Ruling the screen: A look at the depictions of Queen Elizabeth II in films and shows

In 2020, the fourth season of Peter Morgan’s Netflix royal drama The Crown was released to rapturous reviews, and with good reason. Gillian Anderson had disappeared into her role as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the most polarising figures in British history. Series regulars Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles) and Helena Bonham Carter (Princess Margaret) were predictably brilliant. But the show-stealer was the great Olivia Colman who shone as Queen Elizabeth II, especially in the scenes where she’s playing off Anderson’s Thatcher. Colman was the second actor in The Crown to portray Elizabeth II, the British monarch who passed away on Thursday. In seasons 1 and 2, Claire Foy had played the young Elizabeth to great acclaim. According to Lucy Mangan from back in 2016,

“Foy’s performance as Elizabeth Mountbatten is as ruthlessly unshowy as the woman herself. It’s a considerable challenge to play a character who becomes more and more fiercely restricted over time, but Foy manages to register every layer of misery and frustration as Elizabeth Ordinarius evolves into Elizabeth Regina, seeking a way to reconcile the conflicts of personal freedom and desire, wifehood and queendom and to work out quite what to do with advice such as the prime minister’s: “Let them see only the eternal in you”.”

Together, Foy and Colman’s performances in this high-profile series are the dominant depictions, the first things that’ll come to the average viewer’s mind. The next two seasons (also The Crown’s conclusions) will see another British veteran, Imelda Staunton (for non-British audiences, best known as Professor Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies) portraying the late queen.

In truth, however, Foy, Colman and Staunton are just the latest in a long line of actors who’ve played Elizabeth II on stage and screen across the last couple of decades.

Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson and company

Before The Crown, the role of Elizabeth II was practically indistinguishable from the actor who won an Oscar for it: Helen Mirren, whose performance in The Queen (2006) won her the award. This film followed a particularly challenging and globally scrutinized period in the queen’s life; the weeks and months immediately after the death of Princess Diana in a tragic car accident. After Diana’s death there was a great deal written about the animus between her and the British royal family, especially the Queen. In an interview earlier this year with Radio Times, Helen Mirren spoke about writing to the Queen before production began on The Queen.

““I realised we were investigating a profoundly painful part of her life, so I wrote to her. I said, ‘We are doing this film. We are investigating a very difficult time in your life. I hope it’s not too awful for you.’ I can’t remember how I put it. I just said that in my research I found myself with a growing respect for her, and I just wanted to say that. She didn’t write back, of course, but her secretary did. You know, ‘Yours sincerely, da di da di da,’ on behalf of the Queen. I was very relieved subsequently that I had written that letter.”

Mirren later reprised the role for a play (and subsequently, movie of the same name) called The Audience. Her portrayals are such a big part of 21^st century pop culture that a number of Hollywood films have played on this fact. In the Bruce Willis action movie R.E.D. and its sequel, Mirren plays a British assassin named ‘Victoria’, a reference to her famous role as a (different) queen. The Fast and Furious movies are even more direct: here, Mirren plays ‘Queenie’, plain and simple.

Emma Thompson, one of the most accomplished British actors of her generation (and also a very successful screenwriter), played Elizabeth II in an episode of Playhouse Presents, an anthology drama series by British channel Sky Arts. The episode, called ‘Walking the Dogs’ is based on one of the most discussed and frequently depicted episodes from Elizabeth II’s reign: when a 34-year-old man named Mark Fagan broke into her bedroom on July 9, 1982 before being apprehended by security officials. This same incident is also the inspiration for one of the best episodes in The Crown.

Parody depictions of the Queen were almost as common as these relatively high-profile and serious-minded films and television shows. The American actor Neve Campbell (from the Scream movies) played a young Elizabeth in the spoof film Churchill: The Hollywood Years. Even our very own Hrithik Roshan played the Queen-in-disguise in a hilarious (or hilariously bad, depending upon your perspective) heist sequence from Dhoom 3, where his disguise manages to fool even the monarch’s personal guards.

Ruling the screens: A life on TV

The explosion of depictions in recent years was only fitting for a queen whose coronation in 1953 was a landmark moment for British television. Churchill himself had intervened to make this telecast possible after a 1952 decision not to televise the coronation was reversed. There was a compromise, though: the religious bits of the ceremony were not telecast, the channel instead cutting to architectural features of the Westminster Abbey. Talking about this strategic decision in her 2019 essay ‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day: the British monarchy and the media industries’ (published in the journal Contemporary British History), Laura Clancy wrote:

“Television coverage aired footage of Westminster Abbey’s architectural features during the anointing in order to fulfil the agreed ban on shots of the most religiously significant parts of the ceremony. This transmission ‘blackout’ can be interpreted as making the Queen’s transformation more tangible: the magic of monarchy is created in the gesture of hiding it, rather than being something that exists independently, since it implies there is magic to be hidden. The status and hierarchy between monarchy and viewers was re-established in the act of cutting live coverage.”

The ‘magic’ that Clancy is talking about was both recreated and, to an extent, subverted in The Crown’s depiction of this day in its first season, where we see Claire Foy as Elizabeth in the 1950s, at the very beginning of her reign. Netflix achieved this by recreating precisely those portions that were blacked out by the 1953 telecast, which is to say, the religious bits including and especially the anointing, which is shot very tastefully. As Clancy writes,

“First, real archive footage from the moment the cameras panned away during the ceremonial anointing is shown, before this splices into a reconstruction of the anointing featuring Claire Foy in extreme close-up. Although broadcasting the anointing in 1953 was inconceivable, the recreation of this moment demonstrates the shifting attitudes towards monarchy (and, arguably, religion) in 2016. The Crown reproduces the debates of 1953, then, while simultaneously playing with and subverting them for contemporary ‘publics’ who engage with the monarchy in different socio-political contexts. The Crown’s dramatisation illustrates what could have been, had there not been restrictions on television access in 1953.”

The Crown, then, presents a what-if scenario for TV in the 1950s and what might this medium have achieved by way of both entertainment and propaganda, had there been fewer restrictions. I mention the bit about propaganda also because throughout the first 20-odd years of Elizabeth’s reign, her TV appearances were key to reinforcing very traditional, conservative images of British femininity. She quickly became very popular among both British and American women of the time. According to Jennifer Clark’s 2015 essay ‘Queen for a Day: Gender, Representation, and Materiality in Elizabeth II’s Televised Coronation’, these TV appearances used staging and ordinary household images to make the queen more accessible to her audiences—just like a soap opera would do to its central character. As Clark writes,

“At the opening of her 1957 Christmas address, Elizabeth explicitly called upon what she praised as the ‘more personal and direct’ effects of the televisual medium. Seated at a desk, flanked by family pictures, and shot in full shot (to better capture the mise-en-scène), medium shot, and medium close-up (to better capture the intimacy of address and to capture details of the queen’s visage), Elizabeth extolled the virtues of television’s representational power to deliver her unto her people: ‘It’s inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you. A successor to the kings and queens of history. Someone whose face may be familiar in newspapers and films, but who never really touches your personal lives. But now, at least for a few minutes, I welcome you to the peace of my own home.”

This process came to fruition, of course, in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign, when her elderly appearance made it easier to project ‘common-sense’ conservatism onto her televised appearances. Last week, we saw a much-criticised tweet by Gurmehar Kaur wherein the Queen’s ‘grandmotherly presence’ was romanticised; this is exactly the outcome desired by the queen-programming discussed in this essay. As Clark put it in her 2015 essay,

“The very act of representing the queen has also shifted: televising the queen is no longer an intensely provocative issue, the monarchy has been reframed as a less powerful and more benevolent-seeming institution, Britain occupies increased distance from assumptions of empire, and the older and presumably desexualized body of the queen poses fewer ideological challenges. Elizabeth has become ‘our nation’s Granny,’ as she is now repeatedly and fondly hailed in televised interviews with the various heirs to the throne. Her maternal nature more harmoniously inflects her monarchic role. As Prince William put it in his interview with Alan Titchmarsh for ITV’s June 2012 documentary, Elizabeth: Queen, Wife, Mother, it is now unclear whether Elizabeth signifies as ‘granny’ or ‘queen’ first.”

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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