Latest news with #DaisyGoodwin
Yahoo
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Queen Elizabeth's senior aide gives approval to new royal play
Queen Elizabeth's senior dresser Angela Kelly is a big fan of a new play about her relationship with the monarch. Daisy Goodwin's By Royal Appointment was inspired by the late monarch and her personal assistant's working relationship and Daisy revealed Angela actually attended a performance of the play and was impressed with how 'true to the Queen' it was. Daisy told HELLO! Magazine: 'She wrote me such a sweet note afterwards to say how much she'd enjoyed it. She felt it was truthful and it had made her well up. 'I thought that was so impressive. It takes a lot of nerve to watch something that's meant to be you on stage. She was big enough to see that what I've done was not her but true to her position. I think she thought it was true to the Queen so I was thrilled by that.' Daisy also spoke about how Angela's circumstances have changed since the death of Queen Elizabeth in 2022, going from a role 'at the heart of the court' to obscurity. She said: 'You go from having been one of the most powerful people at the heart of the court to someone whose services are no longer required and I thought 'here is a great story'. 'I didn't want her to feel exploited but now that she's seen it, she knows it's an affectionate portrait of the Queen and a realistic portrait of her. 'I imagine that in a world of courtiers, to have someone like Angela, who is not to the manor born, in a position of power, must have been quite tricky. She didn't suffer fools gladly.' And, Daisy was also fascinated by Queen Elizabeth's relationship with fashion. She explained: 'Here is a woman who isn't interested in fashion at all. What she wanted to wear was a Barbour or a headscarf. And yet she was the most famous clotheshorse in the world.' By Royal Appointment is currently on a national tour with Anne Reid as the Queen and Caroline Quentin as the dresser.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Anne Reid on fame, desire and ambition at 90: ‘The most wonderful things have happened since I was 68!'
Anne Reid wants to get one thing straight from the off. She adores working with the director Dominic Dromgoole. 'He treats actors like grownups. Some directors feel as if they've got to play games and teach you how to act. But a conductor doesn't teach a viola player how to play the blooming instrument, does he?' She talks about directors who get actors to throw bean bags at each other and go round the room making them recite each other's names. 'Blimey! I want to be an adult. I think I've earned it now.' She pauses. Reid has always been a master of the timely pause. 'You can't get more adult than me and be alive really, can you, darling?' The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Reid turned 90 in May. She celebrated by going on a national tour with Daisy Goodwin's new play, By Royal Appointment. I catch up with the show at Cheltenham's Everyman theatre. She's already done Bath. Then there's Malvern, Southampton, Richmond, Guildford and Salford. I feel knackered just thinking about it, I say. She gives me a look. 'Oh, they send me in cars. I don't have to toil much!' Yesterday she did a double shift – matinee and evening show. Reid is magnificent as the queen in this witty, moving drama, directed by Dromgoole. The play documents Elizabeth II's years on the throne via relationships with her dress designer, milliner and, most poignantly, her dresser. We witness the major events of her reign backstage as her team prepares appropriate outfits for them. Reid's queen is fabulously multifaceted – funny and mischievous, loyal and dutiful, devastated and disappointed, nostalgic and lustful. There are myriad lines to learn and she's on stage virtually the whole two hours. When Reid emerged for the evening performance's encore, she looked as if she could have happily popped out a third show of the day. She tells me she's delighted with the part, not least because it's so different from the roles she played earlier in her career. Back then she tended to be cast as working-class mothers tethered to the kitchen or women working in aprons (Victoria Wood's canteen comedy Dinnerladies, the cook in the revival of Upstairs Downstairs). 'I've always been below-stairs, and you can't get more upstairs than the queen!' The weird thing is, she says, she grew up in a middle-class family and was privately educated. Her grandfather, father and all three brothers were journalists. Reid's dad was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and she discovered in 2015 (when participating in the genealogy TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) that he also had a sideline spying for the British in the second world war. Her brother Colin was a columnist for the Daily Mail, and her husband Peter Eckersley worked for the Guardian before becoming head of drama at Granada, which is where they met. Did she ever fancy a career in journalism? 'No, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. My dad wanted me to be a performer because my grandma was some sort of small-time performer. I had a letter from him in the war saying, 'I want you to drink milk when Mummy gives it to you because that will make you strong, but most of all I want you to learn elocution and to sing and dance.'' She was sent to boarding school in Wales, dutifully took the elocution lessons and lost her geordie accent, and her teacher told her parents that Anne was a born actor. She went to Rada and was the only girl in her year to win a prize. For the past couple of decades, her parts have been more varied and challenging. Now she's best known as the genteel Celia in the BBC's comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax; the family matriarch Muriel in Russell T Davies's dystopian series Years and Years; the grande dame Lady Denham in the Jane Austen adaptation Sanditon; and the mousy May, who has a sizzling affair with her daughter's boyfriend in the 2003 movie The Mother. All of them dream roles, beautifully played. Reid is a household face rather than name. When I tell friends I'm interviewing her, most look blank. Then I show them pictures of her best-known roles, and they say they love her. We meet in the boardroom at the Everyman. Reid is elegantly casual – shirt, slacks, a dash of lipstick. She can look a little sour and disapproving, then she smiles and her face lights up. It's one of Reid's great dramatic gifts, transforming her from dour curmudgeon to empathetic beauty (and vice versa) in a flicker. Your career has been amazing, I say. She gently rebukes me. 'Well, it hasn't, actually, darling!' Give me a chance, I say – I mean in recent years. 'Yes, right! Well, in the beginning I don't think casting directors rated me. A casting director said to me once, 'Dear Anne, you always help us out when we're absolutely desperate.' Meaning they'd tried everyone else in the business and no one was available. On Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young said to me, 'Your career's the wrong way round.' I said to her, 'I think it's the right way round actually.' Most people have success in their 20s and then it starts to fade away. Mine's just got better and better and better.' In 2010, she was awarded an MBE, presented by the queen, upgraded to a CBE in King Charles's 2025 new year honours list. Reid was actually famous in her 20s – again a household face rather than name, as Ken Barlow's first wife, Valerie, in Coronation Street. She made her debut in 1961, and was electrocuted by hairdryer a decade later – still one of the iconic soap deaths. Reid says she was desperate to leave. 'I said, 'I have to go – I'm going mad.'' Was she bored? 'Oh yeah! I was so frustrated. I didn't get a laugh in nine years.' She thinks that being in Coronation Street pigeonholed her as northern and working class. Didn't she tell casting directors that she was privately educated and more than capable of playing posh? 'Honey, have you ever met a casting director? Once you've done Coronation Street, you're working class. I do think that hangs about.' Even if she was married to the upwardly mobile teacher Ken Barlow? 'Well, he's pseudo-middle class!' she says dismissively. 'God, I don't know how he's stayed in there so long. I would have gone totally bonkers.' I tell her William Roache is in his 65th year on the Street. She looks aghast. 'It suits some people, but it doesn't suit me. No! I would have been in the funny farm by now, darling.' It was on Coronation Street that she met Eckersley, who wrote many of the scripts. She adored him, and tells me how wise and witty he was. 'My husband was the funniest man in the world. You know that thing Clive James said: 'A sense of humour is just common sense dancing'? Wonderful saying! Pete had that pinned up on his office wall. Michael Parkinson said he was the funniest man he'd ever met, and so did Victoria Wood.' She married Eckersley in 1971, the year she left Coronation Street, and got pregnant soon after with their son Mark. But life didn't work out as she had planned. First her mother became ill and then Eckersley was diagnosed with cancer. She became a full-time carer and mother. In 1981, Eckersley died. 'He was ill for a very long time. It was a miracle that he survived that long. We were both 45. Terribly young when I think about it now. I can't really talk about that much.' She looks upset. 'Mark was nine.' How did she cope? 'People deal with these things. You just get on. I wish I'd been the person I am now. I'm much wiser now. I was a fool when I was young.' In what way? Well, she says, Mark had a top education at boarding school, became head boy and went on to the University of Oxford, where he met his wife, but she's still not sure she did the right thing in sending him away. 'He's lovely. He's a film editor. And I've got two lovely grandsons. Family's the most important thing in my life.' When Reid finally returned to work, she'd been away for 12 years, and it felt as if she had to start again with bit parts on TV and in repertory theatre. Wood gave her a break in Dinnerladies in the late 1990s. By now Reid was in her 60s, and this is when she thinks her career really began. She'd never done comedy before except at Rada. 'The relief of working with people like Vic was so lovely. Yeah! Yeah, sad!' And I can see her travelling back to the days working with Wood, the comic genius who died aged 62 in 2016. 'Sad that she's gone. She could never have imagined that she would die before me. Vic was a huge talent. Absolutely huge!' It was The Mother that transformed Reid's career as a serious actor. In an early interview, she said she'd love to be cast in a role where she had to come out of the sea in a bikini and be made love to by James Bond. Here she got her chance, with Daniel Craig, 33 years her junior (and not yet cast as Bond). Reid played the part with such tender yearning and uninhibited passion. The film, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, was groundbreaking. Beforehand, we only seemed to see older women with noticeably younger men if it was played for laughs or weirdness (Harold and Maude) or they were famous beauties (Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, and even then she was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman). 'The Mother changed my life,' she says. Did she realise how radical the part was? 'Not really, no. Roger used to say, 'It's a film about this old granny.' I was only 68!' You were a baby, I say. 'Of course I was, but it's because he was only 40 or something. He said 'We can't cast Julie Christie because everyone wants to fuck Julie Christie!', the implication being that no one in their right mind would want to fuck me.' That's outrageous! 'I know! I know. He said, 'I wanted to cast somebody you wouldn't notice if you passed them in Tesco.' Thanks a lot! You can see why I don't feel I've been valued, can't you!' She smiles. I tell her I think it was a brave film. 'Yeah, but I think they wanted to shock people. I mean all that business about leaning down and giving a …' She stops herself for once. Blowjob, I suggest. 'Yes! And the actual sex was very unromantic. I thought all that was rather ugly, personally. I don't think it was necessary. Nooooo! But young men want to shock the public. And Hanif, who I love dearly, certainly does. I do think it could have been more about the emotion than the shocking thing. I found some of it disappointing. I haven't watched it for years.' It's really good, I say. 'Well I did win the Film Critics' best actress award. That was really important.' Then she changes her mind. 'Oh, it doesn't matter! Who remembers, darling?' At the time, she said it was important to show that sexual desire doesn't simply disappear in older people. 'I don't think it does, really,' she says. What about now, 22 years on? 'Oh, now would be ridiculous, darling, but there you go! No, I don't really think about it.' But what she does think about is desire in general – to push herself, to have fun, to make the most of her life. Reid says it drives her nuts when people in their 60s tell her their best days are behind them. 'A dear friend said it to me yesterday: 'Oh, I'm 62 now – I might never do another play.' Then a taxi driver – I live in black cabs – said, 'It's all over now.' He was in his early 60s, and you think My God! Well, if you don't need those years, give them to me because I could do with them. So many of the most wonderful things in my life have happened since I was 68! I hadn't done cabaret then. I'd not done Last Tango in Halifax. Travelling – I've been all over the place. I can't bear negativity! I can't bear it, and I get so angry with people who give up.' Now she's on a roll. 'I'm a real optimist. I always see the best side of things. My father-in-law was the most divine man, an English teacher, and he said happiness is not something you find – it's something you take with you. Some people will always be miserable, and some people will always find the upside and be happy.' Reid never remarried after Eckersley died. Have there been partners? 'Ah well, that's for me to tell you.' Go on, then. 'No, no, I don't talk about my private life.' Is there anybody in her life at the moment? 'Nononononono! Not for a good long time. I don't like living with anybody. I'm very happy on my own. I just prefer to be on my own. I can get up at two in the morning and play the piano if I feel like it. Yeah. I've got wonderful friends, and I like to get up and do what I want to do. If I want to go to New York today and I've got the money I'll go, I don't have to ask anybody or say, 'D'you want to come with me?'' She pauses. 'I used to think it might be quite nice to be American, but I don't now!' She cackles, and doesn't even mention his name. 'God! What a nutcase!' She says she's having a riot touring the play. Every night she and her co-stars Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus stay up late at night shooting the breeze. Sometimes they are joined by Dromgoole's daughter Grainne, who is also in the play. 'Dominic worries about us. He thinks I'm too wild. He's always saying, 'Go to bed! Go to bed!' because he worries that I live the life too much! But blow that! That's half the fun.' As for the future, she's hoping to take the play to New York, is writing a cabaret that she plans to perform later in the year, and wants to finally get on with her memoir. There's obviously no point in talking about retirement, I say on the way out. She laughs at the idea. Then, with the sweetest voice, she gives me a warning: 'If you write anything horrible about me, darling, I'll come round and put a bomb through your letterbox and blow your house up.' Perhaps we should reconvene in 10 years' time if we're still about, I suggest. 'You don't know! I might be.' And she heads off, singing: 'I'm gonna live for ever, I'm gonna learn how to fly!' By Royal Appointment is at the Mayflower theatre, Southampton, 9-12 July; Richmond theatre, London, 22-26 July; the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, 29 July-2 August; and the Lowry, Salford, 5-9 August
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Anne Reid on fame, desire and ambition at 90: ‘The most wonderful things have happened since I was 68!'
Anne Reid wants to get one thing straight from the off. She adores working with the director Dominic Dromgoole. 'He treats actors like grownups. Some directors feel as if they've got to play games and teach you how to act. But a conductor doesn't teach a viola player how to play the blooming instrument, does he?' She talks about directors who get actors to throw bean bags at each other and go round the room making them recite each other's names. 'Blimey! I want to be an adult. I think I've earned it now.' She pauses. Reid has always been a master of the timely pause. 'You can't get more adult than me and be alive really, can you, darling?' The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Reid turned 90 in May. She celebrated by going on a national tour with Daisy Goodwin's new play, By Royal Appointment. I catch up with the show at Cheltenham's Everyman theatre. She's already done Bath. Then there's Malvern, Southampton, Richmond, Guildford and Salford. I feel knackered just thinking about it, I say. She gives me a look. 'Oh, they send me in cars. I don't have to toil much!' Yesterday she did a double shift – matinee and evening show. Reid is magnificent as the queen in this witty, moving drama, directed by Dromgoole. The play documents Elizabeth II's years on the throne via relationships with her dress designer, milliner and, most poignantly, her dresser. We witness the major events of her reign backstage as her team prepares appropriate outfits for them. Reid's queen is fabulously multifaceted – funny and mischievous, loyal and dutiful, devastated and disappointed, nostalgic and lustful. There are myriad lines to learn and she's on stage virtually the whole two hours. When Reid emerged for the evening performance's encore, she looked as if she could have happily popped out a third show of the day. She tells me she's delighted with the part, not least because it's so different from the roles she played earlier in her career. Back then she tended to be cast as working-class mothers tethered to the kitchen or women working in aprons (Victoria Wood's canteen comedy Dinnerladies, the cook in the revival of Upstairs Downstairs). 'I've always been below-stairs, and you can't get more upstairs than the queen!' The weird thing is, she says, she grew up in a middle-class family and was privately educated. Her grandfather, father and all three brothers were journalists. Reid's dad was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and she discovered in 2015 (when participating in the genealogy TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) that he also had a sideline spying for the British in the second world war. Her brother Colin was a columnist for the Daily Mail, and her husband Peter Eckersley worked for the Guardian before becoming head of drama at Granada, which is where they met. Did she ever fancy a career in journalism? 'No, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. My dad wanted me to be a performer because my grandma was some sort of small-time performer. I had a letter from him in the war saying, 'I want you to drink milk when Mummy gives it to you because that will make you strong, but most of all I want you to learn elocution and to sing and dance.'' She was sent to boarding school in Wales, dutifully took the elocution lessons and lost her geordie accent, and her teacher told her parents that Anne was a born actor. She went to Rada and was the only girl in her year to win a prize. For the past couple of decades, her parts have been more varied and challenging. Now she's best known as the genteel Celia in the BBC's comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax; the family matriarch Muriel in Russell T Davies's dystopian series Years and Years; the grande dame Lady Denham in the Jane Austen adaptation Sanditon; and the mousy May, who has a sizzling affair with her daughter's boyfriend in the 2003 movie The Mother. All of them dream roles, beautifully played. Reid is a household face rather than name. When I tell friends I'm interviewing her, most look blank. Then I show them pictures of her best-known roles, and they say they love her. We meet in the boardroom at the Everyman. Reid is elegantly casual – shirt, slacks, a dash of lipstick. She can look a little sour and disapproving, then she smiles and her face lights up. It's one of Reid's great dramatic gifts, transforming her from dour curmudgeon to empathetic beauty (and vice versa) in a flicker. Your career has been amazing, I say. She gently rebukes me. 'Well, it hasn't, actually, darling!' Give me a chance, I say – I mean in recent years. 'Yes, right! Well, in the beginning I don't think casting directors rated me. A casting director said to me once, 'Dear Anne, you always help us out when we're absolutely desperate.' Meaning they'd tried everyone else in the business and no one was available. On Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young said to me, 'Your career's the wrong way round.' I said to her, 'I think it's the right way round actually.' Most people have success in their 20s and then it starts to fade away. Mine's just got better and better and better.' In 2010, she was awarded an MBE, presented by the queen, upgraded to a CBE in King Charles's 2025 new year honours list. Reid was actually famous in her 20s – again a household face rather than name, as Ken Barlow's first wife, Valerie, in Coronation Street. She made her debut in 1961, and was electrocuted by hairdryer a decade later – still one of the iconic soap deaths. Reid says she was desperate to leave. 'I said, 'I have to go – I'm going mad.'' Was she bored? 'Oh yeah! I was so frustrated. I didn't get a laugh in nine years.' She thinks that being in Coronation Street pigeonholed her as northern and working class. Didn't she tell casting directors that she was privately educated and more than capable of playing posh? 'Honey, have you ever met a casting director? Once you've done Coronation Street, you're working class. I do think that hangs about.' Even if she was married to the upwardly mobile teacher Ken Barlow? 'Well, he's pseudo-middle class!' she says dismissively. 'God, I don't know how he's stayed in there so long. I would have gone totally bonkers.' I tell her William Roache is in his 65th year on the Street. She looks aghast. 'It suits some people, but it doesn't suit me. No! I would have been in the funny farm by now, darling.' It was on Coronation Street that she met Eckersley, who wrote many of the scripts. She adored him, and tells me how wise and witty he was. 'My husband was the funniest man in the world. You know that thing Clive James said: 'A sense of humour is just common sense dancing'? Wonderful saying! Pete had that pinned up on his office wall. Michael Parkinson said he was the funniest man he'd ever met, and so did Victoria Wood.' She married Eckersley in 1971, the year she left Coronation Street, and got pregnant soon after with their son Mark. But life didn't work out as she had planned. First her mother became ill and then Eckersley was diagnosed with cancer. She became a full-time carer and mother. In 1981, Eckersley died. 'He was ill for a very long time. It was a miracle that he survived that long. We were both 45. Terribly young when I think about it now. I can't really talk about that much.' She looks upset. 'Mark was nine.' How did she cope? 'People deal with these things. You just get on. I wish I'd been the person I am now. I'm much wiser now. I was a fool when I was young.' In what way? Well, she says, Mark had a top education at boarding school, became head boy and went on to the University of Oxford, where he met his wife, but she's still not sure she did the right thing in sending him away. 'He's lovely. He's a film editor. And I've got two lovely grandsons. Family's the most important thing in my life.' When Reid finally returned to work, she'd been away for 12 years, and it felt as if she had to start again with bit parts on TV and in repertory theatre. Wood gave her a break in Dinnerladies in the late 1990s. By now Reid was in her 60s, and this is when she thinks her career really began. She'd never done comedy before except at Rada. 'The relief of working with people like Vic was so lovely. Yeah! Yeah, sad!' And I can see her travelling back to the days working with Wood, the comic genius who died aged 62 in 2016. 'Sad that she's gone. She could never have imagined that she would die before me. Vic was a huge talent. Absolutely huge!' It was The Mother that transformed Reid's career as a serious actor. In an early interview, she said she'd love to be cast in a role where she had to come out of the sea in a bikini and be made love to by James Bond. Here she got her chance, with Daniel Craig, 33 years her junior (and not yet cast as Bond). Reid played the part with such tender yearning and uninhibited passion. The film, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, was groundbreaking. Beforehand, we only seemed to see older women with noticeably younger men if it was played for laughs or weirdness (Harold and Maude) or they were famous beauties (Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, and even then she was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman). 'The Mother changed my life,' she says. Did she realise how radical the part was? 'Not really, no. Roger used to say, 'It's a film about this old granny.' I was only 68!' You were a baby, I say. 'Of course I was, but it's because he was only 40 or something. He said 'We can't cast Julie Christie because everyone wants to fuck Julie Christie!', the implication being that no one in their right mind would want to fuck me.' That's outrageous! 'I know! I know. He said, 'I wanted to cast somebody you wouldn't notice if you passed them in Tesco.' Thanks a lot! You can see why I don't feel I've been valued, can't you!' She smiles. I tell her I think it was a brave film. 'Yeah, but I think they wanted to shock people. I mean all that business about leaning down and giving a …' She stops herself for once. Blowjob, I suggest. 'Yes! And the actual sex was very unromantic. I thought all that was rather ugly, personally. I don't think it was necessary. Nooooo! But young men want to shock the public. And Hanif, who I love dearly, certainly does. I do think it could have been more about the emotion than the shocking thing. I found some of it disappointing. I haven't watched it for years.' It's really good, I say. 'Well I did win the Film Critics' best actress award. That was really important.' Then she changes her mind. 'Oh, it doesn't matter! Who remembers, darling?' At the time, she said it was important to show that sexual desire doesn't simply disappear in older people. 'I don't think it does, really,' she says. What about now, 22 years on? 'Oh, now would be ridiculous, darling, but there you go! No, I don't really think about it.' But what she does think about is desire in general – to push herself, to have fun, to make the most of her life. Reid says it drives her nuts when people in their 60s tell her their best days are behind them. 'A dear friend said it to me yesterday: 'Oh, I'm 62 now – I might never do another play.' Then a taxi driver – I live in black cabs – said, 'It's all over now.' He was in his early 60s, and you think My God! Well, if you don't need those years, give them to me because I could do with them. So many of the most wonderful things in my life have happened since I was 68! I hadn't done cabaret then. I'd not done Last Tango in Halifax. Travelling – I've been all over the place. I can't bear negativity! I can't bear it, and I get so angry with people who give up.' Now she's on a roll. 'I'm a real optimist. I always see the best side of things. My father-in-law was the most divine man, an English teacher, and he said happiness is not something you find – it's something you take with you. Some people will always be miserable, and some people will always find the upside and be happy.' Reid never remarried after Eckersley died. Have there been partners? 'Ah well, that's for me to tell you.' Go on, then. 'No, no, I don't talk about my private life.' Is there anybody in her life at the moment? 'Nononononono! Not for a good long time. I don't like living with anybody. I'm very happy on my own. I just prefer to be on my own. I can get up at two in the morning and play the piano if I feel like it. Yeah. I've got wonderful friends, and I like to get up and do what I want to do. If I want to go to New York today and I've got the money I'll go, I don't have to ask anybody or say, 'D'you want to come with me?'' She pauses. 'I used to think it might be quite nice to be American, but I don't now!' She cackles, and doesn't even mention his name. 'God! What a nutcase!' She says she's having a riot touring the play. Every night she and her co-stars Caroline Quentin and James Dreyfus stay up late at night shooting the breeze. Sometimes they are joined by Dromgoole's daughter Grainne, who is also in the play. 'Dominic worries about us. He thinks I'm too wild. He's always saying, 'Go to bed! Go to bed!' because he worries that I live the life too much! But blow that! That's half the fun.' As for the future, she's hoping to take the play to New York, is writing a cabaret that she plans to perform later in the year, and wants to finally get on with her memoir. There's obviously no point in talking about retirement, I say on the way out. She laughs at the idea. Then, with the sweetest voice, she gives me a warning: 'If you write anything horrible about me, darling, I'll come round and put a bomb through your letterbox and blow your house up.' Perhaps we should reconvene in 10 years' time if we're still about, I suggest. 'You don't know! I might be.' And she heads off, singing: 'I'm gonna live for ever, I'm gonna learn how to fly!' By Royal Appointment is at the Mayflower theatre, Southampton, 9-12 July; Richmond theatre, London, 22-26 July; the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, 29 July-2 August; and the Lowry, Salford, 5-9 August
Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The late Queen's most meaningful outfits are getting a new lease of life
' Never complain, never explain ' is a motto that has become synonymous with the late Queen Elizabeth II. Yet one way in which she did convey a surprising amount was through her wardrobe, using it to win favour in the countries she visited, to pay homage to her ancestry, or even to subtly communicate her political leanings. Now the influence of the people behind the monarch's wardrobe – the Designer, the Milliner and the Dresser – are the subject of a new play. Described by the playwright Daisy Goodwin as an 'emotional journey in 12 dresses', By Royal Appointment, which opens at the Bath Playhouse today, looks at how the late Queen's wardrobe was decided on behind the scenes. Particular focus is given to the late Queen's Dresser, Angela Kelly, and the considerable influence that she exerted as one of Her Majesty's closest confidantes – quite the feat for a working class girl from Liverpool. For costume designer Jonathan Fensom, it was a full circle moment, after he wrote his university thesis on the 'mute monarch', and what she was trying to communicate with what she wore. 'I don't think she was particularly interested in fashion per se, but everything was symbolic,' he explains. 'She wanted to create a sense of continuity within her own reign, and the longer it went on the more important that became.' Here, we decode eight of the outfits featured in the play and what the late Queen was trying to communicate with each of them. A fashion-forward choice for Prince Charles's Investiture, 1969 The first look focused on in the play is the pale primrose yellow ensemble and Tudor-style gable hat she wore to her son Prince Charles's Investiture as the Prince of Wales. 'From Daisy's point of view, it was the first really iconic outfit that everybody remembers who was around at that time,' explains Fensom. 'When the hat arrived we were all looking at it like an ancient treasure, because it's the most extraordinary shape.' Made by French milliner Simone Mirman (who created pieces for Christian Dior, Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell), the hat was both a callback to when the Prince of Wales was first invested, and the fashion of the time, which had been heavily inspired by the success of Renaissance films like Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. 'Lord Snowdon designed the ceremony, and he wanted to be a bit fashionable about it,' explains Fensom. 'When you look at the Queen's dress, it looks very Pierre Cardin.' Parisian chic to say goodbye to the Duke of Windsor, 1972 For her state visit to France in 1972, the late Queen commissioned her go-to designers, Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, to create a series of chic looks. During the trip, she took a brief detour from official duty to visit her dying uncle, the disgraced Duke of Windsor, at his home Villa Windsor just outside of Paris. She chose a chic jacquard coat for the occasion, no doubt keenly aware of both her uncle and his wife's fastidious approach to fashion. In a particularly touching move, the Duke reportedly fully dressed for his niece's visit, despite the great pain it would have caused him. Pretty in pink at her Silver Jubilee, 1977 It would be easy to think that the late Queen's choice of a Hardy Amies baby pink dress and matching hat for her Silver Jubilee was inconsequential. Yet as ever with the late royal, it was a sartorial Easter egg of sorts. That's because Her Majesty was subtly referencing the last Jubilee that she had attended – the Silver Jubilee of her grandfather, King George V in 1935 – when she had worn pink as a little girl. 'When the Queen asked for it to be made in pink, they first came back with a bubblegum pink version,' shares Fensom. 'Then she said, no, she wanted it to be the same shade as at her grandfather's Silver Jubilee.' It kickstarted something of a trend, with pink becoming a popular colour for members of the Royal Family to wear at subsequent Jubilees. At the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Zara Tindall, Lady Louise Windsor, the Duchess of Edinburgh, Lady Sarah Chatto and Lady Frederick Windsor all wore variations of the shade. Black for her 'annus horribilis', 1992 1992 was a bad year for the late Queen on all accounts. Windsor Castle was severely damaged by a fire, Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated, and the Duchess of York was caught getting her toes sucked by a man that was not her husband Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. During a speech she gave at the Guildhall to mark 40 years since her accession, she famously dubbed it her 'annus horribilis'. Rather uncharacteristically, she chose to wear all black for the occasion, looking almost as if she was in mourning – perhaps indicating a flair for the dramatic. Royal purple at Prince Edward's wedding, 1999 In the years after joining the late Queen's staff, her Dresser, Angela Kelly, was credited with giving Her Majesty an image overhaul, adding some much-needed glamour to the wardrobe of the nation's grandmother. Case in point is the elegant lilac gown that the late Queen wore for the 1999 wedding of her youngest son, Prince Edward. Featuring sheer sleeves, elaborate beading on the bodice and a pleated skirt, and accessorised with her trademark gloves and a playful feathered fascinator, it was certainly more daring than what she wore to her elder children's weddings, though theirs had been much more high profile affairs of course. Emerald for a groundbreaking visit to the Republic of Ireland, 2011 When the late Queen visited other countries, she would often nod to their heritage via a symbolic brooch or colour palette that matched the flag. But on certain occasions, she also used her look to launch a more significant charm offensive. Such was the case in 2011, when she became the first monarch in over a century to visit the Republic of Ireland. Selecting an emerald green colour palette, she made her intention for friendship clear from the moment she stepped off the plane, immediately dispelling any anguish over the visit. For the state banquet at Dublin Castle later that evening, she changed into a specially made gown with particular significance, as Kelly described in her book: 'The Queen was very specific in her guidance: The gown featured more than two thousand silk shamrocks especially designed for the dress and sewn by hand.' The 'Brexit' hat, 2017 In 2017 the late Queen made headlines after arriving at the Opening of Parliament wearing a bright blue dress coat and a matching hat, which also featured yellow floral embellishment, thought to resemble the EU flag. Coming as it did just a few months after the Brexit vote, the monarch's choice of colour palette looked to symbolise a warmth towards Europe and even the suggestion that she would not have voted to leave. 'I think she had become very brave with her fashion then,' says Fensom. 'Because it was so obvious, wasn't it?' In a kilt and a cardigan in her last photograph, 2022 It is perhaps fitting that in her final image as monarch, the late Queen looked the most authentically herself, wearing a kilt, blouse and cardigan and carrying her signature Launer handbag for a day of meetings at her beloved Scottish summer home, Balmoral. While the actress playing the late Queen, 90-year-old Anne Reid, doesn't change into every costume featured (instead they are shown on mannequins), Fensom says there was a poignancy to showing her in this one. 'It's what everyone remembers as the last thing they saw her in,' he says.
BBC News
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Front Row Daisy Goodwin on her play about the late Queen and her dresser
Daisy Goodwin discusses her debut play, By Royal Appointment, which stars Anne Reid as Queen Elizabeth and Caroline Quentin as her dresser, and which opens this week at Theatre Royal, Bath. The life and legacy of Irish novelist playwright and poet Edna O'Brien is discussed by writer Jan Carson and the director of the documentary Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story, Sin?ad O?Shea. And we hear from the curator of Design & Disability, an exhibition at the V&A in London which showcases the contributions of Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people to contemporary design and culture since the 1940s. Plus Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst pays tribute to American writer Edmund White, whose death has just been announced. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan
