The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  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

  WHY 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.

  None of these actresses brought anything to their roles that suggested the strength of character that Bujold brought to her Anne, perhaps due to the lack of directorial vision and guidance. The 1970 BBC miniseries was different. From t
he start, the creators were committed to the then-innovative conception of a Henry modeled on history rather than either the boorish caricatures of Emil Jannings and Charles Laughton or the tormented egotist of Anne of the Thousand Days. Long before Jonathan Rhys Meyers appeared on the scene, the BBC series broke new ground by showing the young Henry “as an excellent scholar who spoke four languages other than his native tongue . . . a student of mathematics and astronomy, a gifted musician, and a superb athlete . . . most likely England’s first civilised king.”2 The first episode, “Katherine,” was a revelation for many viewers. In the story people were used to, Katherine is the rejected and ultimately discarded wife. In this episode, we see her young and eager, chasing through the castle and tumbling under the sheets with an equally young, ardent Henry. When things begin to go wrong, she is less a piously downtrodden wife than a stubborn defender of her (and her daughter’s) rights. This was also the first and last Katherine whose fair skin and golden hair were faithful to historical description rather than Spanish stereotypes. Annette Crosbie won a BAFTA award for her performance, and deservedly. In her Katherine, we saw a consistent personality develop over time, from a bubbly but regal young woman to a steely monarch who, unlike more clichéd, contemporary portraits, never descends into long-suffering pathos.

  Crosbie was helped by the fact that her character appeared in only one episode, written by just one screenwriter, Rosemary Sisson, who had a clear and steady vision of her heroine. Anne’s role, in contrast, was spread out over two episodes that were written by two authors with very different views of her. She appears at the end of Sisson’s episode as a coldhearted, gossipy, and cackling harbinger of what is to come for Katherine. Then in Nick McCarty’s episode, devoted almost entirely (except for a brief montage of happier days) to Anne’s fall, she suddenly becomes dignified, principled, and much more sympathetic. Between the harpy of the “Katherine” episode and the stoical queen of the “Anne” episode, there is a vacuum, which viewers filled as they pleased. But although the role was not coherent, and some said she was too old (perhaps true for the first episode but not for the second), Dorothy Tutin brought a solidity to her Anne that those who followed her lacked. All of them emphasized cunning and sexual flirtatiousness—traits that, while they may have been true to aspects of Anne’s personality, made her seem too much of a lightweight to fuel the six-year obsession of the king, especially when played by such young actresses. Tutin projected more; she understood that it was not just Katherine who had dignity.

  I saw the BBC series when it first aired on television, and I found it anything but stuffy. For viewers of that era, Masterpiece Theatre and its ilk, while usually dealing with “classics” heavily encrusted with “Britishness” (Alistair Cooke introduced each show sitting in an imaginary English country house), were our first experience of what has become the most popular form of American television addiction: the prime-time miniseries. It didn’t feel “classic-y,” it felt intimate and involving. Until then, only comedy, action, and variety shows had given us ongoing interaction with familiar actors and characters; drama (with the exception of the daytime soaps) began and ended in the space of an hour. Now I became frantic if I had to miss one of the twenty-six episodes of The Forsyte Saga (this was pre-TiVo and DVR, even pre-VCR for ordinary people), was riveted by I, Claudius and Elizabeth R, remained devoted to Sunday night PBS through Brideshead Revisited and even some series that have disappeared from collective memory almost entirely: Danger UXB followed the lives and loves of the young men who detonated unexploded bombs in the streets of London during World War II. Arguably, these shows were the forerunners and inspiration for American prime-time series such as Roots, Lonesome Dove, and The Winds of War. Ultimately, with Dallas and Dynasty, the nighttime series fare became far schlockier. In the early seventies, our tastes were not classier; they were just less jaded, less numbed. We didn’t need sex and scheming to become engaged; a good story that lasted for a while was juicy enough.

  By the time Robert Greenblatt, the award-winning producer of HBO’s Six Feet Under, then president of Showtime and known as “the man who out-HBO’d HBO”3 with such innovative series as Dexter, The L Word, and Weeds, got the idea to do a series on the Tudors, those once-delicious PBS shows had come to seem (as various writers and actors associated with The Tudors put it) “old-fashioned,” “wooden,” “stiff,” “starchy,” “rigid,” and—as Greenblatt described it—“safe in a, you know, ‘BBC’ way.”4 (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, more crudely, referred to previous approaches as “period puke.”5) Greenblatt’s goal for the series he had in mind was to “breathe new life” into the Henry VIII story by offering a “younger and sexier version,” with plenty of beheadings and “more sensual reality.”6 Greenblatt had a certain amount of experience with “young and sexy” when he was executive vice president of prime-time programming for the Fox Broadcasting Company, where he had helped to develop such hits as the original Beverly Hills, 90210; Melrose Place; The X-Files; Party of Five; Ally McBeal; and King of the Hill (as well as the pilots for The Sopranos and Dawson’s Creek).

  Michael Hirst, who studied English literature at Oxford and wrote the screenplay for Elizabeth (and later, the sequel), was commissioned to do the pilot and was expressly asked to do it by Reveille Productions founder Ben Silverman as a “kind of American soap opera” about politics, power, and sexuality, like The West Wing and The Sopranos. “I hadn’t worked in TV before,” Hirst told me in a 2011 phone interview. “And although I had seen The Sopranos, I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Was he asking me to dumb down the story?”7 This was not what Hirst was interested in doing. In fact, one of his pet passions, in imagining a series on the Tudors, was to open up a fresh understanding of the Reformation, so often simply glorified as leading to the “golden age” of Elizabeth and Shakespeare. But in Hirst’s view, it left deep “psychic wounds” in England. He was skeptical about the possibilities of doing this without becoming “didactic,” but after reviewing episodes of The West Wing, which he hadn’t seen before, Hirst became convinced that it was possible to “be entertaining and commercial but about serious things. You could develop ideas, and I could actually talk about important things like the Reformation, but without lecturing.”8 So he decided to “have a go” and wound up in love with the project.

  Among the ideas Hirst was most interested in developing was a revision of the “cartoon vision of Henry VIII as this fat, bearded monster. People seem not to understand that historical figures, behind the iconography, were human beings. That’s the way I approached Elizabeth, and I did it with Henry.”9 At the center of this revision was the actor chosen to play the most post-Holbein, post-Laughton—and, one might say, postmodern—Henry yet. He was not just young, but very young, brown-haired, as physically taut as a J.Crew model, and pulsing with dangerous sensuality. The actor chosen was Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the pillow-lipped Irish actor who had won a Golden Globe for his performance in the CBS miniseries Elvis. Hirst felt that Rhys Meyers would actually bring the Tudor king more in line with historical reality. “Jonny, by instinct, has many of the same qualities as Henry,” he said in an early interview. “He has a short attention span. He never thinks there’s anything he can’t do.”10 Brian Kirk, one of the show’s directors, pointed out that Jonny’s knowledge of the Hollywood star system would give him a “parallel experience to draw on” as the “rock star” of the court.11 Meyers, who admits to having done very little research for the role, continues the comparison: “Henry’s court at that time was the fastest court in the world. If you weren’t in Henry’s court, you were nobody . . . It was the Mecca of entertainment.”12 Um, historians of Francis’s court might have something to say about that.

  On the darker end of the comparisons, Rhys Meyers has also been reported to be a heavy partier and womanizer, with poor impulse control. “Jonny has always been on the brink of going really off the rails,” says a friend, after Rhys Meyers became aggressive with the airport staffer who woke him up a
fter he fell asleep, drunk, on the floor of the airport.13 “He is a clever boy and likes to play mind games,” says another.14 Henry’s behavior—whether aggressive or sexual—was, of course, usually well contained by his sense of the necessary kingly image, but he was prone to sudden outbursts of rage, particularly in later life, and his “mind games” were well-known.

  The younger Henry was also known for his athleticism and was often described as extremely handsome. Of course, there was a certain amount of required flattery going on in these descriptions. But the fact that Henry was over six feet tall, well-built (in his youth), and vividly complected in an era in which life was “nasty, brutish, and short” counted for a lot. Compact, wiry Jonathan Rhys Meyers, seen in terms of Tudor standards, was a very odd choice; a taller, more robust Henry—think, for example, of a slimmed-down Russell Crowe—would have preserved some aesthetic continuity with the real Henry. Joan Bergin, in her costuming, tried to do just this by creatively combining authentic Tudor styling with fashion from other eras—Degas paintings, Balenciaga couture—in order to achieve a “more modern sensibility.” She called this process “deconstructed Tudor.”15 But Jonathan Rhys Meyers wasn’t even a “deconstructed” Henry; he was a radically resculpted one.