Forget Diana, Gillian Anderson's 'honey laced with pure acid' Thatcher is the biggest draw of The Crown's new season

Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown series 4, Netflix

Pat Stacey

November 11 2020 09:10 AM

ANY drama series, no matter how good, can hit a speed bump at some point. For Netflix’s The Crown, that moment was season three.

It looked as immaculate as ever, of course. It’s one of the most expensive series ever made and you can see every cent on the screen.

But there was widespread criticism of the factual inaccuracies, particularly its portrayal of Prince Charles’s schooldays and the treatment of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s alleged involvement in a mooted coup against Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Every drama based on real people necessitates a bit of artistic licence. The Crown’s creator and writer Peter Morgan, however, was accused of playing too fast and loose with the facts.

The season was also slated for simultaneously being too dull and too soapy. The episode focusing on the 1966 disaster in Aberfan in Wales, in which a colliery collapsed, killing 116 children and 28 adults, came in for special criticism.

Morgan’s decision to focus on the question of whether the Queen, who belatedly visited the village eight days after the incident, really cried at the scene or just faked it felt like trivialising a horrific real-life tragedy.

Then there the cast changes. We’d known for some time that the plan was to cast new actors in the key roles every two seasons, rather than age the originals with prosthetic make-up or digital effects.

Nonetheless, seeing the superb Claire Foy and Matt Smith suddenly replaced by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies was still jarring.

Colman as Elizabeth came across as colourless and lifeless (to be fair to this wonderful actress, she could only do so much with a script that frequently gave her little to work with beyond looking bored), while Menzies as Philip lacked the surprising depth, nuance and humanity Smith had brought to playing a man whose grouchy public persona has rarely suggested the presence of any of those qualities.

Helena Bonham Carter’s “new” Princess Margaret, meanwhile, seemed like a completely different person to the one played by Vanessa Kirby in seasons one and two.

Casting is arguably the most important element of The Crown; get it wrong and the illusion of reality crumbles. Ironically, it might well be a single casting choice that gets the series back on track in its fourth season, which arrives on Netflix on Sunday.

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Much has been made of the fact that the first episode alone (I’ll be reviewing the whole season once it’s landed) features the assassination by the Provisional IRA of Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance) and the introduction of the soon-to-be Princess Diana, played with appropriate head-tilting winsomeness by newcomer Emma Corrin.

But the biggest draw here is a different new arrival: Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson. The most divisive British political leader in history has been portrayed on TV and in films quite a few times, but Anderson’s is the definitive version.

It’s true she gives Thatcher cheekbones the real one didn’t have, yet everything else is uncanny: the hair; the walk; the cooing voice of honey laced with pure acid; the aloof personality.

She electrifies every scene she’s in and even seems to energise Colman’s performance. The Queen tells Philip she likes what she’s seen of Thatcher on television – and then she gets to meet her at Buckingham Palace.

The first encounter between the monarch and her newly elected prime minister is full of tension, awkwardness and grotesque comedy.

When the Queen, who likes to guess who’ll be in a new PM’s cabinet, cheerily says she expects there’ll be women, Thatcher, horrified, replies: “Women? Certainly not. I have found women in general not to be suited to high office. They tend to be too emotional.”

Anderson as Thatcher injects new life and edge into a series that’s increasingly felt like a high-class soap about the world’s most dysfunctional family.