So who IS that playing Mrs T in The Crown? Clue: The truth is out there...
WITH her immaculately coiffed hair, Toryblue dress and determined poise, she cuts the unmistakably assured figure of Britain’s first female Prime Minister.
But this is Gillian Anderson, seen for the first time in her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Our exclusive pictures from the set of the fourth series of the acclaimed Netflix drama shows the X-Files star disembarking from a replica of the Royal Yacht Britannia.
The actress appears to have perfectly captured Mrs Thatcher’s gestures, even down to the way she lightly touches her hair and with her head slightly cocked.
This scene, which was filmed in Spain, recreates the moment Mrs Thatcher arrived in the Bahamas for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in 1985.
During the tumultuous summit, the Prime Minister found herself isolated as she alone opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa – a stance that reportedly angered the Queen, played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman.
One picture also shows Charles Edwards, who plays Martin Charteris, the Queen’s Permanent Lord in Waiting at the time and former Private Secretary. Edwards is known to Downton Abbey fans as Michael Gregson, a wealthy publisher who fathered the illegitimate child of Lady Edith Crawley.
Anderson first sprang to fame in the 1990s supernatural drama The X-Files, with its tag line ‘the truth is out there’. She played sceptical FBI agent Dana Scully, alongside David Duchovny as Fox Mulder.
Her status as a sex symbol was cemented by her role as police chief Stella Gibson in the erotically charged BBC thriller The Fall.
While s o me e yebrows were raised at Ms Anderson’s casting as Mrs Thatcher, The Crown’s writer, Peter Morgan – with whom she has been in a relationship since 2016 – had no doubt that she would be able to capture the Tory leader’s ‘sexual aura’.
French President Francois Mitterand famously described the Prime Minister as possessing ‘the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. Ms Anderson herself has said: ‘Thatcher was undoubtedly formidable but I am relishing exploring beneath the surface and, dare I say, falling in love with the icon who, whether l oved or despised, defined an era.’
While filming for the fourth series continues, the third season of The Crown is set to be released on November 17.