From Lilibet as a child in “The King’s Speech” to the heartless ex-mother-in-law in “The Queen”, Elizabeth II, who died this Thursday (8), at the age of 96, was portrayed in films and series countless times throughout her life. .
Her very long reign has made her witness from the radio era, through the popularization of cinema and television, and finally to cell phones and streaming.
The Queen herself may have helped catapult her figure into the pop culture world by delivering the first televised address by a UK monarch in over 60 years, at Christmas 1957. Since then, she has spoken to the nation every year-end, a constant and familiar presence through wars.
The incessant coverage of the British tabloids about her family’s controversies helped to potentiate the interest of the British and the world in the private lives of the residents of Buckingham Palace and surroundings, culminating in the planetary celebrity of Princess Diana in the 1980s and 1990s and her children. , William and Harry, and their wives, Kate and Meghan, in the 2000s and 2010s.
The more recent royal generation seems to have understood that, in a hyper-connected world, their privacy could no longer be fiercely guarded and would have to be carefully managed, in the style of influencers.
Thus, the groups of William and Harry offer their followers images and videos of the main events of their lives —engagement, marriage, childbirth, the children’s first day of school—and give interviews in which they talk about subjects such as mental health. The strategy, as for celebrities in general, results in less paparazzi power and a more human and closer image.
But Elizabeth was born in 1926. In her speeches, she has always stressed that her duty is to serve the nation, but she never seems to have thought that this included revealing any aspect of her intimacy.
In the US, the British royal family was for a long time seen as just a weird, formal, tea-drinking, horse-loving people, appearing from time to time in crass humorous skits. But in recent decades Hollywood has seen a more serious vein to be explored in Elizabeth’s life.
With the queen still alive, however, a problem arose: few knew her intimately; and among those in that position, almost no one is authorized or willing to speak. The result of this is that much of what you see in movies and series that depict passages in the queen’s life is fanciful.
Although the historical facts are respected —Elizabeth was in fact in such a place on a certain date, etc.—, the dialogues between the sovereign, her husband and their children, with Winston Churchill and other premiers are, at best, reconstructed from of third-hand accounts, if not 100% made-up.
Thus, screen Elizabeth is a kind of sphinx, more or less stiff and formal depending on the script and the director. In “The Queen”, it takes too long for her to realize the proportion that Diana’s adoration would acquire with the death of the (ex)-princess. In “The Crown”, a Netflix series, the queen is more nuanced; responsible for some modernizations in the role of the royal family, she is capable of some emotion and friendship, even if she is pulled by some family members into the past and urged to maintain outdated traditions.
The four seasons of the series went, with a few jumps in time, from Elizabeth’s coronation to the arrival of the future Princess Diana to the family, exploring along the way the Queen’s marriage, her relationship with Churchill and her reactions to historical events. Sometimes taking great artistic liberties, the series generated a whole segment of journalistic investigations to check what is and what is not true in the episodes.
It is not known that she has given an opinion on the works based on her life, to approve or disapprove them or to correct eventual factual errors. The exception is “The King’s Speech” — a film in which the main character is her father, George Sixth —, which, according to reports, would have touched the monarch.
There are indications, however, that she had some sense of humor. In a kind of meme of her own, she appeared in a film directed by Danny Boyle shown at the opening of the London Olympics in 2012, with Daniel Craig in the role of secret agent James Bond, in which he parachutes.
The queen’s cute corgi dogs also appear in the Olympics video, as well as other Elizabeth II movies and series. The fame of the most pop queen in history is such that it has even extended to the pets: they won their own animated film, “Corgi: Top Dog”, in 2019.
In music, the queen has been somewhat neglected in recent decades, but two of the most influential English bands in history have written songs about her. In “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols, she is called a fascist and Johnny Rotten sings, over distorted guitars, that she is not a human being.
The Beatles (or, more specifically, Paul McCartney) recorded the mini-song “Her Majesty”, hidden at the end of the album “Abbey Road”. “Her Majesty is a nice girl, but she doesn’t have much to say,” sings Paul, seeming to intuit that pop culture could never really decipher her.
See some of the actresses who portrayed Elizabeth II
- Claire Foyin the series “The Crown”
- Olivia Colmanin the series “The Crown”
- Helen Mirren, in the movie “The Queen”
- Emma Thompsonin the TV series “Playhouse Presents”
- Freya Wilson, in the movie “The King’s Speech”
- Jeannette Charles, on the TV show “Saturday Night Live”
- Kristin Scott Thomas, in the play “The Audience”
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
