Watching the Royals:
A history of the monarchy on screen

1890s - 1950s
Saints and Stability

The birth of moving images quickly led to the filming of major royal events.

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was the first spectacle to be filmed, with 40 cameramen from 20 film companies turning the parade into short movies. Three years later, Victoria’s funeral was captured on screen, with the procession shown in theatres, music halls and fairgrounds across the country.

The Queen also opted to capture more private moments, creating home movies of her family at Balmoral. But these clips were only screened privately. The monarch’s public image remained glittering crowns and solemn processions.

In popular culture, filmmakers cast Queen Victoria as a stable and saintly ruler navigating times of political and social change.

1913 saw the release of the silent historical drama Sixty Years a Queen, starring Blanche Forsythe as Victoria. In 1937, audiences flocked to see Victoria The Great. The two hour film shows the young queen turning into a beloved parent to the nation. The movie was so successful that one year later the sequel, Sixty Glorious Years, cast the same actors as Victoria and Albert.

Like other royal movies of the time - such as The Sea Hawk in 1940 or Young Bess in 1953 - the focus was heritage, not scandalous headlines.

1950s - 1960s
The Screen Queen

In 1953, households huddled together to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Many bought their first TV just for the ceremony.

The decision to film the coronation originally raised objections from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who didn’t want the sacredness of the occasion to be compromised. However, with over 20 million people tuning in, the event made Elizabeth II the most recognisable head of state in the world.

In her own words, the Queen’s 1957 Christmas speech, the first to be televised, delivered a “personal and direct” message. Surrounded by family photos she started to lift the veil on royal life, if only for a fleeting moment.

Just a handful of years later, the Royal Family agreed to a once unthinkable venture - a feature length film about their day to day lives.

Those against the idea included the then BBC controller David Attenborough, who warned that capturing the monarchy so closely would take away their mystique. However, filmmakers saw it as a chance to soften and modernise the institution amid the Swinging Sixties. “The Queen did it because she was trying to get publicity for Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales,” says academic Mandy Merck, author of The British Monarchy on Screen. “What could possibly go wrong?”

First broadcast in 1969, Royal Family showed the Windsors eating breakfast, interacting with state guests and barbecuing. Buckingham Palace reportedly hated it. But millions watched something they had never seen before: the royals as people, not symbols of power.

1970s - 1980s
Fairy Tales Gone Wrong

The 1970s saw the then Prince Charles and his bride Diana become a media fascination. American producers raced to turn their love story into a fairy tale film.

In 1982, just one year after their wedding, ABC released Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story, quickly followed by CBS’s The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana. Reviews were mixed. The Washington Post called the CBS film “lazy” and “gaga”.

The couple’s separation also provided gripping viewing. In 1992, ABC released Charles and Diana: Unhappily Ever After - with the same actress from The Royal Romance playing Diana.

“Her dreams of happiness became a grim fairy tale,” states the movie trailer.

1990s - 2000s
Icons to Individuals

In the 1990s, there was a spate of royal films, with an increased focus on emotion over history and myth.

In 1997, Judi Dench starred as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, a period drama about the monarch’s close relationship with Scottish servant Mr Brown, played by Billy Connolly. A decade later Dench re-imagined the queen again in Victoria & Abdul, following a similar script about the monarch befriending a servant Abdul Karim.

In 1998, Elizabeth featured Cate Blanchett as a coming-of-age Queen Elizabeth who transforms from naive girl to savvy, powerful leader. She later played her again in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Meanwhile, Judi Dench put a comedic spin on the same role in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, winning an Oscar for her performance.

What happens in these movies is that “icons become individuals and individuals become icons,” says Merck. “These ideas are old Hollywood ideas…show the person behind the image, show feeling and show moral worth.”

Notably, the backdrop to these movies was a period of profound turmoil for the Royal Family, including Charles and Diana’s divorce, and later Diana’s death, which led to several royal biopics and a series of tell-all-interviews.

2000s - 2010s
Melodrama and the Monarchy

In 2006, Peter Morgan’s The Queen marked a new chapter for the royalty on screen.

This film was the first time a living monarch was played by an actress in a dramatic retelling of recent events. The plot centred on the days following Diana’s death, with acting royalty Helen Mirren playing Elizabeth II as a monarch caught between personal feeling and public duty.

“This opens the floodgates for what becomes The Crown, and any other portrayal you want to do of living British monarchs,” says Merck.

This melodramatic style is also used in The King’s Speech, where Colin Firth plays George VI struggling but ultimately overcoming his stammer, and Young Victoria, with Emily Blunt as the impassioned young monarch. “You want to try to capture someone who is a human being,” said Blunt on the film’s release, “and not just regarded as an archly played monarch. I wanted people to see the humanity."

2010s - 2020s
'Good evening Mr Bond'

Satire and comedy have long been used to portray and poke fun at the crown – take the mad Queenie or idiotic King George from Blackadder. However, once taboos were lifted on using living royals as material, audiences were given more riotous and ridiculous characterisations of Britain’s famous family.

Channel 4’s The Windsors takes public personas to extremes, with a power-hungry Charles and keen-to-please William. “The public don’t realise what sheer, bloody hard work pulling a small rope can be,” Charles moans as he dunks his hand into an ice-bucket.

Yet comedy has also been used to make the royals more relatable to the public. In a jaw-dropping moment, the Queen met James Bond at the London Olympics and then leapt out of a helicopter, stealing the show. The same year, Charles reigned over the weather forecast on BBC, and later paid a visit to EastEnders’ Albert Square.

And perhaps most memorably, in a sketch for her Platinum Jubilee, the Queen and Paddington Bear sat down for tea, and finally revealed what she carried in her handbag: marmalade sandwiches. The connection in the public mind was so strong that when the monarch died in September 2022, many people left Paddington teddy bears at the gates of Buckingham Palace as tribute.

2020s - Now
Soap Opera and Scandal

And finally, The Crown - a smash-hit show which has reinvented how we watch the royals on screen.

By 2020, four years after the first series was aired, the drama had been viewed by 73 million households worldwide, according to figures from Netflix. In stark contrast to the years of pageantry and aloofness, it delves into the royals' personal lives to tell melodramatic stories of troubled souls balancing duty and desire. Royalty is no longer cast as a blessing, but a burden.

“Over the years, the Crown has become a kind of parallel royal news story in its own right, generating controversies and disputes,” says the BBC’s Sean Coughlan.

“But the longer-term question will be whether it is treated as an unofficial history, rather than a fictional drama.”

As The Crown was binge watched across the world, real life royal drama also became primetime public entertainment. Harry and Meghan’s estrangement from the family was fodder for Netflix specials and a tell-all interview with Oprah. A family, once treated with deference, were placed under the public’s microscope, and with the line between fact and fiction becoming ever more blurred, we’re all just waiting for the next episode.

From satire to soap opera, only one thing is constant: we can’t stop watching the royals.

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