The figure of the caring woman sitting at the gay man’s side as he dies from AIDS is a figure who appears across art about the virus. Perhaps the most famous example is Emma Thompson in the HBO version of Angels in America, the plain-taking nurse who may also be a literal angel.

As such, viewers may think that Jill is just another fictional figure in the mode of Thompson, or that of Julia Roberts in The Normal Heart. However, she is actually based on a real person, also named Jill.

It’s a Sin’s Jill is based on a real woman called Jill Nalder. Similar to the show’s Jill, who meets the show’s sort-of lead Ritchie (Olly Alexander) at a drama class, Nalder was in a youth theatre troupe with writer of It’s a Sin Russell T Davies.

A major detail of the show comes straight from her life: Like Jill in the show, she lived in a London apartment with three friends that they called “The Pink Palace.”

In a BBC interview, Nalder spoke of losing three friends to AIDS, and visiting them in hospital when their parents either could not or would not.

Speaking of visiting one friend in hospital, for example, she said, “it was a devastating time… He never got another visitor after that. I didn’t know his family well enough to contact them, but I know that he had no other visitors.”

Asked how close Jill in It’s a Sin’s story was to her own, meanwhile, she said, “the two things I relate to the most is frantically searching for information about the virus. I became like a dictionary of AIDS-related infections.

“And the hospital visits. Walking down the corridors and looking into the rooms and in each one seeing people around my age dying with Aids. Seeing people with the kaposi sarcoma, the black marks on the skin, for the first time.”

Nalder was one of the founders of a charity then called West End Cares and now named Theatre MAD [Make a Difference], which raised over £2 million ($2.8 million) at the time and has gone on to make £14 million.

The real Jill, like her It’s a Sin counterpart, is an actor on London’s West End, but she recently had a role on TV – in It’s a Sin itself, where she plays the mother of Jill.

On Virgin Radio, Jill actor Lydia West (who has also recently starred in Years and Years and Dracula) said of meeting the woman her character was based on, ‘[Davies] sent me a message saying the show was very loosely based about his life and his friends’ lives, and that the real Jill was playing my mother. ‘He said, “I don’t want you to do anything differently, or analyse her or try and mimic it in any way.’

“Then I met her at the read-through and she was just everything that I hoped she would be. She’s absolutely gorgeous and stunning. ‘It was very emotional. I couldn’t look at her throughout the read, I was looking down for it.’”

It’s a Sin is streaming now on HBO Max.