Actress Liz White returns to policewoman role in true crime drama 'The Long Shadow'

Liz was a huge success in the Life on Mars series, which aired on TV from 2006-7.

She played the part of a doe-eyed, innocent WPC who showed her compassionate side in a misogynistic northern police station, set in 1973.

Now she is back in blue - as a policewoman on the trail of the Yorkshire Ripper.

Liz plays the role of real-life Sergeant Meg Winterburn, one of the relatively few female officers in a West Yorkshire force that underwent withering criticism during their hunt for Peter Sutcliffe.

Viewers can catch her on the true crime drama The Long Shadow, which is set to be broadcast on ITV1 and ITVX next month.

Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield and later found guilty of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980.

It isn’t known how Liz - who was born a year before Sutcliffe was captured - will portray Sgt Winterburn.

Winterburn’s job as an officer sifting through documents, catalogues, and suspects’ names has been played before in The Incident Room, a stage production three years ago at the New Diorama Theatre, London and then New York.

Liz, now aged 43, made her name in the role of WPC Annie Cartwright in the 2006 BBC One drama Life on Mars.

She clearly has a penchant for law and order productions.

In the same year Life on Mars hit our screens she showed up in six episodes of The Fixer, a murder mystery.

In 2011 she performed in the Wild Bill crime comedy-drama film.

Three years later she was in two episodes of the hugely popular Line of Duty.

In 2016 viewers saw her in Grantchester, an ITV detective drama set in the 1950s.

In 2021 she was in Unforgotten, the London-based thriller.

Last year, she also had a part in the crime series The Chelsea Detective.

The Long Shadow is a seven-episode series depicting the desperate hunt for serial killer Sutcliffe.

It was written by award-winning screenwriter George Kay who researched the much-criticised investigation’s archives, case files, interview transcripts and police reports.

Broadcasters have promised the series will “sensitively focus" on the lives of the victims and the officers who were obsessed with bringing Sutcliffe to justice.

Filming took place in Yorkshire in last Summer, with locations including Wortley, Barnsley, Leeds, Dewsbury and York.