 |
| Photo Credit: AP. |
(AP) - In the spring of 2012, portrait artist Ralph Heimans stood on the Cosmati pavement of Westminster Abbey and awaited the subject of his latest commission, Queen Elizabeth II. When she approached, he says, it was an extraordinary moment.
“She was
wearing her Robe of State, with four footmen holding it, and as she came down
the long corridor it was a very theatrical kind of entrance,” Heimans said soon
after he had learned that the queen had died Thursday at age 96.
After
spending an hour the queen, “discussing niceties,” he came away with “a sense
of how thoughtful she was, almost a sense of shyness, an introspective
quality.” In his oil painting, which hangs in Westminster, he drew her as a
solitary, even brooding figure, her eyes cast down, with the vastness of
Westminster behind her like so much weight from the past — and present.
“I wanted to
show her in this private moment, with a certain gravity about her,” he says.
Over the
past 70 years, authors, filmmakers, playwrights, songwriters and painters have
responded to the queen as both symbol and human being, whether commenting on
the heights of her position or attempting to tease out the inner life of a
woman who spoke infrequently in public and avoided personal revelations. The
dual qualities, majesty and mystery, found her imagined in settings ranging
from the sobriety of royal art to the rage of punk music to the varied
characterizations of film and television.
“I think
because she was a constant presence who didn’t say very much, it allowed people
to project on her in different ways,” says Elizabeth Holmes, whose “HRH: So
Many Thoughts on Royal Style” was published in 2020. “Also, you can very easily
make people look like the Queen. You can take that as a starting point and
run.”
On film, the
queen has been fictionalized in everything from Helen Mirren’s Oscar-winning
portrayal in “The Queen” to the farcical “Naked Gun” movies and the grim
“Spencer,” with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana and Stella Gonet as
Elizabeth. But she has been dramatized most fully in the Emmy-winning Netflix
series “The Crown,” which follows her life from the beginning of her reign to
recent times — and whose production was suspended Friday after her death.
When played
by Claire Foy as a young and glamorous monarch, she is seen as finding her way
in her new life, trying to maintain a happy relationship with her husband,
Prince Philip. while approaching her royal duties with the sobriety of someone
years older. Olivia Colman takes over as Elizabeth ages and becomes more mature
and prickly, and flawed, failing initially to travel to the scene of a
devastating mining tragedy in Wales and comfort the townspeople, and proving
unsympathetic to Diana’s troubles with her son Prince Charles.
“I emote. The queen is not meant to,” Colman told Vanity Fair in 2018. “She’s got to be a rock for everyone, and has been trained not to (emote).”
The queen
herself didn’t comment on works about her or always seem aware of cultural
trends: Greeting Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page at a 2005 palace reception,
she seemed unsure of who he was and what instrument he played. But she sensed
her place in world and had enough savvy to appear with Daniel Craig, in
character as James Bond, for a 2012 Olympics video, and enough good humor to
allow herself to be pictured as parachuting from a helicopter with him (the
former was really her, the latter a stunt double).
Fiction
writers enjoyed setting the queen off on unusual adventures. In Emma Tennant’s
“The Autobiography of the Queen,” the monarch flees to St. Lucia in the
Caribbean. S.J. Bennett worked from the premise “What if the queen solved
crimes?” in writing the mystery novels “The Windsor Knot” and “A Three Dog
Problem.”
“She had
such a unique perspective on the world. She was always looking out when
everyone else was looking at her, so she must see a lot of things the rest of
us don’t see,” Bennett, the daughter of a military veteran who had met the Queen,
told The Associated Press.
“It was her
character that fascinated me, not her position as a symbol,” she added. “She
was intelligent, frequently underestimated because she wasn’t traditionally
educated, and endlessly curious about people. In the books I have her eagerly
looking out of the windows of Buckingham Palace while being painted for a
portrait, to see what was going on outside, because that’s what she really did.
She had a very wry sense of humor and a huge instinct for fun, but equally an
almost supernatural instinct for diplomacy, and a world-class sense of duty.”
Musicians
have paid tribute, condemned her and invoked her name for a quick laugh.
For punk and
New Wave artists, she was a monument to be torn down. The Smiths’ “The Queen Is
Dead” mocks the royal family and the succession to power: “I say, Charles,
don’t you ever crave/To appear on the front of the Daily Mail/Dressed in your
Mother’s bridal veil?” The Sex Pistols helped define the punk movement in 1976
with ”God Save the Queen,” in which Johnny Rotten (now Lydon) declares “No future”
as he snarls out some of the most scathing, nihilistic lyrics ever to top the
British charts:
God save the
queen
The fascist
regime
They made
you a moron
A potential
H bomb
God save the
queen
She’s not a
human being ...
Songwriters
otherwise responded with affection. Duke Ellington met her in the late 1950s
and found her “so inspiring” he soon collaborated with Billy Strayhorn on the
pensive “The Queen’s Suite,” for which he arranged a single gold pressing just
for her. In the late 1960s, Paul McCartney dashed off the acoustic, 23-second
“Her Majesty,” with its cheeky refrain, “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl/But
she doesn’t have a lot to say,” and the Beatles tacked it onto the end of “Abbey
Road.”
As he
explained in “Paul McCartney: The Lyrics,” published in 2021, he wrote the song
in part because the queen really didn’t offer many public statements, beyond
her annual Christmas address and the opening of Parliament. McCartney would
meet the queen numerous times, as a Beatle and a solo performer, and even
played the song for her. But, he reaffirmed in his book: “She didn’t have a lot
to say.”
AP National
Writer Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report.