Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen

Abstract

In the midst of Princess Margaret's 1950s romance with Royal Air Force group captain Peter Townsend, Malcolm Muggeridge warned that the new celebrity coverage of the royal family would end in tears. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen proved that tears could enhance the popularity of the British monarchy, creating what one film critic hailed as the most sophisticated public relations boost for the queen in 20 years. In this depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, docudrama—the fictionalized representation of real people and events—is trumped by melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition and its highly expressive mise en scène. The former (represented by actual news footage) is the genre of the film's ‘queen of hearts’, Diana. The latter (represented by the dramatic fiction of screenwriter Peter Morgan) is that of its ‘queen of a nation’, Elizabeth II. In its opposition of two ambitious queens—one romantic, one worldly—the film echoes Friedrich Schiller's 1800 proto-melodrama Mary Stuart. More than two centuries later, the older genre triumphs, rendering The Queen's fictional world more vivid and affecting than the actual images of the real-life Diana. Much of this triumph can be attributed to Helen Mirren, who brings the prestige of her star persona to a monarch in danger of being overshadowed by the celebrity of her rival. In an unusually forthright discussion of royalty and celebrity, The Queen draws the two regimes of power together in a single figure, who finishes the film with a declamation on ‘glamour and tears’.

Keywords:

• Elizabeth II
• Helen Mirren
• Stephen Frears
• melodrama
• celebrity

Notes

¹ The Archers is a radio soap opera about rural British life that has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 since 1950. With the cancellation of the US Guiding Light in 2009, it has become the world's longest-running soap opera in any medium.

²Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘The Royal Soap Opera’, New Statesman, 30 May 2012, at www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/2012/05/royal-soap-opera. First published in the New Statesman on 22 October 1955.

³Judith Williamson, ‘Royalty and Representation’, in Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, London: Marion Boyars, 1986, pp. 75–89 (p. 80).

⁴Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, London: British Film Institute, 1987, pp. 43–69 (p. 45).

⁵William Shawcross, ‘Portrait in Majesty’, Vanity Fair, June 2007, p. 106.

⁶David Thomson, ‘Biographical Dictionary of Film Number 99 (Stephen Frears)’, Guardian, 3 September 2010, p. 14.

⁸First broadcast in 1960, Coronation Street is a British television soap opera set in a fictional suburb of Manchester. In 1998, a character in it called Deidre Rachid was wrongfully imprisoned after a relationship with a con man. A national media campaign to free her ended the storyline with her ‘release’ three weeks later. In 2000, the Prince of Wales appeared on the show playing himself in a fictional news bulletin.

⁹Allan Massie, ‘Why Diana Is Still the Spirit of the Age’, Telegraph, 12 April 2008, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584774/Why-Diana-is-still-the-spirit-of-the-age.html.

⁷See Graeme Turner, ‘The Cultural Function of Celebrity’, in Understanding Celebrity, London: Sage, 2006, pp. 89–108 (p. 96).

¹⁰Derek Paget, ‘Making Mischief: Peter Kosminsky, Stephen Frears, and British Television Docudrama’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:1, 2012, pp. 171–86 (p. 178).

¹¹Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation, London: Wallflower Press, 2012, p. 44.

¹²Giselle Bastin, ‘Filming the Ineffable: Biopics of the British Royal Family’, Auto/Biography Studies 24:1, 2009, pp. 34–52 (p. 42).

¹³Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, p. 21.

¹⁴For a reading of this scene and its relation to other heritage films’ use of portraiture, see Vidal, Heritage Film, pp. 40–43.

¹⁵The public identification of Mirren with the role of Elizabeth II was arguably furthered by her toast to the monarch when accepting the 2007 Best Actress Oscar for the role: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen’. In 2013, she again ‘gave’ theatregoers the Queen at London's Gielgud Theatre in Peter Morgan's The Audience, portraying the monarch's weekly private discussions with prime ministers ranging from Churchill to Cameron. Remarking on the play's ‘two-hour exercise in propaganda for Elizabeth Windsor’, Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland observed: ‘These days, in which our favoured celebrities are those who have triumphed over adversity, it's not enough that we admire the monarch, we must feel sympathy too … Partly thanks to Mirren's ability to convey a sense of inner longings repressed, we believe this Queen when she sighs at “the unlived lives within us all”’. Jonathan Freedland, ‘After a Night at the Theatre with the Queen, I Worry about Our Democracy’, Guardian, 22 March 2013, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/22/theatre-queen-worry-democracy-politicians.

¹⁶Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 14–20.

²⁰Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel's Return from Ireland’, in Helen Gardner (ed.), The Metaphysical Poets, London: Penguin, 1961, pp. 256–60 (p. 258).

¹⁷Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 48.

¹⁸Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 53.

¹⁹Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 96.

²¹Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy [1989], 2nd edn, London: Verso, 2011, p. viii.

²²First staged in 1814, The Dog of Montargis, by Pixerécourt, was based on a fourteenth-century legend in which the faithful dog of a murdered knight finds the sash of the murderer and later keeps him from escaping.

²³Made by the BBC to publicize the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon in 1969, Royal Family was directed by Richard Cawston. Although its behind-the-scenes informality was controversial at the time, the programme's success prompted the Palace to ask Cawston to take over the production of the Queen's Christmas television broadcast from 1970 to 1985.

²⁴Produced by Granada Television for the BBC, The Royle Family is a situation comedy portraying a working-class family living in Manchester. It ran for three series between 1998 and 2000, with further special episodes in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010. The series reunited actors Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, the stars of the 1980s Channel 4 soap opera Brookside.

²⁵Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution [1867], London: Fontana Library, 1963, p. 85.

²⁶Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, in Gledhill, Home, pp. 70–79 (p. 71).

²⁷Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, p. 37.

²⁸See David Cannadine, ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy’, Historical Research 77:197, 2004, pp. 289–312 (p. 303).

²⁹Confirming his own view of this maternal theme, director Stephen Frears has observed that: ‘Making a movie about the Queen is almost like making a movie about your mother and in England, the Queen really does serve as a kind of symbolic, emotional mother of the country’. Quoted in Emanuel Levy, ‘The Queen According to Frears’, Emanuel Levy: Cinema 24/7, at www.emanuellevy.com/interview/the-queen-according-to-frears.

³⁰Brooks argues that melodrama ‘is about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of recognition’ (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, p. 27). His example is Pixerécourt's 1819 La Fille de l'exilé, in which a band of fierce Tartars fall to their knees before a young woman who has heroically forgiven the persecutor of her father.

³³Schiller, Mary Stuart, Act 4, Scene 10.

³¹Friedrich Schiller, Mary Stuart [1800], trans. from the German by Joseph Mellish, Project Gutenberg Ebook, last updated November 2012, Act 1, Scene 8.

³²Schiller, Mary Stuart, Act 4, Scene 7.

³⁴Henry James, ‘The London Theatres’ [1880], in The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and Drama, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949, pp. 133–161 (p. 161).