“Why are you so jealous of me? Why?” said a
smiling Colman, helpfully — and teasingly
— paraphrasing a reporter’s question about
Margaret for Bonham Carter. “How do you cope
with being No. 2?”
It’s “very, very hard,” Bonham Carter parried back.
“I think it’s a very fascinating sort of relationship,
though, isn’t it?” Colman said, and her castmate
turned serious as well.
“It is, and so common to any family, whether
you’re a queen and a princess: How you define
each other, or how somebody’s defined by
your position in the family and whether you are
younger or an older sibling of the same sex,”
Bonham Carter said. “I’m lucky in my life. I have
two older brothers and I’m the youngest. So I
think my life wasn’t complicated by it.”
With Elizabeth and Margaret, “The Crown” has
“definitely gone through the whole sibling
competition,” she said, noting that it is creator-
writer Peter Morgan’s dramatized version of their
relationship. Margaret died at age 71 in 2002;
the queen is 93.
“There is a difference between the real ones and
‘The Crown’ Margaret and the queen,” Bonham
Carter said. “I met lots of people who knew the
real Margaret, and they said that they really
did love each other. There was enough of the
affection and the positive support that Margaret
was to the queen.”
The fictional pair do behave more warmly
toward each other than in previous seasons,
with Margaret’s wrath instead memorably
directed at her husband, Antony Armstrong-
Jones (Ben Daniels), and Elizabeth reserving
her steeliness largely for her son and heir to