The woman is Elizabeth II, queen of all her realms and territories, one of the most famous faces in the world, butt of satirists and lightning rod for a nation in the middle of an identity crisis. The incident is fictional, of course, and, despite the presence of the iconically familiar hairdo, the features are unmistakably those of Helen Mirren. The scene is nevertheless extraordinarily powerful in its sheer audaciousness. It is as though we’re being allowed to see something for the very first time, a glimpse into the inner life of somebody who, despite her having been in our lives for more than half a century as a formal, unchanging presence, we have assumed barely possessed one.
It is one of the pivotal moments in The Queen, a film made by the team that produced The Deal, Channel 4’s dramatisation of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Granita moment. Written by Peter Morgan, directed by Stephen Frears and premiered yesterday at the Venice film festival, it explores the relationship between the new prime minister, played once more by Michael Sheen, and the monarch during the week in 1997 when Diana died and much of the country appeared hysterical with grief.
With the royal family holed up in Balmoral, unable or unwilling to understand such an unexpected national outpouring, the drama follows Blair’s attempts to reconnect the Queen with her people at a time when the public mood seemed on the verge of turning dangerous. Two versions of the same country seemed to be on a collision course. She, and the unyielding sense of duty before self that motivates her, is at the centre of the film.
“It’s shocking to see her as a woman, isn’t it?” says Frears. Yes — and on the big screen, too, as opposed to the event-television drama slot usually lined up for a project such as this (“Well, she is the Queen,” Frears explains). It is an account of those events that is, he says, sympathetic to her as a human being operating within the power dynamics of the time. So, alongside those solitary tears, we see her watching TV in bed with a hot-water bottle, being comforted and affectionately nicknamed “Cabbage” by her husband (James Cromwell), seeking reassurance from her mother (Sylvia Syms) and being irritated by the extravagance of her eldest son (Alex Jennings). It is almost surreal, the experience of seeing one so familiar in such unfamiliar settings and situations, rather as if she has suddenly walked in on one of your dreams — a frequent occurrence, apparently, for many of her subjects. “You’re dealing with the unconscious and the national unconscious,” says Frears. “She’s been in my life longer than any other person.”
Despite the best efforts of journalists, with their pictures of breakfast Tupperware, and those carefully modulated behind-the-scenes BBC documentaries, such as Royal Family and Elizabeth R, that come along once a decade, so little is really known about the private life of our head of state that constructing a convincing portrait of the world she inhabits would seem to be a harder task than re-creating Middle-earth.
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“I spoke to just about everyone who would meet me — former employees, members of staff,” says Morgan. “I did meet a lot of people who spend time with her, people who are regular guests at Balmoral.” The script was rewritten countless times, not, he says, to change anything fundamental, but as a result of a “really forensic” approach to detail. If it was pointed out that the Queen wouldn’t say this, or that wouldn’t happen, then getting it right was part of the joy of it. For example, on Charles’s fear that a sniper would get him: “You have to be able to substantiate that. I would never have written that if I hadn’t known it was the case.”
Inspiration also came to Morgan from much closer to home. “To be honest with you, my mother is exactly the same age as the Queen, and to that generation, the people who were brought up in the war, the notion of complaining is such anathema. There’s a frugality, a practicality, a selflessness that completely characterises my mother,” he says, “Often I would think, ‘What would my mother say, how would she react?’” This theme of a younger generation attempting to come to terms with, and maybe reappraise, the values of an older one runs through the film. Morgan has Blair flying to the Queen’s defence when she is mocked by Alastair Campbell, and he notes that, along with Blair being innately conservative, the prime minister’s mother, too, would have been exactly the same age as the monarch.
“The Queen’s presence is so powerful,” Morgan says. “Her image is so much part of our everyday iconography and currency. It certainly had the most profound effect on the film set once Helen Mirren started inhabiting the part — just the impact she would have in a casual conversation you might be having in a car park. Equally, what makes it such a powerful experience to watch is everything we’re bringing to it as English citizens, even as global citizens.”
It must have helped, too, that while, on the face of it, Mirren might seem an unlikely choice for the role, she herself has commented that she bears a remarkable resemblance to the monarch. A voice coach was used to get that clenched-jawed yet somewhat world-weary tone, familiar from numerous Christmas broadcasts. “At the read-through of the script, when I wasn’t looking at Helen Mirren when she was reading it, it sounded to me just like the Queen being in the room,” says Robert Lacey, the author of bestselling biographies of the Queen and a historical adviser on the film. For him, Mirren captures both her inhibition and the sense that there is a very warm woman struggling to get out. “I think, of all the characters, the Queen is the most fully realised.”
As the catalyst for that crisis nine years ago, Diana is seen only in archive footage, a fleeting image caught by the camera and glimpsed between the personalities in both court and government who drove the events of that week. Helen McCrory, as the famously shallow-curtsying Cherie Blair, Mark Bazeley, as a boorish Campbell, and Jennings’s all-at-sea Prince of Wales revolve around the central relationship of monarch and prime minister. But if The Deal was Blair’s show, we’ re left in no doubt, from the title down, as to who takes precedence here.
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It is also the first time that the Queen, and the role she inhabits, has been portrayed seriously. We have certainly become used to TV dramas about the royals that highlight their supposed cold dysfunctionalism (as in The Lost Prince), weak duplicity (Whatever Love Means) or pointlessness (The Queen’s Sister). When she hasn’t been completely absent from such depictions, the Queen has been used as almost comic relief, to the greatest effect, perhaps, in Prunella Scales’s witty imitation in Alan Bennett’s play about Anthony Blunt, A Question of Attribution.
So, what has changed? For Lacey, the events of 1997 marked the start of a process when Elizabeth started to emerge as a figure in her own right. “In the Queen’s lifetime,” he says, “there were three women who competed with her in terms of public recognition, all in very different ways — Princess Margaret, Diana and the Queen Mother. In fact, a great part of the success of the golden jubilee was that Diana had gone in 1997, and the Queen Mother and Margaret within weeks of each other in 2002, so it made it much easier for people to understand who the Queen was.”
In some respects, Elizabeth II has taken over her mother’s role as granny figure and national matriarch. The view that attitudes to her have shifted, that respect has turned to real affection, as was demonstrated by the celebrations for her 80th this year, is one shared by the film-makers.
“It feels to me as if criticism of the Queen has become, as recently, possibly, as the past couple of years, treasonable,” says Morgan, who started out writing the film as a republican and seems to have a slightly more ambivalent attitude now. “She’s reached an age when to kick an old lady is completely undignified. I think there’s a sense of national shame in doing it. There’s an acknowledgment, too, that here is a person — and I hope that’s what’s moving about the film — who has given her life to something that feels, certainly today, an unbelievably unfashionable idea, and I think people recognise that.”
Convention dictates that the Queen never comments on portraits painted of her. It’s surely unthinkable, though, that she won’t, at some stage, see her celluloid alter ego. “I’m sure she’s quite wise,” says Frears. “I’m sure she can deal with it.” But what is she likely to think of it? Lacey hazards a well-informed guess: “I can see her saying something like ‘Well, that could have been worse’ — and ordering a gin and Dubonnet.”
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The Queen is on general release on September 15