The Creation of Anne Boleyn (38 page)

Natalie was in a bind. “I had to reconcile the real person and the character of Anne Boleyn as created in the text. For the actor, the text is your bible. You can try to put a spin on the nuances, but in the end our job is to be the vehicle of the text.” Yet she often felt “compromised” by the way Anne’s character was written for the first season and got tired of “flying the flag of Showtime” in interviews, justifying the show’s hypersexuality and inaccuracies “when in the pit of my stomach, I agreed wholly with what the interviewer was saying to me. I lost many hours of sleep and actually shed tears during my portrayal of her, trying to inject historical truth into the script, trying to do right by this woman whom I had read so much about. It was a constant struggle, because the original script had that tendency to polarize women into saint and whore. It wasn’t deliberate, but it was there.”
⁵⁸

At the point at which I spoke to Michael Hirst, after the last season of the show was completed, he had become much more aware of the long legacy of negative stereotypes of Anne, the tendency of fiction writers and some historians to simply recycle them, and his own complicity. But at the time of the first reviews, he was surprised when some critics “dismissed Anne as your typically manipulative, scheming bitch” and was distressed that “some of this criticism hurt Natalie very much.”
⁵⁹
But Natalie wasn’t about to let it rest with that. During a dinner with Hirst, while he was still writing the second season, she shared her frustration and begged him “to do it right in the second half. We were good friends. He listened to me
because he knew I knew my history. And you know, he’s a brilliant man. So he listened. And I remember saying to him: ‘Throw everything you’ve got at me.
Promise me you’ll do that. I can do it. The politics, the religion, the personal stuff, throw everything you’ve got at me. I can take it.’”
⁶⁰

She told Hirst of her wish that audiences, when the series got to Anne’s fall, would empathize with her. Talking to me in Richmond upon Thames, Natalie was especially passionate about that subject.

“It happened very shortly after she miscarried, remember. To miscarry is traumatic for any woman, even in this day and age. And to be in that physical and mental state, having just miscarried, and be incarcerated in the Tower! If only she’d had that child! It’s horrific to confront how much transpired because of terrible timing, and how different it could have been. It’s one of the most dramatic ‘ifs’ of history. And it’s why it’s such a compelling, sympathetic story. But I knew by the time we’d finished the first season that we hadn’t achieved it. That audiences would have no sympathy for her because the way she’d been written, she would be regarded as the other
woman, the third wheel, that femme fatale, that bitch. Who had it coming to her.”
⁶¹

Hirst listened to her and took her seriously, and the result was a major change in the Anne Boleyn of the second season. Still sexy, but brainy, politically engaged and astute, a loving mother, and a committed reformist. Scenes were added, showing Anne talking to Henry about Tyndale, instructing her ladies-in-waiting about the English Bible, quarrelling with Cromwell over the misuse of monastery money. No longer was Anne simply a character “in the ether.” Rehabilitating her image became part of Hirst’s motivation in writing the script: “I wanted to show that she was a human being, a young woman placed in a really difficult and awful situation, manipulated by her father, the king, and circumstances, but that she was also feisty and interesting and had a point of view and tried to use her powers to advance what she believed in. And I wanted people to live with her, to live through her. To see her.”
⁶²

The execution scene was especially important to Natalie: “By the end of the season, when I’m standing on that scaffold,” she told Michael, “I hope you write it the way it should be. And I want the effect of that scene to remain with viewers for the length of the series. I want the audience to be standing with her on that scaffold. I want those who have judged her harshly to change their allegiance so they actually love her and empathize with her.”
⁶³
However the scene was to be scripted, this would require a lot of Natalie, especially since the show was not filmed in chronological sequence and the execution scene was shot before the episodes that led up to it. At dawn, standing in the courtyard of Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail, the site of many actual executions, she had “a good cry” with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. “It was incredibly haunting and harrowing—I felt the weight of history on my shoulders.” But because she had “lived and breathed Anne for months on end” and had “tremendous sympathy for the historical figure,” it did not require a radical shift of mood to prepare herself for the scene. “I was a real crucible of emotions for those few days. By the time I walked onto the scaffold, I hope I did have that phenomenal air of dignity that Anne had.” Anne’s resigned, contained anguish did not have to be forced, because by then Natalie was in mourning for the character. “As I was saying the lines, I got the feeling I was saying good-bye to a character. And when it was over, I grieved for her.”
⁶⁴

Hirst, too, recalls the heightened emotions of shooting that scene. “That was an amazing day. Extraordinary day. After, I went in to congratulate her. She was weeping and saying, ‘She’s with me, Michael. She’s with me.’”
⁶⁵

The episode averaged 852,000 viewers, according to Nielsen, an 83 percent increase over the first season finale and an 11 percent increase over the season premiere, and for many viewers—particularly younger women—the execution scene became as iconic as Geneviève Bujold’s “Elizabeth shall be queen” speech.
⁶⁶
When I showed the episode to a classroom of historically sophisticated honors students, none of whom had watched the series, there were many teary eyes; among devoted
Tudors
fans, for whom it was the culmination of a building attachment to the character, the effect of the scene—whose last moments were both graphic and poetic, lingering on Anne postexecution, her now-lifeless face still bearing her final, sad, unbelieving expression, caught midair, suspended in space—was emotionally wrenching.

I have watched many actresses walk to the scaffold as Anne Boleyn and I read every book I can get my hands on fiction or nonfiction about her and I have never seen anyone do it with the grace I believe that Anne had except Natalie. The scene where she is walking through the crowd and they are actually touching her, you can see in her eyes and her mouth and the way she breathes that she is trying to hold it together and stay calm. Episode 9 and 10 of season two are stunning due to Natalie.
⁶⁷

Many viewers, in fact, watched the show listlessly after Dormer as Anne left; the rest of the story seemed anticlimactic to them. “Natalie Dormer basically ruled
The Tudors
!,” wrote one viewer. “Her performance was absolutely passionate, genuine, and convincing and that’s why I was devastated when her character died and she left the show.”
⁶⁸
The feelings of this commentator were shared by many. The following season’s finale had the show’s second smallest audience (366,000 viewers), and among those who stuck with it and continued to enjoy it (as I did) there remained a void where Natalie’s Anne Boleyn had been. The ads for the remaining two seasons were successively more sensationalizing—the third season depicting Henry sitting on a throne of naked, writhing bodies, the last season described (on the DVD) as a “delicious, daring . . . eight hours of decadence.”
⁶⁹
But “those of us who were glued to this sudsy mix of sex and sixteenth-century politics know the spark went out of the series when Dormer’s Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold,”
⁷⁰
wrote Gerard Gilbert in the
Independent.

Today, hundreds of fan sites are devoted to Natalie Dormer, who managed, despite being cast on the basis of “sexual chemistry,” to create an Anne Boleyn who is seen by thousands of young women as genuinely multidimensional. Natalie still gets letters from them every day and finds them gratifying, but also a bit depressing. “The fact that it was so unusual for them to have an inspiring portrait of a spirited, strong young woman—that’s devastating to me. But young women picked up on my efforts, and that is a massive compliment—and says a lot about the intelligence of that audience. Young girls struggling to find their identity, their place, in this supposedly postfeminist era understood what I was doing.”
⁷¹

12

Chapuys’ Revenge

Fiction Becomes Fact Once Again

I
N
2002
ROBIN MAXWELL
, who had written a highly praised novel about Anne,
The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn,
was given a new manuscript to read. Arcade editor Trish Todd wanted to know, would Robin give it a blurb?

The manuscript took Maxwell by surprise. Most novels about Anne that were written in the 1980s and ’90s had been quite sympathetic toward her. Maxwell’s own book (1997) is constructed around the delightful fiction that Elizabeth discovers Anne’s diary and learns how much her mother loved her and how “cruel and outrageously unjust” her father had been; the knowledge redeems Anne in her daughter’s eyes and sets Elizabeth up for a lifetime of caution about giving the men in her life too much power.
¹
In Jean Plaidy’s beautifully wrought
The Lady in the Tower
(1986), we find Anne imprisoned, thinking back on her life, wondering “how had I come to pass from such adulation to bitter rejection in three short years”; her reflections are those of a mature, regretful, clear-sighted woman, capable of recognizing her own faults, but very much aware of how her own missteps had been cruelly exploited by others.
²
This new book, however, seemed to Maxwell to be a modern re-creation of the old Catholic view of Anne as a scheming viper.

“I was appalled,” Robin recalled in a phone interview with me. “It was a great read, a page-turner. But she had taken every rumor, every nasty thing that anyone had ever said about Anne Boleyn, and turned it into the truth in her book. You can argue that she had every right because she’s a historical fiction author, but I refused the blurb on principle because of its vicious, unsupportable view of Anne.”
³

The book was Philippa Gregory’s
The Other Boleyn Girl.
In it, the character of Anne is indeed more selfish, spiteful, and vindictive than she had appeared in any previous novel, a nasty, screechy shrew who poaches Henry from her generous, tenderhearted (and very blonde) sister and proceeds to tyrannize her (and everyone around her), barking out orders, plotting deaths, appropriating her sister’s child, and—when she miscarries her final pregnancy with Henry—coercing her brother to have sex with her. Neither
Sleeping Beauty
nor
Cinderella
strikes a more clear-cut division between the good and the wicked woman, with Anne playing the role of the wicked witch and Mary the long-suffering, virtuous heroine. As in any other fairy tale, however, the good are ultimately rewarded and the evil are punished. Anne, having gone to “the gates of hell” with her brother in order to get pregnant, miscarries a deformed child (an idea that Gregory picked up from Retha Warnicke’s 1989 biography), is accused of witchcraft, and goes to the scaffold (in far less dignified fashion than history records) while Mary, with Elizabeth in her arms, retires to a bucolic life with her husband and children.
⁴

Gregory describes herself as a “feminist historian, and a radical historian” and Mary Boleyn as a feminist heroine—apparently because she has sex and yet isn’t portrayed as “bad.”
⁵
(I thought we went past that—and then some—with
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ally McBeal,
and
Sex and the City.
) “It is no coincidence,” Gregory says, “that our prejudiced opinions of women of the Tudor court are drawn from the devoted Victorian historians who were the first translators and publishers of the original Tudor documents, but were deeply committed to their own view of women as either saints or whores.”
⁶
Her novel, in contrast, allows Mary to be both sexual and saintlike, and despite having been “used” sexually by Henry, she is rewarded with the best ending of anyone in the book (which just happens to be a life of domestic happiness). “Mary’s story is one of absolute independence and victory,” Gregory says, and a “triumph of common sense over the ambition of her sister Anne.”
⁷
Huh? Sex is allowed, but ambition isn’t? What kind of feminism is this? The answer to that appears to be: an opportunistic, infinitely malleable one. Gregory, in a more recent interview, complains about how “one-eyed some historians have been” in their depictions of women of power: “They are always portrayed as power hungry, pretty ambitious, manipulative, cold or proud.”
⁸
This sounds like a pretty fair description of her portrayal of Anne Boleyn.