Drama queen: Her Majesty on-screen, from “The Simpsons” to “The Crown”

By Matthew Sweet

The 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.

Then one of them came to life.

The picture was not actually a portrait of the Queen. The sitter was, in fact, Jeannette Charles: the spouse of a British Petroleum employee who had fled Libya after Muammar Qaddafi staged a coup (pictured above). In 1971 she had commissioned a portrait from a local artist, and Charles’s striking resemblance to Elizabeth Windsor produced a cute story in the Essex Chronicle – which led to an appearance on a national TV chat show and a career as the world’s most employable royal simulacrum.

The Queen’s doppelganger co-hosted (with Eric Idle) a “Saturday Night Live” telethon in 1977 to save England, tussled with Leslie Nielsen and pitched for the Los Angeles Angels in “The Naked Gun” (1988), and knighted the hero of “Austin Powers in Goldmember” (2002). (She turned down an offer to pose naked for a British softcore-porn magazine.)

Charles’s act of impersonation broke a long-established taboo – one that audiences accustomed to watching expensive actors re-enact the psychodramas of living royals may find hard to envisage. Younger viewers of Peter Morgan’s “The Crown”, now imagining a big trial scene for Prince Andrew in series nine, be assured: until the late 1980s, the Queen was a screen role for comedians or non-speaking artists.

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. (His reign was long, incorporating several Queen’s Christmas messages and one for Guy Fawkes night.) 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.

For the Queen’s predecessors, these processes were posthumous. The first Elizabeth was in the tomb for the opening night of Thomas Heywood’s “If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody; or The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth” in 1605. Comedians of the 1930s did not send up George VI’s stammer. Noël Coward never got to play the abdication speech. But this is the story of Elizabeth’s representation – from flat image to a figure in the background or middle-distance, to parody and beyond.

A puppet on the throne “Spitting Image”
Peter Fluck and Roger Law are English artists who love both puppets and James Gillray, a Regency printmaker. The confluence of those enthusiasms was “Spitting Image” (1984-96), a satire show that brought half an hour of 18th-century brutality to Sunday nights in Britain. (It was recently revived, but few noticed.) The election special in 1987 depicted Margaret Thatcher in SS uniform, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from “Cabaret”. Her political contemporaries were depicted as oleaginous molluscs (Kenneth Baker), pustular (Leon Brittan) and incontinent with saliva (Roy Hattersley).

Yet the Queen was treated with relative kindness. She launched Harry’s pram with a bottle of champagne, sang the national anthem while hoovering around Prince Andrew (who was drooling over Playboy at the breakfast table) and, most oddly, interrogated Princess Diana while dressed as Number Two, the villain from “The Prisoner”, a TV series.

With its narrow eyes and swollen philtrum, Her Majesty’s latex incarnation seemed as much a caricature of Jeannette Charles as Elizabeth Windsor. But the squeaky voice, like compressed air being forced through Nancy Mitford, was unambiguous. Comedian Kate Robbins was its source. (Her brief also covered Princess Diana, Princess Anne and Fergie.) The Queen Mother was performed by Robbins’s colleague Steve Nallon as an impersonation of the actor Beryl Reid, mainly because the British public had no strong impression of how she spoke.

A Blunt betrayal Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution”
In Alan Bennett’s play about the precarious position of Sir Anthony Blunt, Soviet mole and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the script refers to its royal character as HMQ. It’s a little relic of deference. So is the tone and structure of the piece, in which Bennett uses the formality of the Queen’s relationships as a tool of his drama, rather than an impediment to overcome or a moral fault that must be punished.

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. (A member of the Queen’s security detail, attending on a night off, stood up, reflexively, as she entered.)

The character remains a visitor to the play, rather than its subject. Blunt (originally played by Bennett himself) is at the Palace to collect a Titian he has decided is fishy. The Queen encounters him by chance: her trip to open a swimming pool has been unexpectedly cancelled. Their conversation about the provenance of the painting is, for us, a discussion about Blunt’s own undetected treachery, but, importantly, it is nothing of the kind for the Queen, upon whose inner life the play barely intrudes. Bennett is more interested in her unreflective side: “I like buying horses,” she says. “One more Fabergé egg isn’t going to make my day.”

Yellow world “The Simpsons”
“The Simpsons” has been going on so long that it now constitutes its own parallel version of the world: in the Springfield universe, Krusty the Clown inadvertently helped free Nelson Mandela from jail, Principal Skinner’s mother dated Fidel Castro and alien beings disrupted the 1996 presidential election in America by decanting themselves into the bodies of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. No surprise, then, that a bright-yellow cartoon Queen Elizabeth also reigns – sometimes voiced by Eddie Izzard, sometimes not.

There are differences between their world and ours. In the Simpsonverse, HMQ has HRH embossed on her luggage (mainly to allow Homer to believe, in an episode called “The Regina Monologues”, that her name is Henrietta R. Hippo). She also retains her power to command an execution and impale the victim’s head on a spike outside the Tower of London.

Most profoundly, however, an episode in 2010 revealed that the lives of the Simpsons are beamed into Buckingham Palace, whose occupants enjoy the footage as a reality show called “The American Oafs”. One of these oafs, Ralph Wiggum, was dropped on his head as a baby, eats crayons and worms, is afraid of chicken legs and enjoys imaginary friendship with a pyromaniacal leprechaun. A parallel universe indeed.

Was she amused? Helen Mirren in “The Queen”
In 2012 the Queen and I went to the movies and watched Ewan McGregor dive into a toilet bowl and swim among the turds. It was a Diamond Jubilee event at the British Film Institute (BFI), and this striking scene from Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting” featured in a clip reel illustrating the history of British cinema.

There were others present, of course. Her Majesty and I did, however, sit within popcorn-chucking distance, which gave me a good clear view of her responses. Delight at “The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper” (1908), in which a collie drives to a baby’s rescue in a Riley 9HP Light two-seater. Stone-faced inscrutability at a sight I was surprised to see included at all: Helen Mirren in “The Queen” (2006), pumice-coloured shampoo-and-set disturbed by the wind, gazing across the expanse of Balmoral to see a 14-pointer standing in the gorse.

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. The Queen, her face streaked by a single tear, gripped by, well, what? The power of nature? An emblem of animal nobility? Her reverie interrupted by the sound of a distant shot, then shooing the stag away, out of the range of the hunters.

It’s a great scene. And its greatness lies in its ambiguity. It was written by Peter Morgan, who has now scripted more scenes for Elizabeth II than Shakespeare wrote for the Plantagenets. But at the BFI, the only interpretation worth hearing would have come from the most silent person in the room.

Skyfall Gary Connery at the Olympics
It was the casting coup of the decade. Daniel Craig played Bond. Connery (not that one) played the Queen. The Queen, in her first proper acting role, also played the Queen.

The London Olympic opening ceremony in July 2012, devised by Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell-Boyce and now widely seen by Remainer Britain as the last moment that everything was basically OK, staged the glorious meeting of two great British institutions: the royal family and the fiction of Ian Fleming.

It began with a filmed insert. The monarch sits at her desk, rather overdressed for paperwork in a shimmering peach gown and feathered fascinator. “Good evening Mr Bond,” she says – and, flanked by corgis, the Queen and the spy process through the Palace, board a helicopter parked on the lawn and fly east to the tune of Eric Coates’s “Dam Busters March”. Then, in the 3D world, a real helicopter hovered above the actual ceremony. The James Bond theme twanged through the air, and down tumbled two parachutists, one in a tuxedo, one in a shimmering peach gown and feathered fascinator.

Gary Connery, a record-breaking stuntman who has doubled for Gary Oldman and Leonardo DiCaprio, parachuted from Nelson’s Column and dived 2,400 feet without a parachute. (He has since been jailed for attacking his girlfriend.) That night, he leapt to Earth in a grey wig and a replica of the Queen’s Angela Kelly frock. For one suspended, triumphant moment, things in Britain were much more than basically OK.

A cult following The LaRouche conspiracy
Here’s what the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about HMQ. She controls the world’s market in illegal drugs. She’s planning to start the third world war, to reduce the world’s population to a manageable billion and American presidents are her puppets – though Donald Trump was less easy to manipulate. And there’s more. In the 1960s, she and Bertrand Russell met at the Tavistock Institute in London to develop a super-weapon in the secret British psy-war against America. The name of that weapon was the Beatles.

These were the beliefs of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche junior, a former management consultant to the shoe industry who, in the 1970s, became America’s most prominent conspiracy theorist and most tenacious fringe-presidential candidate. Until his death in 2019, he mounted the lectern for a weekly webcast from his mansion in Leesburg, Virginia, where he denounced the machinations of the Buckingham Palace death cult. “Her policy is what?” he asked, the last time I tuned in. “To reduce the population of the planet. Cause mass deaths. Starvation. Killing. Destroy crops. This woman is Satanic!”

The cult LaRouche founded did not die with him. It limps on in America and Germany. And the Queen remains its principal enemy. A longtime member of the New York branch has turned that animosity into a form of street theatre. She stands by a little card-table shrine on Wall Street, ventriloquising Elizabeth Windsor’s secret desire to be monarch of the world. She’s got the look right, but not the voice. And it was the Wicked Witch of the West who became associated with the phrase “my pretties”.

Whizzpopping Roald Dahl’s “The BFG”
Many depictions of the Queen carry a subversive charge. Roald Dahl’s is mainly sycophantic – as well as a contrivance to bring the plot to a neat conclusion. His novel “The BFG” (1982) is set in an alternative England where giants stalk the streets and kidnap little girls from orphanages.

Steven Spielberg’s film of the book in 2016 keeps most of the details intact. Penelope Wilton’s gentle and fair-minded Queen takes the Times (which is still a broadsheet). She chats on the phone with Americans called Ronnie and Nancy. (The Boris she calls must be Yeltsin, not Johnson.) She also possesses extraordinary executive power, commanding the army to effect regime change in Giant County by sending in a squadron of Chinooks.

The most challenging moment comes when, after consuming a fizzy drink much beloved of giants, she floats up into the air on a column of her own farts. The incident also features in the book – and looks suspiciously like a steal from the burping scene in the Gene Wilder movie of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971), to which Dahl objected strenuously.

If “The BFG” was Dahl’s attempt to ingratiate himself with the Palace, it was successful: he was offered an OBE in 1986. But that didn’t satisfy him. He turned it down, calculating that it might be upgraded to a knighthood – which didn’t happen. A deliciously appropriate outcome for an author who took such delight in devising extravagant punishments for the greedy.

She ruled the waves “The Crown” TV series
Elizabeth II was the first British monarch to be depicted, in her lifetime, in possession of a psychology. Peter Morgan is the person responsible for giving it to her. “The Queen” (2006) showed her thawing in the strange summer warmth of Diana’s death. His stage play “The Audience” (2013) pulled back a little: Helen Mirren still reigned, but her role was to receive a music-hall bill of visiting prime ministers. Then he did it all again for Netflix, with a massive budget, the pick of Spotlight and often pretty functional dialogue. (All the Queens of “The Crown” – Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton – are experts at finding weight and colour where little exists.)

“The Crown” walked into rooms that earlier dramatists were too deferential to enter. Its audiences saw Foy smirking as Matt Smith’s Prince Philip suggests she get on her knees in the bedroom; Colman displayed a tin ear for the grief of others in the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster. (Colman had to listen secretly to the Shipping Forecast in order not to blub her way through these scenes.) If this was impertinence, it failed to harm its object. Morgan did for the monarchy what John Milton did for the church when he gave voice, thought and feeling to the sketchy figures of Genesis.

William and Harry will not require anyone to perform this unasked service. They had “Spitting Image” puppets as babies: they have been fictionalised all their lives. If the monarchy survives, this will be true for their successors. It may be a condition of its survival.

Matthew Sweet is a regular contributor to 1843 magazine, and a writer and broadcaster in London

IMAGES: GETTY, ALAMY, SHUTTERSTOCK, GARY CONNERY, THE SIMPSONS’ TM & ©2010 20TH TELEVISION/20TH CENTURY FOX/DISNEY