January 4 movie: Elizabeth R. Seeing the Cate Blanchett version made me want to watch this miniseries again. I watched it over about 3 days, but since I already wrote about the series in detail I'll put the whole thing in one post this time and just say briefly that it is excellent, very engaging & not at all dry while still fairly accurate to the historical record.
There are 4 DVDs but the miniseries is on the first three. Disc 4 is special features, which as I recall are not that great. Anyway the miniseries comprises 6 parts:
- Elizabeth's struggle to survive before she becomes queen (the first episode begins near the end of Young Bess);
- her relationship with Robert Dudley;
- efforts of the privy council to marry her to a French prince, and more with Robert Dudley;
- the execution of Mary Queen of Scots;
- the Spanish Armada;
- her relationship with the Earl of Essex (also covered in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) and Elizabeth's death.
My initial recollection was that Elizabeth (the Blanchett movie) had made up a bunch of stuff about Robert Dudley, but on rewatching I see that actually they compressed events from a couple of decades (episodes 2 and 3 of the miniseries) as if it all happened early on. For instance a big plot point in Elizabeth was that she can't marry Dudley because he's secretly married. Well he did secretly marry, which did make her very angry, but that was his third wife, decades after Elizabeth and Dudley had given up any idea of marrying each other. She knew all about his first wife; she was even at the wedding!
Also, I thought Elizabeth made that up about her French suitor being a transvestive, but there was a germ of truth to it: actually the older brother, duke of Anjou, was a transvestite. The younger brother, the duke of Alencon, was the one who courted her. Also the movie made it seem like Elizabeth was never interested in the Duke, but in the miniseries she very much was, or at least acted the part.
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