Actress was earmarked six years ago for the role and reveals her admiration for tragic monarch

FOR the past six years, Oscarnominated actress Saoirse Ronan has been secretly visiting Scotland to prepare to become Mary Queen of Scots.

The new film, which stars Australian actress Margot Robbie as the Scots queen’s English rival Elizabeth I, is a role of a lifetime for Saoirse, born in New York but raised in Dublin, and one that could win her a first Oscar.

Saoirse, 24, has been signed to play the part of Mary since she was 18 and despite cast and director changes and success in films such as Brooklyn and Lady Bird, she was determined to make the movie work.

She said: “Since my teens and growing into womanhood, Mary has always been in the back of my mind. She has always been someone who has stayed with me.

“Since I was 18 I’d take trips up to Scotland. That was really important to me feeling connected to that country. And I do.

“I’d worked there when I was really young and loved it. Being able to spend time up there and visit Stirling Castle, Edinburgh Castle, Linlithgow (where Mary was born in 1542) – the places where she’d spent a lot of time.”

Even when Saoirse, pronounced “sur-sha”, was creating Oscarnominated roles such as Ellis Lacey in Brooklyn or Christine Mcpherson in Lady Bird, she now admits she was also thinking about Mary.

She laughed: “I was always thinking about when we were going to do it and how we were going to do it. It’s a fascinating time period. There is so much tension, even when it comes to waiting for a letter to arrive.

“Mary and Elizabeth’s relationship was based on that for a very long time. It means that there is this incredibly intense relationship that has built up over years between them, without them meeting. It was a fantastic thing to play for Margot and I.”

Back in the 90s, Hollywood went tartan-crazy with Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy. This year it’s Mary Queen of Scots and Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce in Netflix’s Outlaw King.

Critics reckoned Pine, an American, nailed the Scots accent and Saoirse had no fear of it either.

Historians have been bristling at the historical inaccuracies, stating that Mary’s Scottish accent should really be French as she lived in France between the ages of five and 18, as she met and later married Dauphin Francis, who was king for a year until he died, aged 16, in December 1560.

The actress, who turned her Dublin burr into cut-glass English for Atonement, said: “It was actually fine. The Scottish accent is different to an Irish accent but they are both very melodic and very muscular.

“The Sacramento accent I did for Lady Bird, for example, was more lazy. The Irish are used to making everything sound like a song so I loved doing the Scottish accent.”

Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Samantha Morton have all played Mary, while the likes of Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren and Cate Blanchett have taken on the role of Elizabeth.

Saoirse said: “There are so many portrayals of her and they aren’t the full story. It wasn’t until we delved into this and I started to read about her that I knew what had gone on, how untrue and unfair a lot of the documents about her were.

“In my research, what surprised me about her was that she was actually politically astute. She knew how to play the game.

“She grew up in the French court and moved to Scotland. She knew the wheelings and dealings of the monarchy and in the palace.

“She is not painted out to be that way by a lot of