Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman in The Favourite.Yorgos Lanthimos/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
As Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite heads down the Oscars red carpet this Sunday, those who know about the British history behind the film will enjoy the chance to witness the climax to a power struggle that started more than 300 years ago.
The movie’s much-admired ensemble approach – with the three female leads intended to be, as Olivia Colman told one British interviewer, “completely equal” – would have been anathema to the status-conscious early-18th-century women depicted: Queen Anne; Sarah Churchill, First Duchess of Marlborough; and Abigail Masham. The first two spent their early teenage and adult lives in a relationship imbalanced by the fact that the more loving one, Anne, was also a princess with an inferiority complex. Then the latter two cousins spent around five years of Anne’s reign bitterly vying for the position of “royal favourite.” In 1711, Abigail triumphed, although her victory was short-lived; now, the awards season is ranking the rivals back into its own unsisterly hierarchy.
What has placed Colman’s nomination for best actress, while clearly deserved, above the best-supporting-actress nominations of Rachel Weisz (Sarah) and Emma Stone (Abigail) may be partly the prestige that film awards often attach to portrayals of British royalty. Admittedly, this didn’t help Margot Robbie to get Oscar nominated for her Elizabeth I in the recent Mary Queen of Scots, just as Cate Blanchett got no further than nominations for her two portrayals of that same queen. But one wonders whether Judi Dench’s less-than-eight-minute role as Elizabeth in 1998′s Shakespeare in Love would have seemed quite so substantial to the Academy if it had not had literal majesty.
Globe and Mail Oscars guide: Read the list of nominees and our reviews of the films
In The Favourite, the lowly “bedchamber woman” Abigail is first and last on screen, and the Vanity Fair-like arc of the plot is largely hers, while historical sources unanimously tell us that it was Sarah who possessed the most charisma, chutzpah and all-round star quality. Yet the Queen wins lead position. At the recent BAFTAs in London, Colman insisted that she was only “a” female lead, not “the” female lead, and that the ranking system was “weird," but the crowd didn’t take her too seriously.
The film is unusual in giving both light and shade to each of the women’s characters, and, despite her hardness, Sarah perhaps comes out best, as a fiercely intelligent, de facto politician, motivated by concerns larger than personal ambition or self-interest. This is a great advance in the Duchess’s long-running quest to win the good opinion of posterity, about which she cared more deeply than any Christian afterlife. Memoirs that she published in old age did little to rectify Sarah’s reputation, heavily warped and tarnished throughout her lifetime by the first “Grub Street” papers. Then, after Sarah’s death, she faced even more attacks. Most historians belittled her; some, such as the Duke of Wellington or Winston Churchill, blamed her conduct for the downfall of her noble military husband; and nearly everyone depicted her as a hysterical, avaricious and insolent woman. Biographers of Anne have found it hard to empathize with Sarah or to give her the huge space in Anne’s life that she deserves, while biographers of Sarah, myself included, have found it hard to give a fair hearing to Abigail, who left behind no similarly powerful self-vindication. Dozens of British novels, television series, radio and stage plays have reached their own variously shaded judgments about these three very different women whose names were well known to British schoolchildren until only a few decades ago.
Sarah’s memoirs were highly effective, however, in terms of damning Queen Anne as an ignorant, charmless and stubbornly misled child-woman – an image that the Hanoverian monarchy and several generations of Whig historians were then happy to perpetuate. This, together with her obesity, explains Anne’s previous omission from Hollywood’s roll call of royal heroines.
Colman’s character does not exactly rehabilitate Anne’s reputation as a leader, since it places so many of her psychological wounds – the vast number of lost children, her flip-flopping between pride and insecurity – on the surface, alongside her physical problems. Colman’s performance therefore has more in common with Nigel Hawthorne’s George III in 1994′s The Madness of King George than with any of the self-controlled queens previously seen in British costume dramas: Emily Blunt as the chess-playing Young Victoria in 2009, Dench as the morose widow at the beginning of 1997′s Mrs. Brown or Helen Mirren failing to emote over Diana’s death in 2006′s The Queen. The real Queen Anne was probably more akin to these royal characters in that she was a master of inscrutable silences, prized “moderation” and knew when to sit behind a screen so that parliamentarians couldn’t read her expression. It is hard to know whether she would prefer to be forgotten, or remembered as Lanthimos shows her.
All three actors in The Favourite have denied doing any historical research about their characters, so they may not appreciate how ironic it is for these characters to be placed in such high-profile competition with one another once again. And it is almost disappointing that they seem such genuinely good pals that we will catch no jealous rivalry glinting in their eyes on Oscar night, whoever wins or loses. Nonetheless, some of us will be remembering that three real British women, in their graves under Westminster Abbey, Blenheim Palace Chapel and a quiet country churchyard near Epping Forest, also lie beneath this movie’s extraordinary story.
Ophelia Field is the author of The Favourite, a biography of Sarah Churchill (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).