THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 AR 7Television
back to him after Charles fails to end his own
affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Both Corrin and O’Connor, who returned
this season as Charles (he will be replaced
next season by Dominic West, she by Eliza-
beth Debicki, among other cast changes),
said they tried not take sides in the million-
dollar question surrounding Charles and Di-
ana’s operatically disastrous marriage:
Whose fault was it? “The Crown” gives evi-
dence for both positions, and neither posi-
tion.
“The more I’ve learned about the intrica-
cies of this marriage and this relationship,
the harder it’s been to pick sides,” Corrin said.
“People criticize Charles, but he did love this
one woman this whole life, and it wasn’t the
one he married,” she said, referring to Camil-
la. “So many mistakes were made by Diana
and Charles after their marriage, but the big-
gest mistake was that the marriage ever hap-
pened in the first place.”
Indeed, I was a Times correspondent in
Britain in 2005 when Charles married Camil-
la, the woman he had loved all along, after
years of upheaval following his divorce from
Diana and her sudden, shocking death. I
spent the day interviewing the crowds who
had lined the streets in Windsor, where the
wedding took place. Theirs was a mature,
low-drama love between two people who
knew each other thoroughly, and the public
that had once so reviled them greeted this
new chapter in their long relationship with a
muted but respectful understanding that has
deepened over time. They are both in their
70s now, with Charles still pointed toward the
throne, and it feels as if they’ve been together
forever.
But the new season reminds us how the re-
lationship began in scandal, with the young
Charles unable to give up Camilla even when
she marries another man, and proposing to
Diana only after his family browbeats him
into finding a suitable wife. O’Connor
presents Charles as a kind of Hamlet-on-the-
Thames, stooped under the weight of his own
ennui, by turns annoying and sympathetic.
“He can be soft and gentle and kind,” O’Con-
nor said in an interview. “I liked the idea that
he was a sort of tortoise, with a shell over him
that protects him from the world.”
Audience reactions at early screenings,
Morgan said, have been emotional. “I’m in-
clined to think for the viewer there is now an
increased sense of connection,” he said. “Peo-
ple are feeling it far more vividly.”
As always, the series skates through public
events, focusing its attention on the more in-
teresting private dramas. We see only a
glimpse of the wedding, with Diana all but
drowning in her famously over-pouffed me-
ringue of a dress, but we are thrust right into
scenes showing her doubts and unhappiness
beforehand. (As one of her sisters said to her
back then, it was too late to get out of the mar-
riage because “your face is on the tea tow-
els.”) The production also addresses head-on
the bulimia that took hold of her, showing Di-
ana compulsively gulping down food and
then throwing it back up. The scenes are hard
to watch, but true to the disease that con-
sumed her for so many years.
The emphasis on behind-closed-door
drama adds a special frisson to episodes like
“The Balmoral Test.” First Thatcher, new to
her job, and then Diana, new to Charles’s ro-
mantic orbit, are summoned to Balmoral Cas-
tle, the Windsors’ estate in the wilds of the
Scottish Highlands. It’s hard for outsiders to
break in to what we see here is a close-knit
family with peculiarly aristocratic traditions:
the muddy, bloody joy they take in hunting;
the incomprehensible parlor games they
play; the upper-class language conventions
that smoke out who (from their point of view)
is well born and who isn’t.
Thatcher finds it excruciating and fails test
after test, sitting in the wrong chair; saying “I
beg your pardon” instead of the correct (ac-
cording to the snobbish Princess Margaret)
“What?”; wearing city clothes for a day of
hunting. By contrast, Diana, whose family is
actually older and grander than the upstart
Windsors, knows exactly how to play it.
It all feels like voyeuristic fun, especially in
every scene featuring Olivia Colman, who
brings a droll, in-on-the-joke archness to the
role of Elizabeth this season. Because the
real-life queen is scrupulously dull and ano-
dyne in public, most of her private conversa-
tions are wholly made up — but true to her
character, said Morgan, who has made a ca-
reer of plumbing the personal lives of public
figures and who has studied the queen from
multiple angles in the past.
As always, we return to Diana, as compli-
cated and unknowable in death as she was in
life. Was she the royal family’s savior, drag-
ging a stultified institution, and a nation along
with it, into the modern age with her human-
ity and common touch? Or were her emo-
tional upheavals alarmingly anti-British and
rather unhinged, a debasement of centuries
of stiff-upper-lip rectitude?
It remains to be seen how the final two sea-
sons of “The Crown,” which are expected to
end in the early 2000s, will treat Diana’s lega-
cy. But if you leave this season believing that
to be a complex question — as indeed are the
relationships between the queen and her
family, the queen and her government and
the queen and her country — then Morgan
will have done his job. You don’t even have to
be a flag-waving royalist to care what “The
Crown” reveals about the Windsors and the
kingdom over which they preside.
Morgan himself isn’t a particular royal fan,
he says: he’s much more interested in his
characters’ unique position as both private
and public figures, their personal lives inex-
tricably intertwined with the history of their
country. “Once you’ve spent time with these
characters,” he said, speaking of his job as au-
thor of this ongoing drama, “you don’t pass
judgment on them.”
A glamorous figure who
is as unknowable in
death as she was in life.
MARGARET THATCHER,Britain’s first female prime
minister, is one of the most important British fig-
ures of the 20th century — and yet these days, her
distinctive public persona seems just as notorious
as her inflexible right-wing policies.
Between 1979 and 1990, Thatcher delivered
speeches to the public in a patronizing, slow voice,
accompanied by a stern expression and under a
thick starchy halo of hair. She had a very distinctive
walk and relished her reputation as “the Iron
Lady,” in public favoring a uniform of skirt suits
with shoulder pads and a rigid handbag that
seemed to be an extension of her arm.
These quirks and the pivotal role she played
mean many people have played Thatcher, in every-
thing from films, plays, television shows and drag
performances. In the fourth season of “The
Crown,” which comes to Netflix on Sunday, Gillian
Anderson takes on the challenge of inhabiting the
outsize figure. We spoke to her and four other per-
formers about their approach to playing Thatcher.
These are edited excerpts from those conversa-
tions.ANNA LESZKIEWICZGillian Anderson
PLAYED THATCHER IN ‘THE CROWN’ IN 2020
She’s one of those iconic historical characters. It’s
hard to say no to being asked to play Margaret
Thatcher, especially in a series like “The Crown.”
I came to it with a lot of assumptions based on
other people’s opinions. I’ve found, particularly in
regards to someone as divisive as Thatcher, that
it’s really important to leave one’s own opinions at
the door. It’s not about my beliefs, it’s about inter-
preting the character, inclusive of her beliefs and
her motivations, as convincingly as one can.
There’s a lot of fittings for something like this. I
wanted to have the opportunity of walking around,
not only in the types of shoes that she would wear,
but also in the padded suit that I wore to get a bit
closer to her size, and the stockings that she would
wear, and a dress. When I was able to walk around
in my own time, in those things, even pre-wig, it did
help. Fortunately, nobody walked through the door
at any given time.
I always feel that to the best of one’s ability
you’re trying not to mimic, because mimicking can
sometimes feel shallow. I was trying to find a place
where the voice sat within my voice, so that it didn’t
feel like it was too stretched or over the top, or like
it was an impression or a parody. You can only do as
much as you can do, and then you just kind of have
to let go.Andrea Riseborough
STARRED IN ‘MARGARET THATCHER: THE LONG WALK
TO FINCHLEY’ IN 2008
The wonderful thing about the TV series “The
Long Walk to Finchley’ is that it was a hilarious
romp through the younger years of her life, as she
was trying to get her career together.
I’m a Northerner, so portraying a political figure
who had very little regard for my people was a wel-
come challenge. One of the fun things about “The
Long Walk to Finchley” is the idea of Thatcher’s
younger, cheeky self who was very aware of the
power of her sexuality. She was assertive, and una-
pologetically so, at a time when being in her posi-
tion wasn’t the most popular choice. There’s a re-
belliousness in that, as conservative as she was po-
litically.
There’s a physical process which basically starts
at the end of “Long Walk to Finchley,” where she
stops being an upright young woman and starts be-
coming almost birdlike. Her walk became incredi-
bly tense, she poked her nose forward an awful lot.
It’s almost like her body is less important than her
point. The handbag also becomes an object with
which to drive the point home.Steve Nallon
VOICED THE THATCHER PUPPET IN ‘SPITTING IMAGE’
BETWEEN 1984 AND 1996
After I left university in 1983, I was performing
comedy in clubs in the north of England, and I got a
reputation for being the guy that could do Margaret
Thatcher. When I heard about the satirical puppet
show “Spitting Image,” I wrote a letter to the
producer. When I was given the job, I was littlemore than a student surviving on ketchup sand-
wiches, and suddenly I found myself playing
Thatcher in what became this hugely successful
show.
The key to “Spitting Image” is the puppets: They
are the stars. It became clear that you couldn’t just
do an impression, you had to caricature the voice
that matched the puppet. The Thatcher puppet was
much harsher, so I decided to combine her inter-
view voice with her House of Commons voice. Then
they started putting Thatcher in men’s clothes, and
I had to make the voice less feminine.
When I see other actors doing Thatcher, I think
they’ve missed the point if it’s very, very patroniz-
ing. The voice she had when talking to an inter-
viewer, and she wants to get her point across but
not make a mistake, was slow. But when she was
normally chatting to people the voice was so much
quicker.
I can’t say I gained affection for her. She’s like an
old frock, now. A frock I don’t wear anymore, but
that’s still in the wardrobe, just in case.Matt Tedford
HAS PLAYED THATCHER IN ‘MARGARET THATCHER:
QUEEN OF SOHO’ SINCE 2013
After dressing up as Maggie for a Halloween party
and realizing she is a very androgynous, very male
character, I said, “Well, in a lot of ways she’s got the
makings of a gay icon, but none of the love.” Section
28 was the law she passed banning the promotion of
homosexuality. Jon Brittain — who co-wrote
“Queen of Soho” and is a co-writer on this season of
“The Crown” — and I took that as an idea and
turned it on its head: What if she went into Soho in
London on the eve of Section 28, met gay people,
had a change of heart, gave up politics and became
a superstar gay disco cabaret diva?
The joke of the play is that she is Margaret
Thatcher, and she gets mistaken for a drag queen.
Meryl [Streep] played her in “The Iron Lady” with
a very straight back and she’s very refined and
calm and cool, whereas in reality, Thatcher was like
a spider, constantly scurrying to the next meeting,
terrified that something was going on that she was-
n’t aware of. She liked to know what was happening
in the web, all the time. So I try and do that. And it’s
the handbag and the pearls: Once you get that
handbag in your hand, it’s amazing how it becomes
an extension of yourself.
We also do “Margaret Thatcher Queen of Club
Nights,” which is basically an ’80s disco where she
brings everybody together for a big old dance. All of
a sudden, it’s 2 a.m. in Edinburgh, and you’ve got
300 Scotsmen screaming: “Maggie! Maggie! Mag-
gie!” You think: “Oh no I’ve gone too far. I’ve made
her too lovable!”Haydn Gwynne
PLAYED THATCHER IN ‘THE AUDIENCE’ IN 2013
Peter Morgan’s show “The Crown” grew out of his
play “The Audience,” in which I played Thatcher. I
couldn’t resist the role. I was madly prepping for
my first table read, in the kitchen, and my then-
partner was in the sitting room. When I finished, he
came through and said: “Oh, my God, it was all I
could do not to come into the kitchen and stab you
with the bread knife.” There was so much worse for
him to come. Can you imagine going to bed and
your partner’s looking at Thatcher videos on
YouTube?
Everybody’s going to start with her voice be-
cause it’s so distinctive, and that’s sort of a blessing
and a curse. But it’s not just the voice with Thatcher,
she also had quite a distinct physicality in how she
moved. She was definitely a bird: She led with her
beak.
When I appeared as Thatcher in the play, my en-
trance didn’t happen till the second half. Because
she’s such a famous prime minister, the audience
are waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. As I came on,
they would recognize the walk and start laughing.
I was playing Thatcher onstage when she died.
When I came onstage that night there were none of
the usual reactions, the laughter and applause. Just
deathly, tumbleweed silence. It’s the taboo around
not laughing in the moment of death. Me and Helen
[Mirren, who was playing Queen Elizabeth II] were
looking at each other and thinking: “Take a very
deep breath. We’ve got to show them that it’s OK.”
And I think that night, we did achieve that. But it
was a very curious experience.
It’s kind of cool, the Thatcher Club. And I’m the
only one who got to play her when she died.JOHN REDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESSSOPHIE MUTEVELIAN/NETFLIXALAMYGREAT MEADOW PRODUCTIONSTHE OTHER RICHARDJOHAN PERSSON/ARENAPALIn the Footsteps of ‘the Iron Lady’
Playing Margaret Thatcher isn’t
just about recreating her quirks.
GILLIAN ANDERSONin Season 4 of “The Crown” as
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, seen at top in 1987.STEVE NALLONwith the Thatcher puppet he voiced on
the satirical show “Spitting Image” for over a decade.ANDREA RISEBOROUGHin the TV series “Margaret
Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley.”MATT TEDFORDin “Margaret Thatcher Queen of Club
Nights” at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018.HAYDN GWYNNEas Thatcher in Peter Morgan’s “The
Audience” at the Gielgud Theater in London in 2013.