38 The Times MagazineWhen I was playing around with it and doing
it for the first time, it made me feel really
angry. I kind of understood a lot about this
woman just from the way she spoke. There’s
a constriction and rigidity there.”
You do feel it might all one day explode
and Anne will come out with a speech such
as Doherty’s in Crave: “I’m evil, I’m damaged,
and no one can save me.”
She agrees. “Sarah Kane is what wants
to come out, but actually she has to be
Princess Anne.”
We are talking, of course, of a construct,
the Morgan version of Anne. The woman
herself has largely kept her own counsel
on The Crown. In an ITV documentary
celebrating her 70th birthday this summer,
she claimed she had not seen it and then,
contradictorily, that the early seasons were
more interesting. She had, however, read in
an interview (from Town & Country) that “the
actress” playing her had said getting the hair
right could take two hours. It took her, she
scolded, “10 or 15 minutes”.
“And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah.’ My hair
is clearly the opposite of hers because it
genuinely took hours. It’s pretty massive. It’s
huge and it genuinely did kind of transform
everything. Once you’re in the make-up chair
and it was done, it affected everything.”
Did she feel herself getting more regal?
“In a weird way, you do. When you’re
occupying more air, something happens.”
Returning the princess’s compliment,
Doherty did not watch the documentary.
After two years inhabiting Anne, she needed
some distance. Also, she never liked to think
of the princess or her friends judging the
performance for its veracity. “That is just
too intimidating.”
It’s another way to mark her, I suppose.
“Exactly. It’s too much pressure. So
I removed from my mind any possibility
she could ever watch it.”
The possibility was all the more scary
because by now Erin Doherty was among
HRH’s biggest fans. When she got the part,
she was not entirely sure which “one” Anne
was. To some, that might sound hard to
believe, but Doherty is 28, and was just
26 then. The last time Princess Anne was
really in the news, for her extremely low-key
second wedding in a Scottish kirk, Doherty
was five months old.
“I think that’s also what excited me so
much about playing her,” she says. “For
my generation, it would kind of be like an
introduction to a person people deserve to
know because she’s magnificent. The way she
is within the rigidity that is the royal family,
the way that she behaves within that,
is brilliant. And it was so much fun to play her.
So, yes, I kind of fell in love with her.”
She admires Anne for being outspoken,for telling the press to “naff off”, for really not
caring what people think of her. She loves her
unsentimental humour – a wickedness shared
with her father, whose favourite she was – and
her courage.
It is an adjective indiscriminately bestowed
these days, but Anne possesses the real thing.
In 1974, returning from a charity event along
the Mall to Buckingham Palace, she survived
an armed kidnapping attempt. Four men- including, ironically, given her dislike of the
press, a tabloid journalist – were shot by her
would-be abductor, Ian Ball, who planned to
hold her ransom for millions of pounds. When
Ball ordered her to get out of the car, however,
the princess politely declined.
“He was slowly running out of bullets,” she
drily told Michael Parkinson on his chat show
later, and got a laugh. While Mark Phillips
had admitted to Parkinson that he had been
frightened, Anne turned her near miss into
an anecdote. Doherty loves that interview.
Yet Morgan did not dramatise the incident
in his series.
“I was gutted,” says Doherty. “I was so
gutted. When I was reading about her before
we’d even started filming I was like, ‘This is
amazing. They have to put that in.’ ”
Did she talk to Morgan about the omission?
“Well, what he said and what I completely
agree with, and I stand by it – that’s why I’ve
made my peace with it – is that he does what
the public doesn’t necessarily know about.
It probably is one of the most known things
about her. I completely get it, but as an actor,
I was gutted.”
Anne was heroic that night. Ball had
grabbed her forearm and she stayed put.
“I know, and she said, ‘No.’ That told
me everything I needed to know about her.
In a genuinely life or death situation, you
understand who a human being is and she
completely resisted.”
But part of Anne’s courage, and part of the
reason Doherty admires her so much, comes
from her having – and this is my paraphrase- survived the mother she had.
“My choice,” she agrees, “was to make
[her steeliness] come from this childhood of
not having that mother figure there as you
would have wished. You kind of go, ‘Well,
that’s fine. If that person isn’t there, I don’t
need one.’ ”
So when the press was unkind, she
was prepared?
“Exactly and that part of her personality
was the most fun to embrace. She had this
ability to completely deflect judgment. It
had impacted her so early on from being
introduced to the media. They commented on
her from when she was 16. They commented
on her body. I find that fascinating and
horrendous. If someone had called me frumpy
as a 16-year-old, I’d have had a breakdown.”
In the run-up to Anne’s grand wedding
to Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey the
Labour MP Willie Hamilton, a very visible
republican of the era, complained loudly that
the nation was being forced to pay for the
nuptials of the monarch’s “plain daughter”.
“There you go,” she says. “We can’t say
that these people aren’t affected by other
people’s judgments.”
Yet if Anne hurts less than her older
brother, who minds everything, that resilience
hardly redounds to her mother’s credit. This
year’s Crown offers a tough critique of the
Queen’s parenting of Anne (and Philip’s
parenting of Charles). In one episode,
the Queen blithely boasts of leaving them
alone, aged six and four, for five months in
1954 while they toured Australia. Princess
Margaret wonders if that might not have had
consequences. Elizabeth replies, “On what?
The tour was a triumph.”
“And that’s what’s brilliant,” says Doherty.
“I think Olivia does an amazing job at
portraying this woman, but I think that is
what’s fascinating about them. This family
is completely circulating around this woman
who needs to do this thing that she does, but
it actually completely detaches her from the
beating heart that is a family.”
In a season that depicts Charles in despair
over his choice of wife, and that wife’s descent
into bulimic spiral (several episodes carry a‘IF SOMEONE HAD CALLED ME FRUMPY AS A
16 -YEAR-OLD, I’D HAVE HAD A BREAKDOWN’
Doherty filming The
Crown at Goldsmiths’ Hall,
London. Right: Princess
Anne on a visit to Great
Somerford, Wiltshire, 1975NETFLIX INC 2020, TIM GRAHAM/GETTY IMAGES
Erin Doherty Continued from page 31