Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

quality of the food, and the general difficulty getting around.

The Ascot management spent an additional ?10 million to improve the viewing at the lower levels, and the Queen brought in her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson, a veteran party planner, to enhance the look and feel of the hospitality tents in the Royal Enclosure, and to improve the menus.

TO MARK HER eightieth year, the Queen permitted two anodyne documentaries devoted to her life and work, neither of which presented the personal glimpses she had allowed nearly four decades earlier in Royal Family. She also participated in a somewhat contrived film about a new portrait of her being painted by seventy-five-year-old Rolf Harris, an Australian-born television entertainer and artist. When the BBC proposed the project, the Palace took only two days to say yes—further evidence of the Queen’s willingness to be seen by the public in less traditional ways.

All efforts by her advisers to shape the Queen’s image paled beside the impact of The Queen when it appeared in theaters in the autumn of 2006 to popular and critical acclaim. The director, Stephen Frears, said, “We made the Queen a Hollywood star”—not a notion she would savor. But the film did serve to define her anew and, odd as it seems, merged the real Queen in the public imagination with Helen Mirren, a lifelong republican whose newfound admiration for Elizabeth II made her into a “Queenist.” Although much of the dialogue and many of the scenes were pure invention by screenwriter Peter Morgan (Prince Philip may have called his wife “Sausage,” but never “Cabbage”), the film was thoroughly researched and grounded in reality.

Its appeal lay in imagining moments that contrasted the Queen’s exalted status with her appearance in curlers as her worst nightmare unfolded after Diana’s death, in balancing her shortcomings with an essential goodness, and in satisfying the public’s need for her to reflect their own anxieties, doubts, and sadness. “What is brilliant is that the film has a mythical quality,” said Frances Campbell-Preston, lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother for thirty-seven years. Although the words were “not necessarily the Queen’s words,” she said, “there is a truth.”

“I gather there’s a film,” Elizabeth II said to Tony Blair in an audience just after the movie opened. “I’d just like you to know that I’m not going to watch it. Are you?” “No, of course not,” said Blair. One of her relatives gave her a full rundown on the telephone as the Queen listened silently. When told the film was good for the monarchy, she asked why. “Because it showed why you didn’t come down to London, that you were being a grandmother as opposed to temporarily not being queen,” said her relative, who added that she shouldn’t see it because it would be “a reminder of a really ghastly week” and that “to see herself portrayed by someone would be irritating.”

One of Elizabeth II’s friends gently ribbed her by sending a cartoon titled “The Queen” from The Spectator magazine. It showed the interior of a movie theater with someone’s view of the screen being obstructed by a person wearing a crown. The Queen was tickled by the cartoon, but she told her friend she was holding to the agreement she had with Blair—stubbornness perhaps, but also a sign of her lack of self- absorption. When the film came up in a conversation with Monty Roberts, she asked him not to see it, even when he told her he heard it was flattering. “I suppose it depends on your point of view,” the Queen said. “I think she preferred me to know her the way I know her,” he recalled.

Nearly everyone else who knew the Queen did go, and they almost unanimously felt that the portrayal “rang true,” as Nancy Reagan said—from the way it captured aspects of her character and personality to her sturdy walk and the way she put on her spectacles. But they also observed that because of the tragic circumstances of the film, Mirren’s Elizabeth II was more like her restrained public image than her relaxed and jolly private self. Most agreed that the depiction of Philip was unduly harsh, and that both the Queen Mother and Robin Janvrin had been mischaracterized. But even Elizabeth II understood the phenomenon created by the film, according to her friends. Palace officials were delighted when the movie spawned articles in fashion magazines about “Balmoral chic” as sales of Barbour waxed jackets surged.

“You know, for fifty years and more Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” said Helen Mirren to appreciative laughter after winning the Oscar for best actress in February 2007. “She’s had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm, and she’s weathered many many storms, and I salute her courage and her consistency.” Holding the Oscar aloft, she concluded, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘The Queen!’ ”

“She’s a real role model. She’s just

very helpful on any sort of difficulties

or problems I might be having.”

Prince William escorting his grandmother during a visit to his base in Wales, where he worked as a search- and-rescue helicopter pilot, April 2011. Ian Jones Photography

TWENTY

A Soldier at Heart

IN APRIL 2007, THE QUEEN SAT FOR HER FIRST PORTRAIT BY AN American, the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Not only was the sitting limited by her schedule to just twenty-five minutes, it was to be filmed for yet another television documentary about the Queen carrying out her duties. She agreed to wear the stunning Queen Mary tiara, the Nizam of Hyderabad diamond necklace, a white satin gown embroidered with gold, and her flowing dark blue Garter robe. Leibovitz was surprised to learn that Elizabeth II did her own makeup and got her hair done just once a week.

In a brief conversation the evening before the photo shoot, the Queen spoke fondly to Leibovitz about British photographer Jane Bown, an octogenarian who had done her portrait the previous year. “She came all the way by herself!” the Queen said. “I helped her move the furniture.” Leibovitz replied, “Well, tomorrow is going to be the opposite of that.”

Unusually for a woman who prided herself on punctuality, the Queen arrived twenty minutes late for her sitting. “I don’t have much time,” the Queen said to the photographer, who noticed that the dressers “were staying about 20 feet away from her.”

Elizabeth II was clearly vexed to be surrounded by the photographer’s large entourage. When Leibovitz asked her to remove her “crown” to make the image less dressy, the Queen said, “Less dressy! What do you think this is?” But she calmed down and yielded to the photographer’s requests to vary her costume and her pose. Leibovitz later said she loved the Queen’s “feisty” personality and respected her willingness to fulfill her commitment, however tiring and stressful.

The resulting images were stunning. The most striking showed the Queen without the tiara and wearing a simple navy boat cloak with gleaming brass buttons, her arms and hands unseen, standing in front of a digitally superimposed background of a wintry sky and the bare trees of the Palace gardens. It was a frank attempt by Leibovitz to evoke earlier iconic images by Beaton and Annigoni symbolizing the Queen’s solitude, as well as “an appropriate mood for this moment in the Queen’s life.”

The photos were unveiled on the eve of the Queen’s tenth trip to the United States, and her third state visit, this time hosted by George and Laura Bush. Before her departure, she gave a reception at Buckingham Palace for 350 prominent Americans in London. Washington Post correspondent Kevin Sullivan joined one of the small semicircles of people to be introduced to the Queen, which also included Don Johnson, who was starring in Guys and Dolls in the West End, Terence Kooyker and Andrew Wright, who were rowers at Oxford, and Brian McBride, one of the top players for the Fulham professional football team.