In season 4 of The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II (played by Olivia Colman) gets a new prime minister. At first she is excited because the new prime minister is a woman, but the new PM, Margaret Thatcher (played by Gillian Anderson) ends up being one of the toughest PMs Elizabeth has had to work with. She starts a war in the Falkland Islands and doesn’t do much to address the high unemployment rates around England. She also fires her entire cabinet of men even after she told Elizabeth she preferred men in Parliament because she thought women were weak. In one episode of the season, an unemployed man breaks into Buckingham Palace because he tries to contact Queen Elizabeth about badly people are suffering from joblessness during the costly war that Margaret had everyone enter into, but with little success. Queen Elizabeth is terrified when he breaks in, but he tells her he just wants to tell her how fucked up the situation is under Margaret Thatcher. Earlier in the episode, he is standing in a long line of unemployed citizens and is struggling to pay his bills, and not only that but his wife leaves him for another man and takes the kids with her. He has a lot to be pissed off about, and he tries to contact the government to see if they can do anything about it, but with little success. When Queen Elizabeth gets to know him more, she realizes that the unemployment situation really is bad but because she spends a lot of time in Buckingham Palace she isn’t really out with the public and so she can’t really know what goes on unless she reads the newspaper or watches the news on TV. Before the police take him out of Buckingham Palace, he tells Elizabeth that Margaret Thatcher is coming for her job next if she isn’t careful. As the season goes on, it is clear that Queen Elizabeth and Margaret don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, namely the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom and sanctions against South Africa during apartheid. However, when Margaret resigns, Queen Elizabeth, after much thought, gives her a medal for her long years of service as prime minister. I studied about Margaret Thatcher in world history class but of course, after a while I forgot all my history knowledge, so it was helpful to watch The Crown because even though it’s a fictionalized account of the monarchy it still gives some good insight.
I had been meaning to see The Iron Lady for a while, mainly because I loved Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (if you haven’t seen it she plays a demanding fashion magazine editor named Miranda Priestly who makes the life of her assistant a living hell). The Crown episodes with Margaret Thatcher mainly cover her work with the Queen, but not so much about her childhood or her past experiences. In The Iron Lady, we see Margaret Thatcher before she became prime minister. Before she married Denis Thatcher, she was Margaret Roberts, a young woman who was bullied in school for not being wealthy like the other girls but falls in love with conservatism. She meets Denis, an intellectual young man with and and they fall in love. The film mainly shows how she grapples with Denis’s death after she is no longer prime minister. One thing that interested me about this movie was that they show how Margaret Thatcher’s inflection changed when she became prime minister. Her representatives practiced with her how she was supposed to speak to the public, and she had to learn how to enunciate things more aggressively. They also show how she got her hairstyle. In the movie, she is reflecting on her past time as prime minister and what she learned along the way. She experiences hallucinations in which Denis appears to her as the voice of conscience. It’s interesting because in The Crown, Olivia Colman plays the Queen but in The Iron Lady she played Thatcher’s daughter Carol. Also Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in the movie as well (she is from a show I love called Fleabag.)
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