The Creation of Anne Boleyn (34 page)

These are matters of interpretation that can make a huge difference in an actress’s portrayal of Anne. When Anne delivered her best-known line—“I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck”—then put her hands around her neck and “laughed heartily” (as Kingston described it), he took her to be showing “much joy and pleasure in death.”
²⁵
The actresses who have played Anne have been too smart to accept that interpretation, but then they have been left with the task of figuring out just what
was
going on. Merle Oberon and Dorothy Tutin eliminate the laughter entirely and have Anne say the line wistfully, as if in resigned acceptance (and in the case of Oberon, with a touch of narcissism) of the reality of the coming confrontation between steel and flesh. Natalie Dormer plays the “little neck” speech as a moment when the unimaginable stress that Anne is enduring breaks through her composure, and both the absurdity and the terror of her situation erupt in a crazy joke and then, hysterical laughter—an interpretation that fits well with the evidence that Anne’s behavior in the tower was frequently unhinged. But Bujold chooses to emphasize Anne’s intelligence and pride rather than her emotional instability, and plays the line as a sardonic response to Kingston’s lame reassurances that the blow would be so “subtle” there would be no pain. Her Anne recognizes cowardly, self-serving bull when it’s thrown at her, and will have none of it. She was, and probably always will be, the proudest of Annes.

The enthusiastic critical reception to Bujold’s performance was an exception to the lukewarm—and frequently hostile—reviews that the movie received when it opened. Vincent Canby complained that it was “unbearably classy” and “conventionally reverential.”
²⁶
But he also said (somewhat condescendingly, I think) that Bujold was “a constantly delightful surprise” whose intelligence was “an unexpected dividend” to her beauty.
²⁷
John Simon, in a piece for the
New York Times
called “Oscars: They Shun the Best, Don’t They?”, described the movie
,
which had garnered ten nominations, including Best Picture, as “a sluggish dullard of a film [that] conforms to Hollywood’s and, for all I know, Dubuque’s idea of a grand, historic document in which regal, larger-than-life-size dummies bestride the screen with pachydermous portentousness, their mouths full of spine-chilling platitudes.”
²⁸
Time
magazine began its review by saying that “it appears to have been made for one person: the Queen of England.”
²⁹
After describing
The Private Life of Henry VIII
as “a superior treatment of the same subject,” the magazine singled out Bujold as nearly, but not quite, saving the movie. “It would have been easy to play the spider ensnared by her own web, but Bujold knows better . . . The performance establishes the star, but not her setting. A great king may be enough to restore a country; a noble queen is insufficient to save a base film.”
³⁰
The
New York Times
attributed the film’s ten Oscar nominations to the beef stroganoff and champagne served at the thirty-five special screenings for Academy members.
³¹
But many critics complained when Bujold, nominated for Best Actress, lost to Maggie Smith in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and celebrated when Geneviève won the Golden Globe.

The critics’ harsh reaction to the film was in part due, I believe, to the tenor of the times. The year before
Anne of the Thousand Days
was released, American soldiers massacred 347 civilians at My Lai. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the target of antiwar rage, said he would not seek reelection. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis motel, and the inner cities exploded. Just days later, SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. In May, Parisian students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. A few weeks later, moments after victory in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel. A few days before, a marginal member of Andy Warhol’s circle, Valerie Solanas, also the founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him in the stomach. Prior to the shooting, she had written a manifesto calling for “systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”
³²
It was not a time for reverence, not a time to romanticize the privileged, and not a time for “stuffiness” of any sort. In 1969, the once-daring
Anne of the Thousand Days
seemed tame and “conservative.”

Wallis also had a crush on history that was not very fashionable during this period in America. He was obsessed with making sure the costuming and settings—and even much of the music—were period appropriate. (Outside scenes were filmed at Hever Castle, Anne’s actual childhood home, and Penshurst Castle, a fourteenth-century manor house a few miles from Hever.) And unlike
A Man for All Seasons
(1966)—which was actually much more reverential toward its subject—
Anne of the Thousand Day’s
language remained “lofty” and without the touch of the casual, slangy ambiance that kept Robert Bolt’s screenplay (from his play) down to earth and seductively intimate, despite its idolatry of Thomas More. Sixties audiences could identify with the witty, antiestablishment dropout (played by Paul Scofield), who remained so cool throughout
A Man for All Seasons
—something the real Thomas More, a ferocious heretic hunter, certainly was not. In contrast, Richard Burton was physically stiff and unfashionably leering. He hated wearing the costumes and was uncomfortable “hiding” behind the beard he had grown for the film. He didn’t like the dancing sequences (and it shows). If it weren’t for his wonderful voice, his Henry would have had no presence at all, especially when compared to the robust performance of Robert Shaw (Henry in
A Man for All Seasons
). That role was much smaller, but whenever Shaw came on screen, his playful but dangerous Henry dominated.
³³

Geneviève, unlike Richard, had an immediate sense of identification with Anne. Wallis “recognized something that was already a part of me,” she told me.
³⁴
Still, to be picked to play Anne was a complete surprise. She had already been in several well-received films, but, as she told me, “was still something of an unwritten page. At the time I was married to Paul Almond, living in the East End of Montreal, and enjoying my life. But I definitely had ambition. When that call came, I was shocked. Pleasantly so, of course.”
³⁵
There were aspects that made her nervous. She was panicked about the prospect of reading love scenes with Richard Burton. (“I can laugh about it now, but it was agonizing.”) And “the English lines were unfamiliar. I’d been schooled in French-Canadian theatre and suddenly I had one hundred and ten pages of English as Anne Boleyn would have spoken it.”
³⁶
But the character of Anne “felt extremely natural to me.”

Her own history had prepared her well to play a young woman breaking through the confinements of convention. She had grown up in a devout French-Canadian Catholic household and spent her first twelve school years in a convent; in an online biography, she is quoted as saying that at the time she felt “as if I were in a long, dark tunnel, trying to convince myself that if I could ever get out, there was light ahead.”
³⁷
But something about her religious training made its way into her attitude toward acting. When asked in 2007 how she prepared for her roles, Bujold answered, “You pray for grace. If you’ve done your homework and, most of all, are open to receive, you go forward . . . Preparation for me is sacred.”
³⁸
But going forward with her own life required rebellion as well as grace; she finally “got out” of the tunnel by being caught reading a forbidden book. Liberated to pursue her own designs for her life, she enrolled in Montreal’s free Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art Dramatique due Québec. While on tour in Paris with the company, she was discovered by director Alain Resnais, who cast her with Yves Montand in the acclaimed
La Guerre Est Finie.

Resnais taught her an acting lesson that “still is in me, will always be with me. ‘Always go to the end of your movement,’ he told me—don’t short-circuit the emotion, the bodily expression, the commitments of the personality you are playing, allow them to fully unfold.”
³⁹
That’s something that Geneviève saw in Anne as well. “You can’t put something into a character,” she said, “that you haven’t got within you. Every little thing in life is fed into the character . . . a word, a thought. I had read something on Anne Boleyn that Hal gave me and I could look at her with joy and energy; Anne brought a smile to my face.”
⁴⁰
I asked her what elicited that smile. “Independence. A healthy sense of justice. And she knew herself and was well with herself. She obviously had such profound integrity in that respect. She was willing to lose her head to go to the end of her movement.”
⁴¹
That’s what we see, too, in Bujold’s portrayal of Anne, especially in that final speech, and it’s why “My Elizabeth shall be queen!” still has audiences cheering for her, unconcerned with the historical liberties.

Most movies of the late 1960s have not worn exceptionally well, particularly with today’s generation of viewers, for whom many of the lifestyle protests of the time seem dated and silly. My students snoozed through
Easy Rider.
With
Anne of the Thousand Days,
the passing years and changing culture have had the opposite effect; my students adored it, especially loving an Anne who seems to become “truer” as the generations have become less patient with passive heroines and perhaps a bit tired of the cutesy, man-focused femininity of many current female stars. “Everything I imagine Anne really was”
⁴²
; “How I always picture Anne—as a strong woman not a sniveling girl”
⁴³
; “The gold standard of Annes”
⁴⁴
; “When I imagine Anne, it is her that I see”
⁴⁵
; “The definitive Anne Boleyn for me”
⁴⁶
; “Pitch-perfect”
⁴⁷
; “So powerful that she turned a big, tough guy like me into a whimpering fool”
⁴⁸
; “A remarkable actress. I will never forget the scene where she and Henry go riding from Hever . . . Purely from her body language, she radiates suppressed hatred toward Henry—just by sitting on a horse! And who can forget her in the blue gown, with jewels in her hair, looking devastatingly beautiful and in total command of herself and the situation.”
⁴⁹

Before I said good-bye to Geneviève in our interview, I asked her whom she would pick to play Anne today. She admitted that she hadn’t seen either Natalie Portman or Natalie Dormer; she lives a fairly reclusive life in Malibu and rarely sees movies or watches television. “But is there anyone who you think would do the part justice?” She was silent for a while, then asked me if she could be honest. Of course, I said. “Maybe it’s selfish, but . . . the way I feel . . .” Geneviève had been so warm and generous throughout the interview, praising all her mentors and influences in her life, but she was clearly a bit uncomfortable with what she wanted to say. So I pressed a bit more, and she responded with an intensity that recalled her performance and made me smile with delight.

“No one,” she replied. “Anne is mine.”
⁵⁰

11

The Tudors

W
HY HAVE THOUSANDS
of young girls, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, become obsessed with Anne Boleyn? In no small part, the answer is Showtime’s
The Tudors
—and Natalie Dormer’s smoldering, brainy Anne. In the years between Bujold and Dormer, other actresses have played Anne—Dorothy Tutin, Charlotte Rampling, Helena Bonham Carter, Jodhi May—but none have inspired the passionate devotion of Bujold’s and Dormer’s fans. Of these four, only Dorothy Tutin is memorable. Charlotte Rampling was a credible vixen in a truly horrible 1972 condensation of the six-part BBC miniseries, which, as in the original, stars Keith Michell; Michell does an excellent job, but the events of Henry’s reign are so compressed that we don’t even get to see Anne’s execution (one review said the made-for-TV movie should have been titled “Henry VIII and, By the Way, His Six Wives”
¹
). Helena Bonham Carter, playing Anne to Ray Winstone’s Henry in the 2003
Henry VIII
(a pretty decent TV movie that no one remembers anymore), was fine but indistinguishable from Helena Bonham Carter in any other role. The 2003 BBC version of
The Other Boleyn Girl
was almost entirely improvised, allowing the actors to interpret their roles as the mood struck them; Jodhi May, who was selected for the part of Anne on the basis of the fact that she was sensual but not conventionally pretty, was most notable for the excited deep heaving of her bosom, which never let up no matter what was happening in the plot. Excited: heave, heave. Anxious: heave, heave. Plotting: heave, heave. Awaiting her beheading: heave, heave, heave.