Can Kristen do a Diana?
We would have said no, but by the look of the first photo of her playing the princess, the Twilight star might just pull it off
She’s been seduced by the living dead and come back from the dead to slay an evil queen, but can Kristen Stewart take on a movie that by all accounts, should be a dead duck, asked Kerry in her column for The Sunday Telegraph.
Before this week, we would have said the odds were against Spencer being a success. The last film about the Princess of Wales, 2013’s Diana, was famously labelled “car crash cinema” by critics, as poor Naomi Watts failed to overcome the “cardboard dialogue” and later admitted, “If you have to go down with that sinking ship, so be it.”
Kristen also faced criticism that an American actor had been chosen to play a very English princess, her only qualification being she had previously done so in Snow White, where her upper-class accent was a lot more successful than Chris Hemsworth’s Scottish lilt.
However, this week we got a first glimpse of the Twilight actor as Diana, doing her trademark tilty-head and by George, I think she’s got it. She might Doolittle it after all.
The Pablo Larraín-directed movie is set in Sandringham over one Christmas in the early ’90s, when Diana resolved to follow her own path and give up the idea of being queen.
“We decided to get into a story about identity, and around how a woman decides somehow, not to be the queen,” said Pablo, who also made the biopic Jackie, for which Natalie Portman won a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
“She’s a woman who, in the journey of the movie, decides and realizes that she wants to be the woman she was before she met Charles,” he said.
Luckily for Kristen, the curse of playing Diana on-screen has just been lifted by Emma Corrin in Season Four of The Crown. The formerly unknown actor, 25, was so convincing as a young Diana, even with a silly script, she managed to do what Naomi couldn’t and Kristin Scott Thomas’ younger sister Serena also botched in the 1993 TV movie Diana: Her True Story.
No doubt Elizabeth Debicki, who is taking over as the princess in the next season of The Crown is both thankful and worried that she unexpectedly has big stilettos to fill. While you can only make a role your own, it doesn’t help if the person who did it before you aced it. Just ask Olivia Colman, who despite winning an Oscar, managed to turn the Queen from Claire Foy’s beloved, if stuffy monarch, to a horrible old bat. Nice one, Liv.
What Elizabeth and Kristen have to hope is their scripts are less soap and more substance and that Diana is – finally, please, we’re begging you – written as a complex woman, not a doe-eyed dunce.
Spencer is penned by Steven Knight, whose credits include Peaky Blinders and the cracking A Christmas Carol with Guy Pearce. Let’s pray Steven can play a sneaky blinder and not let the ghosts of Christmas past spook him.
It will, of course, be highly symbolic of another generation’s struggle to stay in the Royal Family over Christmas and comparisons will be impossible to ignore of Harry and Meghan’s festive freak-out in 2019.
Our advice for Steven - and The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan - is put down the sledgehammers, gentlemen and tread lightly. Diana was the Queen of Hearts, after all, so here’s hoping film-makers can stop breaking ours.
Fergie’s Boon for Bridgerton
Sarah Ferguson is taking her new job as a Mills & Boon novelist very seriously indeed, confessing she’s binge-watched Bridgerton twice: “I adored Bridgerton so much... I’m obsessed with it.” The Duchess of York is also keen on asking Shonda Rhimes, the show’s producer, to adapt her upcoming novel, Her Heart For A Compass (out this August) into a TV series. Fergie’s debut Mills & Boon book is a fictional account of the life of her great-great-aunt, Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott, with the Victorian-era romp introducing a Lord Rufus Ponsonby. The Duke of Hastings has competition!
Royal dates for the diary
Let’s face it, we need something to celebrate:
February: Eugenie has her baby. We can’t wait to meet the first child for the princess and Jack Brooksbank. According to Betfair, favourite names are Alice and Arthur, with Grace and Henry also in the running.
April 21: The Queen’s 95th birthday. The Queen will become the first British monarch to reach 95 on April 21, and to celebrate, The Royal Mint is issuing a special commemorative £5 coin.
April 29: William and Catherine’s 10th wedding anniversary. We can’t believe it’s been 10 years since they walked down the aisle. Wonder if Wills will be gifting Catherine a traditional diamond ring to celebrate?
June 10: Prince Philip’s 100th birthday. In June, Prince Philip hits his centenary – but don’t expect him to celebrate, he’s already dismissed that idea.
June: More babies. There will be more babies in the summer, with Zara due to give birth to her third child and Catherine’s sister Pippa Middleton her second.
July 1: Unveiling of Princess Diana’s statue. If travel restrictions allow, hopefully William and Harry can be reunited for the unveiling of their mother’s statue at Kensington Palace, to mark what would have been her 60th birthday.
Charles has a toothpaste valet
It’s well documented Prince Charles loves to be fussed over, (his staff even iron his shoelaces and press his pyjamas daily), while one valet squeezes one inch of toothpaste from a crested silver dispenser on to the royal toothbrush.