional for Louise; Ben Taylor's film takes her middle name, Joy, and she effectively watched her groundbreaking birth being played out for the big screen.

She told the programme: 'It was very emotional. I just wish my mum was there to see it.I wish that all five people who were involved in my birth werethere to see it including the three pioneers because I think they'd be so proud - and to realise that there are 12 million of us [people born using IVF] now, whichis just amazing.'

Louise looked like any other baby when she arrived in the summer of 78, but her birth made headlines all over the world.

As the first ever 'test tube' baby,she spent her first days in a jar, after being conceived in a petri dish - rather than a test tube as the popular name suggested.

Louise, now a mother-of-two, was pictured on the front page of the Daily Mail shortly after her arrival, under the headline: 'And here she is... The Lovely Louise'.

Her first weeks and months were followed avidly by experts and ordinary readers, all of whom were keen to see how a child conceived outside the human body would cope.

In an exclusive announcing her birth, at Oldham General Hospital, the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter said: 'Louise Brown has chubby cheeks, tiny fists, a mop of unruly blond hair, a voracious appetite and powerful lungs that bellow down the hospital corridor.'

Now, 46 years on, Joy follows the story of how obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Nighy), physiologist Robert Edwards (Norton) and embryologist Jean Purdy (McKenzie) faced huge criticism for trying to 'do God's work'.

In Edwards's words, they said they were simply trying 'to cure childlessness'.

Louise's mother, Lesley Brown, had been unable to conceive naturally because her Fallopian tubes were blocked.

She and her husband John had spent nine years trying for a baby when they signed up for IVF (In vitro fertilisation).

The football-sized jar that was used to grow Louise was put in an incubator chamber at 37 degrees, where it was monitored regularly.

Lesley was among 282 women who tried the then experimental procedure. Doctors attempted 457 egg collections but only 167 resulted in fertilisation.

From 12 embryos that were successfully implanted into women, five became pregnant. But Louise was the only live birth.

Louise married her husband Wesley Mullinder in 2004 and the pair now have two children of their own.

Amazingly, Wesley encountered his future wife when she was just days old, due to the fact that he lived just across the street from her parents in Bristol,.

Then aged eight, he was among neighbours and family who visited to see Louise.

Speaking in 2018 at an event to mark the 40th anniversary of IVF, Louise said:'About a year into our relationship my husband told me he had been there after I was born, which was quite weird.

'It was only when we met years and years later that I found out he lived across the road from my family home at the time.

'There was so much press interest, with 100 journalists at the door, and lots of children just wanted to see what was going on. He was among that group.'

Since Louise's birth more than 12 million children have been born using fertility treatment.Her sister Natalie was the 40th IVF baby and the first to have a child of her own.

Spanning 1968 to 1978, the movie follows the trio's fight against the church, state, media and medical establishment, in their hope for the world's first test tube baby - the colloquialism used at the time for babies born of IVF.

The story of Joy provides the poignant narrative of Jean Purdy, a mould-breaking young nurse who stood shoulder to shoulder with visionary scientist, Robert Edwards, and innovative surgeon, Patrick Steptoe.

The movie, produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey of the UK’s Wildgaze, with executive producer Cameron McCracken for Pathe, is directed by Sex Education director Ben Taylor and written by Jack Thorne and his wife Rachel Mason.

Joy review: These test tube baby pioneers deliver a bundle of joy, writes BRIAN VINER

Joy (12A, 124 mins)

Verdict: Uplifting tale

Rating:

Pub quiz enthusiasts have always known the name of the first 'test-tube' baby. The question pops up a lot, and the answer is Louise Brown.

But it's her middle name that gives Ben Taylor's film its heartwarming title. Evidently, at the invitation of Louise's ecstatic parents, it was conferred by the medical team who made their daughter's life possible. Fittingly, they chose Joy.

The film stars Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie as the British pioneers of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the treatment from which Louise was born in July 1978.

In some ways it reminds me of The Social Network (2010) and The Imitation Game (2014), even Oppenheimer (2023). They are all stories about complex breakthroughs that have to be told compellingly, because we know the ending even before the lights go down.

To create dramatic tension, major obstacles must stand in the way. Here, the establishment is dead against what obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Nighy), physiologist Robert Edwards (Norton) and embryologist Jean Purdy (McKenzie) are attempting to do. In Edwards's words, that, simply, is 'to cure childlessness'.

Once the trio have joined forces in 1968, Steptoe anticipates the hostility they will face. 'The Church, the state, the world... they'll throw the book at us,' he says.

Screenwriter Jack Thorne personalises that — with how much dramatic licence I don't know — by building an estrangement between Purdy and her devoutly religious mother (Joanna Scanlan).

But told that they have no right 'to play God', both Purdy and Edwards have a ready (if perhaps disingenuous) response: that nobody says the same thing about spectacles and dentures, so why shouldn't human ingenuity address infertility as it has myopia and tooth decay?

The film's challenge is to make the myriad complexities of early IVF research accessible to today's audience. It does this well, striking an easy balance between the solemn medical jargon required to give the story authenticity (in Joy, as far as I'm aware, 'pre-ovulating follicles' make their debut in mainstream cinema) and that jaunty period charm which so often drives British films set in the 1960s.

It was even evident last time the Kiwi actress McKenzie popped up in 1960s England, playing a haunted fashion student in Edgar Wright's gripping psychological horror film Last Night In Soho (2021). She was perfect for that role, but here seems to me slightly miscast: too wan and winsome to play the formidable Purdy. Mind you, a quick Wikipedia check reveals that Purdy, remarkably, was only 23 when she first teamed up with the much-older Steptoe and Edwards.

As Steptoe, Nighy delivers his standard set of soft-voice and fluttery-hand mannerisms, but he's convincing as the doctor compelled by the forces of stuffy disapproval to pursue his dream in an outbuilding behind an Oldham hospital.

And Norton is perfectly fine as the ebullient Edwards, who in a TV debate takes on one of the scientific grandees bitterly opposed to the concept of IVF: the molecular biologist James Watson.

Incidentally, just as Watson won the Nobel Prize (for his part in the discovery of DNA), so, decades later, did Edwards. But this film is focused on the battle more than the victory, lingering over the laboratory failures that ended in disappointment for the first group of aspiring mothers treated in Oldham.

Again, I don't know how much springs from real life and how much from Thorne's keyboard, but those women drolly call themselves the Ovum Club, and, in an affectionate scene, even have a charabanc trip to the seaside.

Purdy, who goes with them, is the central figure in Joy, as the filmmakers strive to give her the status that for years Edwards insisted she deserved, as an equal partner in the IVF story.

Alas, she wasn't around to hear his pleas. In 1985 the woman who shared responsibility for the creation of so many lives had her own claimed by cancer, before she turned 40.

• Joy is showing in cinemas now, and will be available on Netflix from November 22