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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Onto a Windsor. “I haven’t actually often played living people,” insists Helen Mirren. “I’ve avoided it because you’re in a bit of a no-win situation – you’ll never be half as good as the real person. You can’t imagine how intimidating and scary it is, to contemplate playing someone like that.” Actors, eh? Complaining when they don’t get roles, tormented when they do. This time, however, is perhaps a special case: Dame Helen isn’t playing any old person, but Elizabeth II, sovereign for over half a century, in writer Peter Morgan and director Stephen Frears’ intimate portrait, The Queen.Focusing on the week of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, Morgan’s incisive script uses this pivotal moment to pit the staid, tradition-bound restraint of the House of Windsor against the nascent, modernising Blair government, who correctly judged the overwhelming public grief at the loss of the ‘People’s Princess’. Opposite Mirren’s monarch stands Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, a role the actor previously essayed in Morgan and Frears’ award-winning Blair/Brown TV drama, The Deal.  “It’s very rare as an actor that you get to play the same character again,” considers Sheen. “It’s weird in that once you’ve played a character, whether it’s a fictional or non-fictional character, you love them. You come to understand them – it’s your own interpretation obviously, of what you think is going on with them as a person – but there is a connection that you make that never goes away.” “So whenever I see Blair on TV now, it’s like seeing a member of my family, and it takes me a while to be able to separate Blair as Prime Minister and decisions he takes and whether I agree, with Blair the character that I play.” Both Mirren and Sheen stress the sheer amount of research required to achieve more than a caricature of their subjects. “I watched tapes, read books, looked at portraits,” Mirren says. “Most valuable for me was looking at the Queen as a young girl. Marilyn Crawford’s book The Little Princesses was actually invaluable – I saw Elizabeth as a little girl and you really saw clues into the character through that.”  Acclaim for Mirren and the film is already widespread, but would Her Majesty’s view echo the famous reaction of her great-grandmother Victoria, in being not amused? “This is the question that everybody wants to ask me in particular,” says a mildly exasperated Mirren. “I have no idea. I mean, it’s not my place, how can I say?” Instead she offers the opinion of expert Royal writer Robert Lacey. “He said, ‘I imagine the Queen will say, ‘Well, that could have been worse. Could I have a gin and tonic, please?’’”
Leigh Singer
The Queen, on general release 15 September 06.
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comment by flyingtwinkle
Sep 19, 2006
The past cannot be cured. Elizabeth I
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