30 The Times Magazines it manoeuvres into the bloody
battlefields of the Eighties, the
fourth season of Netflix’s The
Crown brings out the big guns:
Thatcher and Diana. Yet this
autumn’s episodes boast no more
affecting or powerful scene than
a quiet encounter between the
Queen and her daughter, Princess
Anne, in the grounds of Gatcombe
Park, Anne’s Gloucestershire home. It hits
the viewer resoundingly, like a nail on the
head, or a bullet to it.
It is 1981. Anne is unhappy. The press, head
over heels with Diana, is out to get the older
woman. Having relished scaring people, she
is now scared herself, alone and friendless.
Her eight-year marriage to Mark Phillips
persists only in name. The Queen has
heard from the head of royal protection that
Anne has become “intimate” with one of her
bodyguards, a detective named Peter Cross.
He will be transferred, she says. Anne protests
that he is the one thing that makes her happy,
but there follows no reassuring hug, no word
of sympathy, just an injunction to plough on.
The Queen, one feels, hardly deserves her title- the title of mother, that is.
People buy in to what Olivia Colman
has done with Her Majesty, admire Tobias
Menzies’s quiet take on Prince Philip and
will, perhaps, have varied views of Gillian
Anderson’s Mrs T. The young actress Erin
Doherty’s performance as Anne is different,
however, for it does not seem to be a
performance. Doherty simply is Anne, exactly
as we older subjects saw her on the chat shows
she condescended to appear on for a while,
exactly as we assumed she must be off them.
Peter Morgan, The Crown’s creator, has
confessed he is often asked to put more Anne
into The Crown. “Anne’s often overlooked,”
he said, “but Erin’s portrayal means that
everybody has fallen in love with her.
Searches about her on Google went through
the roof.”
As I leave for Chichester, where Doherty
is about to star in a brief, socially distanced,
revival of Crave, a short, bleak play by the late
Sarah Kane, I mention to my wife that I have
met Doherty before, on the set of The Crown
two Januaries ago. I liked her a lot. “Posh girl,
I suppose,” she says.
So you would think. But when Doherty
cheerfully introduced herself in a trailer in
Elstree – Colman, like the Queen herself,
required no introduction – I had to stop
myself from exclaiming, “But you talk like
you’re from south London!” – Crawley, West
Sussex, in fact. The dissonance between
portrayer and portrayed was softened a little
that day by her being in costume with her hair
whipped tall like the princess’s. This evening,
in the empty restaurant of Chichester’s
Minerva Theatre, it is in a ponytail and
Doherty wears jeans and a hoodie. She
now looks too small, too slight to be Anne,
although the stats say they are both 5ft 6in.
There is, too, no getting away from her plebeian
vowels. Doherty says “blimmin’ ” a lot, like
a Victorian street urchin.
“No, I’m not like her at all. I definitely get
people going, ‘You’re nothing like Anne.’ And
I take that as a compliment, and then they go,
‘Do you get recognised?’ And I’m like, ‘No,
because I’m nothing like this woman.’ ”The voice she has found comes from repeat
viewings of the Princess Royal, especially on
Parkinson and Wo ga n.
“To be fair, I think the voice, for me, was
the key,” she says.
It’s lower than hers?
“It’s so much lower and it’s much more
constrained. The nature of the accent means
you do have to be quite rigid with your mouth.
It is quite a lot of effort to say the words.A
‘I REMOVED FROM MY MIND THE IDEA THAT ANNE
WATCHES THE CROWN. TOO MUCH PRESSURE’
Doherty as Princess Anne
in series 4 of The CrownPrincess Anne with the Queen on a state visit to Austria,
May 1969. Left: with her bodyguard, Peter Cross, 1982PREVIOUS SPREAD: MATT HOLYOAK/© NETFLIX INC 2020, TIM GRAHAM/GETTY IMAGES, NETFLIX INC 2020. THIS SPREAD: NETFLIX INC 2020, JEREMY FLETCHER/GETTY IMAGES, GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK Continues on page 38
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