LONDON — The sight of the Queen of England wearing curlers and clutching a hot-water bottle might seem like an instance of lèse majesté to those born in an earlier era. If you grew up in the Commonwealth, it's the Madame Tussauds monarch who is familiar -- the imperturbable public face, the posture dictated by history, the prim handbag of legend.
When the palace gates bearing her crest are closed, it's a different matter. There the sovereign is a mother and a grandmother, a woman with a lively sense of humour who lives in draughty palaces and might, occasionally, require a nighttime hot-water bottle.
"She has what's called a 'hottie' in Scotland," says Peter Morgan, who wrote the screenplay for The Queen, and was given that particular piece of information by someone close to Her Majesty. "Those country houses are famously freezing cold. It would be vulgar to have central heating."
Morgan, a British screenwriter who lives in London, was speaking from his Los Angeles hotel the day before his script was nominated for a BAFTA (the British Oscar) and a few days before it won a Golden Globe. If Helen Mirren -- who has also picked up a nod from BAFTA, and various critics' circles, and snagged her own Golden Globe -- doesn't receive an Oscar nomination Tuesday morning, it will be a shock equal to the ravens fleeing the Tower of London, or Tony Blair receiving a hug from the man in the street.
Hellen Mirren as The Queen
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But however many honours come its way, do they really signify that Morgan's is an authentic look behind palace doors?
How do you accurately draw a portrait of the private life of such a public figure?
Morgan set himself a difficult task when he began to write the script, which follows the chaos of late summer, 1997, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when a tradition-bound Queen Elizabeth and a newly elected Tony Blair clash (and ultimately reconcile) over their country's values.
For authenticity, Morgan read biographies, and after he'd written a first draft, passed the screenplay on to insiders. "I must have met a hundred people on this. I wrote the first draft as I imagined it, as I wanted it to be, and then I took it to people and said, 'Would this be remotely plausible?' " And yes, apparently the Duke of Edinburgh does refer to his wife of almost 60 years as "cabbage," although perhaps not in public.
More important, it was Morgan's job to imagine the Queen's private emotions, a geography that is terra incognito not only for her subjects but also, Morgan suspects, for the monarch herself.
"If a young girl who you'd extended the olive branch to, and who'd thrown it back in your face, suddenly died under tragic circumstances, you'd have mixed feelings. And feelings are not something you do particularly well," Morgan says. "You've been brought up to be the sovereign, to put duty first. So to explore an undiscovered country, that inner emotional landscape, that felt like rich territory."
Interesting, then, that it's a role Mirren was reluctant to take. The 61-year-old actress has spoken repeatedly of her fears about portraying a living person, of getting it wrong and "betraying" the monarch. (And this from a non-monarchist, the child of socialist parents who would loudly slag off the Royal Family and remind young Helen that the Queen used the lavatory, too.)
Relying only on a steel-grey wig, sensible glasses and shoes, and a judicious bit of posterior padding, Mirren found the essence of the Queen. She had met Elizabeth briefly when she was made a Dame, and read biographies of her, but Mirren told the Associated Press that her main inspiration was a short piece of film showing the 12-year-old Princess Elizabeth getting out of a car to shake someone's hand -- in essence, preparing for the public role that would define her life.
It took a pack of semi-outsiders to take on a symbol of Britishness. Morgan is the son of immigrants -- his father was a German Jew who escaped the Nazis; his mother a Catholic Pole. Mirren was born Ilyena Mironoff, the daughter of a Russian émigré taxi driver descended from a line of aristocrats. Neither Morgan nor Mirren nor director Stephen Frears had been in the country that crazy September when Diana died and the collective stiff upper lip began to quiver: Frears was shooting The Hi-Lo Country in Nevada, Mirren was also in America, and Morgan was getting married in Vienna.
"That may be why we wanted to tackle it," says Morgan. "Certainly the British people acted like lunatics that week."
