Queen Olivia: I’d make big firms pay heir t axes to sor ttt he NHS

The Crown star on how she’d fix nation

OLIVIA Colman has told of how she would give tax-avoiding firms a right royal rollicking if she really could be queen for a day.

The Crown star said she would make giants pay fairly so the NHS gets a life-saving cash injection. The 45-year-old said: “I would make all companies pay all their taxes until the NHS is sorted out. “The amount those massive companies avoid paying would fix everyone. Once that’s sorted out, I’d grab a pony and go for a trot.”

Olivia, on screens as the Queen in the third series of the Netflix hit from Sunday, says the hardest thing about portraying Her Majesty was hiding her emotions. She admitted she “can’t hide anything” in real life, so filming scenes based on the 1966 Aberfan disaster in which 144 people died, 116 of them children, was particularly tough. Olivia said appearing closedoff was “the hardest thing ever, to play someone much stronger emotionally than me”. She added: “When we filmed the scenes with the tributes and the flowers and the toys, the director would say, ‘Pretend you’re just judging a flower competition’, because if I thought about what it actually was, I couldn’t cope.”

Oscar-winner Olivia also said it is “cruel” to make someone so repressed. “You train an animal to do one thing, then expect them to do something else at a whim. She’d been told all her life, ‘Hold it in, don’t show you’re a woman’.”

But the star also told Radio Times the particular appeal of playing the Queen is her being “the ultimate feminist”. She said: “She’s the one on our coins and banknotes. Prince Philip has to walk behind her. She fixed cars in the Second World War. She insisted on driving a king from a country where women weren’t allowed to drive [King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, 1998]. She’s no shrinking violet.”

The third series of The Crown opens in 1964 and will cover the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the moon landing and Prince Charles’s relationship with a young Camilla Shand.

CLASS ACT Stony-faced as Queen in Aberfan scene

ACTING ROYALTY Olivia plays Queen