Often the female royal figure must choose between her heart and her ‘professional’ commitment to the state. The mere owning up to sexual desire is often taken, by men, as a sign of weakness, so a female ruler can only show her mettle by forgoing things typically ‘female’.
– George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992: 105)
Royal bio-pics have been a mainstay of commercial cinema since its inception. Historians fear them as, ultimately, they are seen as a commercial and entertainment venture first and historical document second. Inevitably filmmakers will have to condense, elide, edit and re-organise a life in order to make a satisfactory and coherent narrative. They are usually held up as exemplars of high production values in costume, hair, make-up, set design and location. Stately homes which are used as locations often subsequently see a high up-turn in visitor numbers.
Here, we will be examining four films examining the lives of queens which exemplify Custen’s thesis of pitting their private and public personas against one another: an Asian director’s take on English history with his pair of films on Elizabeth I starring the Australian actress, Cate Blanchett; American director Sofia Coppola’s version of French history in
Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst; and the British director Stephen Frears’ examination of a short period in the life of Elizabeth II in
The Queen.Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Screenwriters: Michael Hirst (Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and William Nicholson (Elizabeth: The Golden Age)
Starring: Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth) and Geoffrey Rush (Sir Francis Walsingham)
Subject: Queen Elizabeth of England and Ireland (1533–1603)
Films about Elizabeth I have been a popular cinematic subject. The first was Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth (1912), in which she improbably dies of a broken heart after learning of the Earl of Essex’s death. Bette Davis played Elizabeth twice: in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) with Errol Flynn as Essex, and in The Virgin Queen (1955) which focuses on her romancing of Sir Walter Raleigh (Richard Todd). Flora Robson played Elizabeth in two films: Fire Over England (1936) and The Sea Hawk (1940) – both focusing on the 1588 attack of the Spanish Armada. Jean Simmons played a teenage Elizabeth in Young Bess (1953), which saw the fourteen-year-old princess being seduced by the much older Thomas Seymour (Stewart Granger).
According to the on-screen titles, Elizabeth (1998) covers the period of her reign from 1554 to 1563 (the closing credits stating that she reigned for a further forty years). However, a number of the historical incidents that appear in the film are outside of this time frame, including the Duke of Norfolk’s execution (1572) and the Duke of Anjou’s appearance in Court (1571). Geoffrey Rush, who plays Sir Francis Walsingham, stated: ‘[Kapur] wants to tell the story of a young woman torn between love and duty, testing her emotional and political dominions. And if some fifteen-year-old student comes out of the film and disputes the facts, then I think that’s great. Shekhar’s interested in chaos – he’s added chaos to history’ (quoted in Charity 1998).
Although some of these events have been brought forward, the intention of the filmmaker is clear: to create a direct path from young carefree princess to Gloriana, the Virgin Queen. Shekhar Kapur has said:
Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (1998)
All history is interpretation. It intrigues me how people are still hung up on the fact that Elizabeth was a virgin even now. Why is that so important to people? Here is a woman who had four fairly well-documented relationships, and everybody insists she was a virgin. It must be a political thing. The denial of sexuality somehow makes a woman greater. (Ibid.)
It was unlikely that Elizabeth ever had an affair with Dudley (as shown here), nor was she likely to have been a ‘virgin’.
This was Kapur’s first film in English; his previous film, The Bandit Queen (1994) having earned him an international reputation. Rush noted that, ‘Shekhar had no cultural reverence for English history. Coming from Bombay, he has a good perspective on how extreme London might have been 450 years ago’ (ibid.).
As the title implies, the film is seen from Elizabeth’s point of view and we witness her change in attitude and appearance. The first shots of the film are of a dream-like sunlit-dappled group of young women with flowing dresses and an abundance of golden curls. They are frolicking in a meadow, free from all affairs of state and political machinations that the young princess will soon find herself embroiled in. As Queen she increasingly takes on more responsibility and this maturity is made manifest visually in the change of style of her dresses, make-up and hairstyles which become ever-more corseted and restrictive. In the final scene her hair is being shorn. She has sacrificed love and marriage, pronouncing, ‘See, I have become a virgin. I am married to England.’
Once in the court, there is a sense of unease and dread, danger lurking in every dark shadow as various plots are planned and executed. The theme of conflict resonates; conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, Mary and Elizabeth, love and duty. Her advisor William Cecil (Richard Attenborough) attempts to make advantageous marriage pairings, including the Duke of Anjou (Vincent Cassell) and Catholic Philip II of Spain (George Yiasoumi), but it is the young and highly inappropriate Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes) with whom she is shown having an affair.
Jane Dunn author of Elizabeth and Mary, Cousins, Rivals, Queens (2003) said:
I love what Cate did [here] … I think she was extremely moving in the lead role. Having said that, the history in the first film was bunkum. It was mixed up and unnecessarily wrong. I fear that they will try and sex things up. The remarkable thing about Elizabeth was not that she jumped into bed with every man she met but that she so effectively resisted temptation. People did speculate that she slept with Raleigh, among others, but they also speculated that she was incapable of physically making love to anyone. There is no evidence that she slept with any man. (Quoted in Hastings 2005)
The film was released a few months after the Elizabethan romp Shakespeare in Love and shares two cast members: Geoffrey Rush and Joseph Fiennes. It did well at the box office, and proved to be an international platform for the then relatively unknown Cate Blanchett, who won eleven major awards, including a BAFTA. The coveted Best Actress Academy Award was given to Gwyneth Paltrow for her role of Viola De Lesseps in the Elizabethan-set romp Shakespeare in Love, which Wendy Ide described as ‘One of the greatest travesties in the recent history of awards’ (2007). In the same ceremony Judi Dench won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her twelve minutes of screen-time as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.
The film’s agenda is not primarily historical accuracy but rather to depict a complex period of political history in an engaging manner. It was marketed in the UK as a political thriller and the film utilises elements of the genre within the narrative and cinematography. The Duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston) is shown to be a sexual and political predator and places himself at the centre of the drama, whereas Sir Francis Walsingham is forever in the shadows pursuing his enigmatic agenda.
It has a contemporary editing style (by Gill Bilcock) who edited Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) which Kapur much admired. The sound design mirrors this as traditional instruments are used alongside synthesisers and sound effects of unsettling howls of wind and off-screen cries in echo chambers further bring out the thriller elements. These marked it out as different from the slew of heritage films that had been released, most notably those under the banner of Merchant Ivory.
This thriller tone was continued in the film’s UK poster campaign which featured large tinted black and white images of the four leads with a one word summary of their place within the drama: Elizabeth – heretic; Norfolk – traitor; Walsingham – assassin; Dudley – lover; all very similar in style to the Trainspotting poster campaign in 1995. The poster’s tagline read ‘Declared illegitimate Aged 3. Tried for treason Aged 21. Crowned Queen Aged 25.’
In the US the poster used a full colour image of the young Elizabeth, casually draped in a chair, connoting a sexually confident young woman. There, Alison Owen, the film’s producer, pitched it as ‘Trainspotting meets The Godfather meets British royalty’. It was well-received, particularly with American women who ‘responded far more excitedly to the character of Elizabeth, whereas here [in the UK] people came away from the first screenings feeling they couldn’t identify with her. In America, women were jumping out of their seats shouting “Go girl!”’ (quoted in Marriott 1998).
The film would gross $82 million world-wide, a good return on its $15 million budget. Owen said: ‘The movies that do well in the States tend to present the popular picture of England. Americans have got preconceptions about England being all Beefeaters and Nelson’s Column. Elizabeth has that element of history, so they feel at home’ (ibid.).
It was critically well-received on both sides of the Atlantic.
Brimming with royal intrigue, court conspiracies, sex, violence, treachery, bloodshed and even a touch of cross-dressing,
Elizabeth is superior historical soap opera that shrewdly sidesteps all the clichés of British costume drama with its bold, often modern approach. Propelled by Shekhar Kapur’s muscular direction, by Michael Hirst’s witty script and, perhaps most significant, by Cate Blanchett’s remarkable performance as the Virgin Queen who ruled England for more than forty years, this richly entertaining saga is accessible enough to go beyond upscale crowds and possibly find wider appeal. (Rooney 1998)
Elizabeth is no dead slab of cinema. The film offers a new brand of history, styled to catch the attention of restless modern youth … this may suggest a variety show, full of stunt effects and cute casting. But Elizabeth is an organic and intelligent whole, suavely shot and performed, made with as much concern for modern sensibilities as for its selected facts of history. (Brown 1998)
Almost ten years later, Cate Blanchett reprised her BAFTA-winning, Academy Award-nominated role of Elizabeth, now a mature, statelier Queen.
The film starts almost ten years after the last one ended and follows her open challenge by Philip II of Spain (Jordi Molia), the figurehead of European Catholicism. The political intrigues of the Court continue. Her femininity would have had an impact on her perceived effectiveness as a ruler, she is portrayed as a career-woman with no interest in producing an heir which concerns her advisors. Elizabeth positioned herself as the gender-neutral Monarch, rather than Queen, usually considered the wife to a King. Assassination plots are uncovered, orchestrated we are led to believe by Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton), which ultimately leads to her death. The film ends with the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. Neither Sir Francis Drake nor the Duke of Medina Sidnoia are featured in this grand finale, despite both being there in reality. However, Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) does perform spectacular heroics worthy of any Douglas Fairbanks Jr or Errol Flynn movie – despite there being no documentary evidence that he was even there.
More inaccuracies include the depiction of Mary Queen of Scots being executed soon after her arrest, whereas in reality she was imprisoned for nineteen years; Dr Dee did not advise Elizabeth until after the defeat of the Armada; and no English ships were lost during the battle. Characters’ ages vary greatly from what they would have been at this period and as with the first film, some historically recorded events that happened earlier or later than the time period are incorporated into the film’s narrative timeline.
Although Blanchett’s performance was once again praised, critics and historians found the bias and presentation of historical fact troubling. Its overly melodramatic feel was also questioned, many deriding the scene in which Elizabeth dressed in gleaming armour and with her red hair flowing, arrives astride a horse at the cliff-tops to give her troops a rallying speech; this is a purely cinematic conceit. Screenwriter William Nicholson says, ‘My screenplay centres on a woman whose hopes of love are in conflict with her hold on power’ (2007).
Some UK critics gave a rating as low as ‘one star’ saying, ‘Where Kapur’s first Elizabeth was cool, cerebral, fascinatingly concerned with complex plotting, the new movie is pitched at the level of a Jean Plaidy romantic novel’ (Bradshaw 2007b). Others questioned its tone, but nevertheless urged audiences to see it for Blanchett’s performance which offers ‘soulful modulation between queenly command and womanly anguish’ (Quinn 2007).
Professor Cardini (a Vatican-endorsed historian) condemned the film as a ‘distorted anti-papal travesty. A film which so profoundly and perversely falsifies history that it cannot be judged a good film’ (quoted in Owen 2007). He had particular concern over the presentation of King Philip II of Spain who was shown as a ‘ferocious, fanatical Catholic, swinging his rosary like a weapon and roaming the Escorial Palace like a madman, full of impotent fury, dreaming of subjugating the world of catholic faith’; in contrast Elizabeth was portrayed as an ‘able politician and courageous sovereign’, failing to show that she ‘exterminated the Catholics of Scotland and Ireland’ (ibid.).
The estimated budget of around $55 million reflects the focus on spectacle. The sumptuous visuals call to mind the look of oil paintings of the Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean period. It made $74 million at the box office, not entirely replicating its predecessor’s success.
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Director: Sofia Coppola
Screenwriter: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette) and Jason Schwartzman (Louis XVI)
Subject: Queen of France and Navarre Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna 1755–1793)
Screenwriter and director Sofia Coppola used Antonia Fraser’s sympathetic and well-respected biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001) as her source material. She said, ‘I wanted to avoid doing a biopic because I hate that kind of typical structure … I wanted this to be more impressionistic, more a portrait of what it might have been like from her point of view’ (quoted in Freer 2006: 150). She continued:
I feel like everything the public knows about Marie Antoinette is based on false information … I was reading Antonia Fraser’s book and saw there was this real girl – that so much of what we know about her is based on propaganda. It was interesting to see the other side of what life could have been like for her. I didn’t see her as a villain. Marie Antoinette was just a teenager when she went to Versailles; what she wanted was to stay out late and go to parties. The film was about trying to understand her voice and make her sympathetic: to see the girl behind all the myths. (Quoted in Woolf 2006: 45)
The film covers the period in Antoinette’s life from 1768 when, aged 14, her mother the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (Marianne Faithfull), arranges for her marriage to the young dauphin, later Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzmann), to her arrest and imprisonment in 1792.
The youngest of sixteen children, Antoinette is ignorant of the world and the expectation of being a married woman. As years pass, and the French courtiers despise her, the more she gets caught up in a cycle of parties, gambling, shopping and gossip causing fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar’s film critic to note: ‘We may be remembered as the Heat generation, but to reduce one of the most fascinating periods in European history to a tale of shopping and fucking is beyond the pale’ (Frostrup 2006: 192).
Neglected by her husband sexually, their relationship deteriorates. In May 1774 they become King and Queen. Four years, later, there is still no heir and her brother Joseph (Danny Huston), concerned for his sister’s continued presence in French court life, visits and explains the intricacies of sexual intercourse and the importance of children to both, and nine months later, in December 1778, Marie give birth to a daughter. As French financial troubles worsen, their life of extreme luxury and profligacy makes them increasingly unpopular with the people. She has an affair with Count von Fersen (Jamie Dornan) whose look was modelled on Adam Ant (the soundtrack features two of his hits with the band Adam and the Ants). She has further children in 1781, 1785 and 1786 (the last child subsequently dies). As the French Revolution begins to erupt, they become the target of hatred but decide to stay in France, unlike the many nobles who escaped. The last shots of the film are of the palace being stormed and the Royal Family being taken away in June 1792. She would be executed by guillotine in October 1793.
Marie Antoinette was first depicted on film by Anita Louise in Madame Du Barry (William Dieterle, 1934) and four years later by Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (W. S. Van Dyke, 1938). Most recently she was played by Diane Kruger in the French production, Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot, 2012) which offers a fictionalised account of Antoinette’s final days, as seen through the eyes of a servant girl.
Despite relying heavily on paintings as visual reference Coppola was keen for her film to be the antithesis of a series of beautifully-lit tableaus in the mode of Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975). She wanted to bring the urgency, decadence and hedonism of the court to life. As she told Matt Woolf, ‘filmmakers are the portrait painters of the modern day, bringing to life those realms that are captured for all eternity on canvas’ (2006: 45).
A lively and unconventional take on the costume bio-pic, the narrative drive follows a straightforward trajectory but her visual and aural language is anything but expected. There is no attempt by any of the cast to use French or Austrian accents, allowing the cast the freedom to concentrate on their physical and emotional performances. The period covered in the film is from 1768 to 1792, yet there is no attempt to age them, the passing of time instead being shown through the portraits and the number of children depicted in them.
This was a $40 million production, and the filmmakers were given unprecedented access to Versailles. These sequences are filmed as though an episode from MTV’s
Welcome to my Crib. The high-energy score features tracks from 1980s British New Romantic bands Adam and the Ants (‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’) and Bow Wow Wow (‘I Want Candy’ and ‘Aphrodisiac’). These are interspersed with tender and heart-breaking moments displaying the pain, confusion and anguish of this young girl out of her depth, played out against a backdrop of more subdued pieces.
Mary Nighy as Princesse de Lamballe, Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette and Rose Byrne as Duchesse de Polignac in Marie Antoinette (2006)
Antoinette is shown as a fragile porcelain doll; when she overhears spiteful gossip about her being barren soon after she becomes an aunt, she rushes to a quiet room, leans against a wall, slides to the ground and sobs. What does a young woman do when so alone? She eats pastries, buys new shoes, hats and clothes – which the film’s next energetic montage set to the tune of ‘I Want Candy’ shows.
A tabloid queen surrounded by gossip, an eighteenth-century style icon with outrageous clothes and hairstyles but her underlying vulnerability is ever-present, and when she is dressed in another ridiculous outfit and overbearing wig, her poses are suffused with the need for acceptance and a look that conveys that age-old question, ‘do I look alright in this?’ Costume designer Milena Canoero and six assistant designers created the gowns, hats, suits and prop costume pieces. Shoes were designed by Manolo Blahnik and Pompeii, over one hundred wigs and hair pieces were made by Rocchetti & Rocchetti.
The film opens with Antoinette lounging on a
chaise longue as she eats a beautiful pastry – the room is sumptuous, the soundtrack belts out the punk anthem ‘Natural’s Not In It’ by the Gang of Four. We then rewind back to the fourteen-year-old Marie’s entrance into French society as the Austrian princess is sent off to marry the French prince, leaving behind her family, clothes and puppy. It ends with their flight from Versailles to Paris, therefore excluding the dark days leading up to their execution.
Whereas many critics found the juxtaposition of the old and the new unappealing, Pam Cook wrote:
Coppola’s use of travesty in her biopic has contributed to dividing critical opinion. Travesty, a common device in theatre and literature, irreverently wrests its source material from its historical context, producing blatantly fake fabrications that challenge accepted notions of authenticity and value. It brazenly mixes high and low culture, and does not disguise its impulse to sweep away tradition. In the case of historical fictions, travesty collapses boundaries of time and place through pastiche, emphasising that history is in the eye of the beholder, whether group or individual. Travesty is playful, but it can have a serious purpose: to demonstrate that the past is always viewed through the filter of the present, and represents the vested interests of those who reinvent it. (2006: 36)
Sofia Coppola dismissed criticism that the cast sounded like spoilt 5th Avenue New Yorkers by saying that she wanted ‘to emphasise that they are teenagers and to mark the difference between their world and the stuffy court world’ (quoted in Freer 2006: 150). This view of Marie Antoinette was shared by historian Simon Schama [in the PBS documentary, Marie Antoinette, 2006] in which he described her as a ‘Valley Girl’ and an ‘airhead’. Sam Allis’s review of the documentary continued:
Marie Antoinette was the original Paris Hilton. This hall of fame airhead revelled in a world of endless parties and wore her hair three feet high. This frivolous queen of France was labelled ‘Madame Deficit’ for her breath-taking spending while the French people starved. If, contrary to common belief, she never said, ‘Let them eat cake,’ she should have. Historian Simon Schama puts it this way, ‘She’s got a credit card with no limit really.’ (2006)
This is a sympathetic portrait of Marie Antoinette. Perhaps given Coppola’s upbringing in a privileged sheltered environment, she felt a kinship with this young woman whose ability to do her job is constantly questioned. She portrays Antoinette’s luxury as little more than a gilded cage. Like all Coppola’s films to date,
Marie Antoinette emphasises the darkness and emptiness that lies beneath a seemingly successful life. Coppola says, ‘I think they all [
The Virgin Suicides,
Lost in Translation and
Marie Antoinette] have a similar theme of girls looking for identity and each one takes off where the last one left off. In
Lost in Translation she’s just feeling and searching and in this one there is a complete evolution of a girl finally being a woman (quoted in Freer 2006: 151).
The film opened the 2006 Cannes Film Festival where it was received by a chorus of boos, slow hand claps, catcalls and jeers. Reviews were largely negative, with many criticising its tone and lack of historical integrity. However, despite the anachronisms of the language in the script, the course material of Fraser’s biography did ensure that many elements that may have appeared to be fanciful are in fact true. Their marriage was not consummated and Antoinette did receive letters from her mother encouraging her in the bedroom arts. She was also bisexual, and had numerous affairs. The film does perpetuate the myth that she said ‘Let them eat cake’, which has been discredited.
Jonathan Romney wonders, ‘how many critics conflated the two [Marie Antoinette and Sofia Coppola], dismissing the film as really obliquely autobiographical. Some detractors complained that the film wasn’t a serious historical drama; others were disappointed it was a more traditional heritage outing than anticipated, rather than the radical genre-busting promise by the chic cast’ (2006).
It failed to recoup even half of its $40 million budget at the US box office, taking $15 million domestically. It proved more popular overseas and its final world-wide box office $60 million.
The Queen (2006)
Director: Stephen Frears
Screenwriter: Peter Morgan
Starring: Helen Mirren (Queen Elizabeth II), James Cromwell (Prince Philip), Sylvia Syms (Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother) and Michael Sheen (Tony Blair)
Subject: Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, 1926–present)
The Queen was produced by Pathé Pictures and Granada Productions for ITV, opened in the cinemas in September 2006 and was shown on British television on 2 September 2007 to mark the tenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. It re-united the triptych of director (Stephen Frears), writer (Peter Morgan) and actor (Michael Sheen) that had been behind the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown-themed
The Deal (Channel 4, 2004). Morgan and Sheen had also collaborated on
The Special Relationship (2010) about the Blair/Clinton years. Here, their critical gaze turned to the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair, the British people and the tabloid press for the week-long period in September 1997 following the death of Princess Diana.
Morgan used interviews with ‘discreet sources’, biographies and news reports to create his screenplay. Neil Tweedie writes, ‘Morgan does not claim to have achieved total accuracy in his work. Instead, he seeks ‘truthfulness’, a plausible version of events that sits comfortably within the characters and the circumstances bequeathed him by real life’ (2007). Morgan says, ‘You have to ask yourself as a dramatist, do you believe there is a relationship between truth and accuracy? It may not be accurate – you don’t know – but is it truthful, is it truthful and fair? Are you giving the character a fair hearing?’ (quoted in ibid.)
The film sets up a series of oppositions and explores these through Diana’s death and funeral: the forward-thinking Blair government vs old traditions of royalty; public vs private mourning; monarchy vs republic. Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II and James Cromwell as Prince Philip in Despite the film’s title, the film is as much about New Labour as it is the Queen: ‘Morgan’s screenplay provided a more insightful commentary on the instinctively conservative personality of our mysterious, opaque Prime Minister than a hundred political columns’ (Billen 2007).
Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II and James Cromwell as Prince Philip in The Queen (2006)
The film’s narrative may only take place over one week, but it was one extraordinary week in the life of the Queen. The public and political responses to her were pivotal; this was the first time the Queen had been criticised. It tells an implicit story about the Queen’s life and those of her family, courtiers and subjects, and the story as it unfolds says more about the monarchy in the last years of the twentieth century than any multi-part documentary series or birth-to-death bio-pic.
The film is bookended by the Queen and Blair’s weekly private audiences. The first, following his election three months before Diana’s death, and the last their exchange three months after it, reminiscing on the ‘week’ that changed them. Blair, still full of the victory after his first six months in the office is very pleased with himself. The Queen swiftly puts him in his place: ‘One day they’ll turn on you.’
The script is peppered with these knowing asides, ensuring that the film says as much about the dynamics between the monarchy and Parliament of 2006, as it does about 1997: ‘It’s a portrait of royal power that is as topical as Desperate Housewives’ (Christopher 2006a). It is the minutiae of the royal daily routine that makes the portrayal of the Queen’s life credible, showing her family as one with both a lower- and upper-case F. Bickering, wandering around a cold/damp Balmoral in woolly dressing gowns clutching hot water bottles, her responses to the formal portrait sitting and being woken by the sound of bagpipes all add humanity, which is so appealing. Or the throw-away put-downs, such as when she first meets Tony Blair, bluntly stating: ‘You are my tenth Prime minister, Winston Churchill was the first.’
There are the quiet moments that say so much, such as when the Queen reaches out and touch Charles but then holds back, which speaks volumes about their relationship past and present. Yet there are also much more obvious instances of symbolism, for example the parallel between the beautiful majestic stag that the Queen sees whilst out walking and Diana is too clichéd; the Queen begins to weep, grieving for this animal who will be stalked and ultimately killed.
The Queen wishes to remain dignified, always adhering to her mantra of duty first, self second. Charles, recalling Diana who was warm, physical and showed her feelings, believes that they should display some of this emotion publicly. Through persuasion by Blair and the fact that her popularity ratings are at an all-time low, she responds more warmly and slowly the tide of popular opinion turns, culminating in the address to the nation.
Director Stephen Frears has combined these imagined behind-the-scenes moments with real news footage and recreations of key incidents. Sheen’s version of Blair’s statement on the Sunday morning was word for word, gesture for gesture, pace for pace. Frears described his decision to use archive footage, saying, ‘The film hinges on a conflict between one woman who is portrayed by an actress, and another – Diana – who is played by documentary footage. You might think that the pressure was to bring Diana alive, but quite the opposite happened. It would have snapped credibility’ (quoted in Christopher 2006a).
After Helen Mirren won the Academy Award for The Queen, a palace spokeswoman said, ‘I’m sure the Queen will be pleased.’ Dalya Alberge reported that, ‘the film is regarded as a public relations success for the British monarchy thanks to Mirren’s portrayal of the Queen as a resolute sovereign, bound by tradition and protocol, who wrestles with public pressure to shed her veneers of propriety and grieve alongside her nation’ (2007). Mirren, in her Academy Award acceptance speech, paid tribute to the woman she portrays, saying, ‘I salute her courage and her consistency. And I thank her, because if it wasn’t for her, I most certainly would not be here.’
The film’s budget was $15 million, and it made $123 million at the worldwide box office. It was to become one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2006 in the US, featuring on many of the critics Top Ten lists. Mirren dominated the major award ceremonies, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA. At the 2014 BAFTA awards she was honoured with its highest award – a Fellowship. It was presented to her by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge who quipped that she was ‘an extremely talented British actress I should probably call Granny’. Mirren would play the Queen, from age 26 to 87 in the Morgan-scripted play The Audience (2013). The play recreates a series of weekly meetings the Queen has had with her Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill to David Cameron. The only one not featured was Tony Blair.
Critics rated it highly, with many giving it four or five stars.
Chicago Sun-Times critic Robert Ebert stated: ‘
The Queen could have been told as a scandal sheet story of celebrity gossip. Instead, it becomes the hypnotic tale of two views of the same event – a classic demonstration, in high drama, of how the Establishment has been undermined by publicity. Told in quiet scenes of proper behavior and guarded speech,
The Queen is a spellbinding story of opposed passions’ (2006).
Further viewing
Diana (Olivier Hirschbiegel, 2013); Princess Diana (Naomi Watts)
The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008); Georgina Cavendish (Keira Knightley)
The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010); King George VI (Colin Firth)
The Madness of King George (Nicholas Hytner, 1994); King George III (Nigel Hawthorne)
W.E. (Madonna, 2011); Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), Edward VIII (James D’Arcy)
Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2009); Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt)
