Sex, secrets and shame at heart of high society
A VERY BRITISH SCANDAL TELLS THE SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF THE DUCHESS OF ARGYLL’S DIVORCE. GEMMA DUNN FINDS OUT MORE
IT was a divorce that gripped the nation in the Sixties with its aristocratic protagonists, and tale of sordid sex and intrigue.
Now it has been turned into a three part drama by the team behind 2018’s A Very English Scandal, a dramatisation of the 1976–1979 Jeremy Thorpe scandal.
Called A Very British Scandal, it offers up a feminist reframing of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll’s highprofile divorce: one of the most notorious legal cases of the 20th century.
WandaVision’s Paul Bettany plays the Duke, but at the heart of the tale is Duchess Margaret (Claire Foy), who was once famed for her charisma and beauty but became embroiled in allegations of forgery, theft, drug-taking, and the exposé of an explicit Polaroid of her with an unknown man.
The Duke accused his wife of infidelity and produced a list of 88 different men. Some were gay and had never been involved with Margaret but she chose not to challenge the account, since homosexuality was still a crime and it would have implicated her friends.
As her contemporaries, the press, and the judiciary sought to vilify her, Margaret – who had inherited her title after marrying in 1951 – kept her head held high as she was betrayed by her friends and shamed by a society that revelled in her fall from grace.
But was widespread institutional misogyny at play? It certainly needs exploring, believes screenwriter Sarah Phelps, who was keen to re-examine the case through a female lens.
“I felt very strongly that (Margaret) had been punished for being a woman, for being visible, for refusing to back down, be a good girl and go quietly.
“This drama is my tribute to her,” says the Dublin Murders writer, who shunned gossip in favour of authentic court transcripts when doing her research.
She says she thought about how she believes Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex has been treated when writing the drama. “I think a lot about Meghan Markle. “There’s a prevailing idea that if you’re in the public game, you’re fair game – you’re meat. If you put yourself out there and if you get bruised, so what?
That’s your job. Your job is to be ripped apart by us and that’s who I was thinking a lot about when I was writing this.”
Up until now it felt like the Duchess of Argyll had been forgotten, suggests Claire, 37.
“That is what I found really interesting about trying to understand her as a person...” muses the star, a two-time Emmy winner for Netflix’s The Crown.
“You look at photographs of her and she is not photogenic, you would look at her and go: ‘She doesn’t look like she’s massively impressive as a person.’ She just looks like a woman in a dress, in a certain period of time.
“(Yet) in that period of time, she was the height of class, fashion, a beauty of interest.
“Everyone was fascinated by her.
But she hasn’t been remembered in that sense of being an icon – they did a very good job of diminishing her and silencing her.”
For that very reason, it was vital to Claire that her portrayal was honest.
“I’ve always really firmly believed that, regardless of who she was, she was a deeply flawed woman, who put her trust in the wrong people.
“She was incredibly gullible, vulnerable, really not street wise in any shape or form and was very entitled, very privileged and very spoiled.
“She is sort of deeply unlikable and you question her all the time, but fundamentally, when the chips are down and when she’s in this situation and she’s been treated in the way she’s been treated, you can see right and wrong.
“So many women are in the position that she is in, but they don’t have the means, the funds, the time, and they don’t have the inclination, to be able to fight like she could fight,” the Stockport-born actor adds.
“She was still belittled, and shamed, and put down and I think that is why she’s sympathetic.
“I hope, to a modern audience, basically now we can look back and go, ‘That was pretty bad, the way we treated that woman’.”
What would Margaret have made of the drama?
“She would have hated me. She would have been appalled,” the mother-of-one says of the late Duchess.
“Oh my God! I can just almost hear her scathing, deeply disappointed that it’s me and not many other people that I could name.
“I’m so low class, look at her. I love her even more for the fact that she would hate me.
“There are so many stories that I have heard about her from people who knew her and oh my God, she was amazing. The stuff she did was extraordinary.”
As for liking her subject, “I think ‘like’ is a really boring word; I’m not really in the market for making dramas about people who are likeable,” answers Claire, who will next star in Sarah Polley’s new movie, Women Talking, alongside Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand.
“Nice is really great because there’s lots of nice people and it’s lovely to be nice, and it’s nice to be liked.
“But I think with someone like this, to do that I think is to overlook the love that you can have for someone whilst also looking at them and going: ‘You are making so many errors in your life’.
“So to have sympathy for them, and to understand and to genuinely see someone for their actions and how they’re behaving I think is really important,” she finishes. “The outcome of this programme should not be that people like her.”
I can just almost hear her scathing, deeply disappointed that it’s me and not many other people that I could name Claire Foy on what the Duchess of Argyll would make of A Very British Scandal
A Very British Scandal starts on BBC1 on Boxing Day at 9pm