There may be no surefire short cut to awards glory, but as strategies go, playing a British monarch has a higher strike rate than most - dating back to 1932, when Charles Laughton scooped the best actor Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII. More recently, Judi Dench’s late-blooming film career was rewarded with a slew of awards and an Oscar nomination for her Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. The next year, she took the gold for an eight-minute turn as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love; that same year, Cate Blanchett narrowly lost the leading prize for playing the same queen in Elizabeth.
Voters are so enamoured of the OG Liz, in fact, that Blanchett was even nominated for her shrieky retread of the same role in the turgid Elizabeth: The Golden Age; the role of QE2, meanwhile, landed Helen Mirren every prize going for The Queen in 2006. Not to be outdone by the ladies, Colin Firth was Oscared as Elizabeth II’s dad in The King’s Speech; it’s a family business of sorts.
Last year, Dench largely sat out awards season after flimsily reprising her signature role in Victoria & Abdul. Lest that have you fearing voters have lost their royal thirst, however, rest assured that queens are back in business this year. Months after Claire Foy nabbed the Emmy for her brittle take on Elizabeth II in The Crown, Olivia Colman – coincidentally set to inherit the role from Foy in the next series, presumably to further Emmy acclaim – is at the forefront of the best actress Oscar conversation for her tragicomic interpretation of the dithering, paranoid Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s wicked court farce The Favourite, itself tipped for multiple honours. Already crowned by the Venice film festival and British independent film award juries, Colman picked up a Golden Globe nod this week; IndieWire’s Anne Thompson is among the industry experts predicting the British national treasure to fight off Lady Gaga en route to the Oscar podium.
Earlier in the year, pundits were expecting more of a royal face-off in the race: there was less talk about Colman than there was about three-time nominee Saoirse Ronan in the title role of Mary Queen of Scots, with Margot Robbie in similarly hyped-up support as (yep, her again) Elizabeth I in Josie Rourke’s glossy, souped-up spin on an oft-told chapter of history. And yet, as Oscar season cranks up, Rourke’s film and its well-liked stars have been entirely absent from precursor lists – Golden Globes included – while The Favourite continues to gather momentum. Reviews for Mary, Queen of Scots, if not as ecstatic as those for Lanthimos’s subversive festival darling, have been respectable; Ronan’s and particularly Robbie’s notices have been better still. Why the silence around it?
There was a time when The Favourite would have been the awards season outlier, while Mary Queen of Scots might well have cruised to major nominations. The former is a perverse, brashly queer slice of absurdist history from a Greek avant-garde auteur, with stylistic nods to early Peter Greenaway; the latter, give or take some modish Game of Thrones inflections, is far more in the traditional Masterpiece Theatre mold, played nobly straight by director and actors alike. In interviews, Rourke has taken some veiled potshots at Lanthimos’s film – citing her diversity-minded approach to casting in particular, relative to The Favourite’s lily-white ensemble – but that hasn’t prevented her lavish corset opera from being seen as the fustier of the two.
Rourke’s interpretation is not without innovations of its own, not least compared with Charles Jarrott’s far starchier 1971 film of Mary, Queen of Scots, which netted Vanessa Redgrave an Oscar nomination (ding) for her limply weepy performance of the doomed Mary Stuart – despite Glenda Jackson’s tart, vindictive Elizabeth I stomping off with the film. Rourke’s more youthfully angled film shifts the dynamic a bit: Ronan’s Mary remains a martyr, of course, but of a steely, battle-ready hue, while Robbie’s Elizabeth is an affectingly vulnerable jangle of insecurities and moral uncertainty. It’s less of a catty face-off than Jarrott’s film, forging a tacit, us-against-the-patriarchy understanding between the rival monarchs – despite their scarcity of shared screen time – that feels far more in line with today’s gender politics, be it historically accurate or not.
In this respect, Mary Queen of Scots and The Favourite aren’t exactly on opposite ends of the court: both are feminist reappropriations of royal history, with both films’ queens fending off the challenge of entitled masculinity at multiple turns. In the former, those include Mary’s own envious, treacherous husband Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), while in the latter, scheming opposition MP Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) enters into a complex one-sided chess game of power-mongering with Her Majesty. Colman’s Queen Anne is no ball-busting heroine: she’s an anxious dolt, whose political cluelessness is guarded and manipulated by her rival ladies-in-waiting, clashing over both their palace status and the queen’s sexual affections. That the men’s political machinations play out as a less influential subplot beneath this tangle of feminine wiles and desires within the Queen’s inner circle is exhilaratingly unexpected – history, for once, driven by female egos rather than male ones.
The Favourite, however, is the rare royal biopic to undermine its majestic subject entirely: the tragedy of Queen Anne in the film is not that she’s ambitious or misunderstood in her time, but that she’s a bit dim, and hopelessly out of her depth in a position of power she never asked to hold. At a moment in contemporary history when so many of our leaders are failing us, does The Favourite’s viciously disrespectful takedown of the monarchy ring just a bit more true than Mary Queen of Scots’ lightly modernised, but still romantically heroine-besotted, portrait of leadership in crisis? In Rourke’s film, queens slay; Lanthimos’s slays, or at least skewers, its queen, and is reaping the benefits.
