Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens (review)

Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens investigates a timely subject: namely, the resurgent fascination with female sovereigns. The book intersects with current critical work on media that seeks to understand the popular character of stardom and celebrity. Ford and Mitchell return to earlier films on female monarchs produced in the 1930s and contrast them to current media (film and TV) incarnations. Following George Custen's lead in Biopics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), the authors acknowledge that the early expressions of the genre were heavily weighted toward female figures, and they undertake an analysis of the genre's evolution to track cultural, aesthetic, and social transformations in the treatment of queens.

The method of analysis, therefore, involves an examination of written historical and legendary accounts of the queens, studio history, the impact of stardom on the films, and reviews of the films. Furthermore, the study is indebted to Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life (1988) that focuses on “literary accounts of women's lives” and on Heilbrun's insistence on the feminist need “to examine the whole person” (6). In the discussion of the various films’ treatments of women subjects, Royal Biopics, following Heilbrun, accords value to narratives of women's lives that focus on female power and that escape the strictures of male-dominated narratives, with their tendency to “erase female childhoods, ‘mock’ or undervalue female friendships, and rarely depict any but the most conventional male/female relationships” (6).

Beginning with two cinematic adaptations of the “life” of Queen Christina, the authors contrast the Garbo Queen Christina (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian, to Liv Ullman's in 1974. According to Ford and Mitchell, the 1933 film focuses on striking differences between historical and biographical accounts of the queen's physical appearance and scandalous public behavior and Garbo's star persona with its mythology of reclusiveness and her exquisite face—significant divergences that were “airbrushed” into the film. Thus, the book situates the Mamoulian/Garbo film within the Hollywood studio world of the 1930s, with its investments in the machinery of stardom. By contrast, the Liv Ullman portrayal in The Abdication (1974) comes closer to an “unvarnished” portrait of the queen, aligning this biopic with the 1970s’ focus on gender issues associated with the woman's movement and its changing conceptions of femininity and celebrity. This film is a “real attempt to understand the private woman under all the public bluster by digging deep into Christina's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood” (23).

Four biopics of Catherine the Great present the reader with different, if problematic, treatments of the monarch's biography. Paul Czinner's Catherine the Great (1934), starring Elizabeth Bergner and Douglas Fairbanks, traces Catherine's rise to power, but, despite occasional glimpses of the “real empress's policies,” Catherine's portrait becomes yet another validation of the epigram that “power cannot trump love” (37). The Catherine that emerges from the narrative and from Bergner's physical appearance is that of a feminine figure who is “diminutive: smaller than, weaker than, less than a man.” Similarly Josef Von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress (1934) does not offer “a complex approach to power” (51), but rather the “Old World face of Dietrich, dark lips smiling, glinting with avarice” (53). In Ford and Mitchell's analysis, the film's surreal treatment is evidence of its flaunting of history, replacing it with a fascination with Dietrich. More recent biopics of the queen reveal a more evident complicity with politics of the 1990s. Young Catherine (1991), a TV production with Vanessa Redgrave and Julia Ormond, “combines nostalgia for the past with a democratizing homily from the present” (53), and the 1995 Catherine the Great is “part bodice-ripper, part political thriller” (63), conveying the idea that “getting the crown is all right into the twenty-first century” (70).

Biopics on Cleopatra from the 1930s to...