TV’s Crown is being ‘cruelly unjust’ to the royals, says Dame Judi
SHE is widely respected as acting royalty, so when Dame Judi Dench accuses The Crown of being ‘ cruelly unjust’ to the Royal Family, you’d hope producers might sit up and take notice.
Dame Judi, 87, who has played Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, said the Netflix series risked damaging the monarchy.
The Oscar-winning actress blamed it for ‘crude sensationalism’ and blurring fact and fiction in a dramatic intervention in the row over the show’s rewriting of history.
In a letter to The Times newspaper today, she called on Netflix to display a disclaimer at the start of each episode to say it is ‘fictionalised drama’.
She said it would also show respect for the bereavement suffered by the Royal Family and the nation, she said.
Dame Judi, who was made a Companion of Honour in 2005 and is pictured, right, as Queen Victoria in the film Victoria and Abdul, said she was stung by reports that the latest series would include scenes of Prince Charles lobbying to force his mother’s abdication.
She fears it will give an ‘inaccurate and hurtful account of history’.
She wrote: ‘The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.’ Netflix has faced a backlash over the latest series, which is due to be screened next month. But it has repeatedly resisted calls for it to carry a disclaimer. Series five will cover 1991 to 1997, including the separation of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. It is expected to include fictionalised scenes showing Charles, played by Dominic West, lobbying then-prime minister Sir John Major over the potential abdication of his mother. Sir John has described the scenes as ‘a barrel-load of malicious nonsense’. Dame Judi warned such scenes would be ‘cruelly unjust’ and that there’s a danger that viewers would believe it presented an accurate version of history.
She added: ‘No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.
‘The programme makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode. The time has come for Netflix to reconsider – for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers.’
The Crown has been a huge hit for Netflix, and it now spends around £11.5million per episode.
Two years ago, the then-culture secretary Oliver Dowden asked Netflix for a ‘health warning’ on episodes so viewers would know scenes were fictionalised, but Netflix refused. It defended the show this week as ‘fictional dramatisation’.
‘This cannot go unchallenged’