As Anne-Marie Duff prepares for The Little Foxes, I look back to 2005’s The Virgin Queen
“She’s her father’s daughter no matter what they say.
‘Look closer, her eyes are her mother’s’”
Anne-Marie Duff is one of those actresses whose presence on our stages and screens always feels a pleasure, as she seems to ration the amount she works and so has rarely been in danger of over-exposure. Soon to be seen in The Little Foxes at the Young Vic, I thought I’d look back to her starring role in the 2005 mini-series The Virgin Queen, in which she took on the iconic role of Queen Elizabeth I.
Split over 4 parts by writer Paula Milne, the focus is mainly on Elizabeth as a person and how her relationships shaped her rather than a trawl through the history and politics of the time. This allows Duff to delve into the psychology of the woman, an interesting approach as it is thus necessarily fictionalised but intuits that the execution of her mother and a lingering fear of her father were formative, driving forces during her entire life. There are neat suggestions too about how the mask of white make-up came into being, the sexual longings that lay behind the avowed virginal status, the toll that reigning had on her interpersonal relationships. But the trap that many biopics often fall into, and which this does too, is to not interrogate its subject fully, to just leave them at the centre of the world that has been created and so the portrait of Elizabeth that we see in one of unchallenged virtue and rightness, too often too good to be true.
The Virgin Queen thus constantly treads the line of dipping into melodrama but frequently dives headlong straight into it. Director Coky Giedroyc could apparently not resist the lure of a musical montage and thus there are far too many that pop up here, Martin Phipps’ music swelling up every time big news is imparted in highly unrealistic scenarios cf: the announcement of her ascendancy to the throne, in a field. This rather impressionistic approach, at the deliberate expense of the political machinations of the court, lends an air of what can best be described as schlock, which is a real shame as the potential for something much more interesting is clearly here.
The viciousness of the Catholic realm is powerfully portrayed, the burnings at the stake a visceral reminder of the danger in which people lived if they did not step in line with the prevailing mood. But the mini-series is more concerned with the soap-opera-ish twists and turns of Elizabeth’s relationship with Tom Hardy’s Robert Dudley, always chaste but deeply emotionally involved. Hardy starts off all pouty playfulness but develops rather impressively into a matured craggy experience by the end, he’s a rather unpredictable actor and I like that about him.
Tara Fitzgerald’s compassionate lady-in-waiting Kat Ashley is an underplayed asset, movingly convincing in the staunch defence of her mistress yet dispatched without a death scene; Sienna Guillory’s Lettice Knollys is a vibrant presence, especially as she takes up the reins in the plotting against the monarch after being thrown out of court for betraying the queen with Dudley; and Ben Daniels and Daniel Evans both glower marvellously as sinister politicos Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil respectively.
The Virgin Queen is as such an interesting take on what is such a familiar story to many, but in trying to do something different and flesh out a character who is essentially unknowable, at least in the modern parlance – we will never know what she thought or what truly motivated her – it sacrifices a degree of effectiveness. Anne-Marie Duff is nevertheless very strong, she’ll make you want to fight for Queen and country with the rest of the army, and so it could be worth a watch if you’re bored.
