ITALY: Speaking at the Venice Film Festival, Dame Helen Mirren says she was "frightened" portraying the head of the British monarchy in the film, "The Queen"

Britain's Queen Elizabeth was unable to comprehend the public's grief at Princess Diana's death in 1997 but was finally convinced to cast aside royal protocol by Prime Minister Tony Blair, a new film shows. Stephen Frears' "The Queen" was screened at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday (September 2), giving journalists the first chance to see the eagerly-awaited reconstruction of the dramatic days following the high-speed car crash in Paris that killed Diana. Mirren, who has just won an Emmy for her title role in the mini-series "Elizabeth I", takes on the unusual task of portraying a living monarch in the film, which also explores newly-elected Blair's role in the crisis. "It was a very, very frightening project," she told reporters. "It's a no-win situation playing someone who's alive, because, as good as you are, you'll never be a tenth as good as they are, so you can't really win. With tightly rolled silver hair in the film and her voice trained to match that of the monarch, Mirren gives a convincing performance full of humour and sympathy for a woman struggling to abandon the stiff upper lip she believed her people wanted. "There's been a change, some shift in values," Mirren's queen says during a conversation with her mother at Balmoral in Scotland. She also contemplates abdicating the throne. "I don't think I'll ever understand what happened this summer," she adds towards the end of the film in a conversation with Blair. "I've never been hated like that before." The British public was angry at what it saw as indifference from the royal family to Diana. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of London for her funeral. The film makers do not claim to exactly duplicate the moment in history, although they say extensive research, including speaking to sources close to the royal family and Downing Street, resulted in a realistic dramatisation. The film has lit up a festival where critical reaction to entries so far has been muted. Frears suggests Blair saw the long-serving monarch as a mother figure, while Prince Charles is cast as someone closer to Blair's position than his mother's. He also fears his family's unpopularity could result in him being shot. The film director told reporters the Queen had been present longer than other person in his life and had naturally entered his subconscious. "So, the Queen has been in my life, in my consciousness for sixty years -- that's longer than my wife, or my children, or my mother, or anybody. She's been there longer than anybody else. So, it doesn't need Freud to say that after a time she enters your unconscious. You know, everytime you stick a, you know, you put a letter in the post, you put picture of the Queen on the stamp and it goes in the post. So, of course, it seems to me you are dealing with matters that are deep inside you." The film contains plenty of humour, particularly when dramatising scenes of intimacy between the queen, her husband Prince Philip, Charles and her mother. "Move over, cabbage," Philip says as the couple go to bed, and the queen dons a woolly dressing gown and clutches a hot water bottle on the night Diana is killed. Michael Sheen reprises the part of Blair that he also played in the television drama "The Deal". The prime minister, himself riding on a wave of popularity at the time as the queen's ratings plummeted, is portrayed as someone genuinely concerned for the royal family. In contrast, his spokesman at the time, Alastair Campbell, is portrayed as a cynical operator. Actor Ethan Hawke was also in Venice on Saturday with his film 'The Hottest State', about the excitement and pains of falling in love. Hawke directed and wrote the movie, which was adapted from his own novel. 'The Hottest State' stars Laura Linney and Catalina Sandino Moreno and is screening at the Venice Film Festival out of competition. ENDS.

ITN Source | September 4, 2006

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