ROGER LEWIS
Goose-faced Sarah Parish, as we know from W1A, is very good at portraying the stupidity of evil.
Her performances consist of giving people a steady, blank stare. There is nothing going on behind those eyes: no cogitation, no ingenious calculation – only sheer aggression, unsullied by doubt or the possibility of mercy.
Bancroft was perfectly made for her psychological style. As a police superintendent, Parish murdered her way around her manor with impunity – she stabbed a pregnant blonde to death, pushed a wheelchair-bound Kenneth Cranham over a ravine, firebombed a safe-house, gave a foreignlooking gunrunner a heart-attack by overdoing the Taser, shot her deputy in the face at point-blank range with a revolver, having earlier beaten her up in the kitchen, and, at the finish, looked like she was about to start pulling the plugs out of a patient in the ICU.
Along the way, she got rivals sacked or suspended, nipped into the lab to tamper with evidence, and all the while Art Malik looked on with approval and Ade Edmondson, the former comedian, looked on with dim incredulity. He must still be missing Rik.
Parish’s Grand Guignol manner would have suited Joan Crawford, who as a star portrayed the stupidity of beauty. Once her looks went, her mind followed. Feud dealt, at considerable length, with her sadomasochistic battles with Bette Davis. It was rubbed in that they were versions of each other – breasts and brains, natural ability and manufactured achievement. We went behind the scenes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte; Sixties hagsploitation pictures, so-called, where erstwhile movie queens were turned, by misogynistic Hollywood, into monsters – but, in real life, Joan and Bette already were monsters.
This could easily have been the opportunity for camp soap opera but, despite the crazy hair and the make-up, Jessica Lange, as Joan, avoided caricature. She showed how being a movie star meant becoming a mechanical construct – everything was deliberative, including adopting children and pretending to be a perfect mother. Apparently, she had her molars removed to cave in her face and accentuate her cheek bones. Inside, too, Joan was a seething mass of insecurity, hyperalert to the possibility of insult – and Stanley Tucci’s Jack Warner and Alfred Molina’s Robert Aldrich weren’t shy of dishing out insults. Nor was Judy Davis’s Hedda Hopper, the gruff gossip columnist who belonged in a Borgia court, and whose floral hats were like flowers of evil.
Like Lange, Susan Sarandon’s Bette, smoking and drinking, was an artful mixture of toughness and pathos. What a great actress Davis was – my auntie, incidentally. Behind those big poppy eyes, she possessed an enormous amount of high-strung, angry intelligence, which is a Welsh trait. Sarandon didn’t give us a slavish impersonation, as such, but she did, now and then, get a vocal inflection, a toss of the head, so perfectly right, it was spooky.
I wonder if, in the future, The Crown will be considered a documentary pageant? The Queen dancing with black politicians, Prince Philip endlessly committing adultery, and the drama of the marriage, secret meetings with Lord Altrincham, the Duke of Windsor coming back to England and applying for jobs, the Queen’s envy of Jackie Kennedy, and so forth. Fact or fiction?
Nevertheless, a lot of money had been spent on post-war fashions, cashmere cardigans, dove-grey lounge suits, the interior of royal trains and BOAC cabins. Gordonstoun, where Prince Charles was bullied, and Prince Philip was, for the sole time in his long life, happy and independent, was appropriately designed to resemble Dotheboys Hall, a palace of peeling wallpaper and tuberculosisinducing damp stains.