Queen Elizabeth II was for most people unknowable, but there was one place where the curious could feel close to her: onscreen.
And whether it was Helen Mirren in “The Queen,” a movie about the monarch’s life in the days after Princess Diana’s death, or Claire Foy and Olivia Colman in Netflix’s “The Crown,” the actors all took different approaches to try to get under the skin of such an enigmatic figure.
Ms. Mirren told The New York Times in 2006 that she had not just relied on a gray wig and upper-crust accent but also had steeped herself in every aspect of Elizabeth’s life, reading biographies and watching old film clips to try to get a sense of the monarch’s character and even mannerisms, both on and off duty.
Ms. Foy, who portrayed the young queen as she ascended the throne in the first two series of “The Crown,” said that she hadn’t been able to do much research because there were no accounts of what the monarch had really thought in those moments.
“I just had to imagine what it was like, being a girl who wanted to live in the countryside with her husband and children and dogs and horses,” Ms. Foy said at a 2016 media event, according to the magazine Variety. “She was a shy, retiring type, very close to her lovely sister, and suddenly she’s given the top job, and she’s the most unlikely person to have it.”
Ms. Foy portrayed the queen as distant from her children, but she said that Elizabeth shouldn’t be criticized for that. “She had a job to do, and if she was a man, no one would have questioned it,” the actress said in an interview in The Guardian in 2017.
Ms. Colman seems to be the actor most affected by playing the monarch. “I’ve fallen in love with the queen,” she said in a 2019 interview with The Radio Times, a British magazine.
Elizabeth was “the ultimate feminist,” she added, noting that the monarch was the family’s breadwinner at a time when few women were in Britain, and that in 1998, the queen drove King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around her Balmoral estate in Scotland at a time when women were barred from driving in his country.
“She’s extraordinary,” Ms. Colman said. “She’s changed my views on everything.”
