“The Crown” walked into rooms that earlier dramatists were too deferential to enter
he Queen was intimate with her subjects. For eight decades, they licked her and mailed her. She jangled in their pockets, smiled from classroom walls and biscuit tins. She shared their moments of joy and misery. Her image attended them as they helped the homeless, won the football pools, settled their debts. For the first three decades, these representations stayed static.The picture was not actually a portrait of the Queen.
Those comedians were usually men. A Scottish performer, Stanley Baxter, was the first to settle the tiara upon himself, for a 1972 sketch in which the royal limousine gets a parking ticket outside a cinema. Baxter had verisimilitude, but this wasn’t always necessary: in the 1980s, when the British comic Kenny Everett fried bacon with a fag in his mouth for a sketch about products marked By Royal Appointment, he didn’t even shave off his beard.
When Prunella Scales, best known for her turn as the fire-breathing Sybil of “Fawlty Towers”, stepped out onto the boards of the Royal National Theatre in December 1988, she was the first actor to portray a living monarch on the British stage. The moment was brief. But most people in the audience knew the scene that lay either side of the Stephen Frears’ shot: Mirren’s Queen, her shoulders shaking, responding to Diana’s death, unobserved. The monarch and the deer regarding each other across the green.
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