You don’t hold a single position of global celebrity for 70 years without becoming a cinematic figure too. Whether wildly fictionalised or painstakingly rendered in biographical terms, the Queen has racked up a rare screen legacy for a living historical figure. For most of her life she has been treated on film as a literal icon, as close as any actor can possibly come to the impassive crowned symbol of sundry postage stamps. Portraying her as an actual character, with inner life and conflict, would come later.
My first encounter with a dramatised Elizabeth II remains, for me, the most enduring: as the ward of serially incompetent police lieutenant Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun (Netflix). The target of an assassination attempt foiled only by happy, hilarious accident, she’s not a terribly active presence in the film – mainly there to look regally endangered, and at one point pitch a ceremonial baseball with dour poise. But she is sufficiently convincing that, at age eight or so, I was convinced that the monarch herself had agreed to this undignified cameo.
