It was rumoured that Charmian knew her husband was planning to take part in the £2.6m robbery, but the drama insists she had no knowledge of the crime.
Charmian was 18 and the product of a middle-class, Home Counties upbringing when she first met Biggs on a London commuter train.
The impressionable teenager fell madly in love with 28-year-old Biggs and was soon sucked into a life of crime. She followed him to Australia after his escape from Wandsworth Prison but was forced to bring up their three children alone after he fled to Brazil and fathered a child with a nightclub dancer.
Charmian acted as a script consultant on the drama and attended the launch in London.
She said: “I wanted the story to be told truthfully and from the point of view of the family. A dramatisation allows the emotions to come through in a way that a documentary never does.
“Watching it made me cry on several occasions because it brought the memories back so vividly.”
Asked if she would do it all again, she replied: “Being me, I probably would. There have been some fantastic times as well as sad ones. That’s a life. You have to have the lows to appreciate the highs.”
However, asked if she still loved Ronnie, she said: “When you get to my age, you get a lot wiser.”
Writer Jeff Pope, whose credits include the Bafta-winning Appropriate Adult, said Ronnie Biggs had seen a preview of the first episode and “given a double thumbs up”.
He added: “There are a lot of myths around the Great Train Robbery, such as the myth that Jack Mills had been killed during the robbery. Whilst there was a violent and completely unprovoked assault on Mr Mills, the fact remains that Mr Mills didn’t die during the robbery, he died seven years later from leukaemia.
“There are lots of myths and misconceptions we have about Ronnie in particular.
“I hope the audience come away with a different perception of Charmian and Ronald Biggs. It’s not about canonising them. It’s about understanding what happened and realising that, certainly in the case of Charmian, ‘That could have been me’.”
Mr Mills family maintain that he never recovered from the attack and have criticised ITV for paying Charmian a consultancy fee.
Smith, winner of two Olivier Awards for her stage roles in Flare Path and Legally Blonde, said she was moved to tears by the story.
“I’m such a hopeless romantic and at the heart of Mrs Biggs is a love story,” she said.
Daniel Mayes, who plays Biggs, said: “There’s a real tragedy to the story. He got 30 years even though he never actually touched a mailbag.
“Of course they all took their cut, but I think the prison sentence was excessive and there was no parole at the time. You wouldn’t get that for murder now.”
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