Harriet Walter — a versatile, thinking artist & a woman playing Shakespeare’s women (b. 1950)

Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane (BBC Strong Poison, 1987) — iconic

Viola in Twelfth Night (1970s) — early in her career, a quick poetic presence

As Brutus in Julius Caesar (2012) — more recently

In a context in which unmarried women were viewed as either innocent virgins, whores, or old maids, it was refreshing to play a Beatrice who is sometimes in-between. If she is a virgin, she is not innocent; and her love/hate for Benedick is a long-standing love/hate exclusively reserved for him, therefore she is no whore. Old maid she may be, but her self-professed scorn for the state of marriage and her one-off originality safeguard her from any pity. In my own life I had experience of this fragile state and had occasionally worn a similar masks (Harriet Walter, “Beatrice,” Brutus and Other Heroines)

Friends and readers,

Another of my actress blogs. I’m in the refreshing position of writing about an actress whose work I have long followed, love well, whose face as Harriet Vane I have used as my gravatar on my longest running blog (where I still sign Miss Sylvia Drake, from Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night) — almost all my actress blogs have been about 18th or 19th century British actresses (two exceptions). At the same time she is one of a number of British actresses since the profession began who writes well, about her art, about theater, and playing Shakespeare’s characters — it was such actresses, those who left interesting memoirs (as well as those who went into directing), who have been responsible for the rise in status serious actresses have enjoyed since the later 19th century.

I became aware of how special she was (that it was not just a subjective idiosyncrasy that made me aware of her presence wherever I saw her & would watch more attentively) when I came across her memoir of her time directing and acting in a company of actresses who were doing all female Shakespeare plays: Brutus and Other Heroines (Nick Hern, 2016), wherein she indeed played Brutus and Henry IV (Bolingbroke), not to omit earlier productions where she was Ophelia (early in her career), Helena and Imogen (she is especially proud of these, so more on this just below), Portia, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice and even Cleopatra. Casting people is an art which does drive down to an archetype they can correspond to (or work against the grain): Michelle Dockery has been Hotspur’s wife, Kate; Keeley Hawes Elizabeth Plantagenet, widow and then wife of Edward IV; Sophie Okonedo, Margaret of Anjou and Cleopatra; Sally Hawkins, Duchess of Gloucester; Penny Downie, Gertrude; Lindsay Doran, Duchess of York, Sinead Cusack, Lady Macbeth (against type) and Judi Dench (defying this, so many).

In this volume she is with Juliet Stevenson the most insightful generally, with Fiona Shaw, the most self-aware (the editor and frequent commentator and voice is that of Faith Evans)

In reviews her performances are singled out, you can find her described individually when she has even a smaller role (nearly consistently in the better ones) — as conveying an intelligent presence, naturally witty, piquant, conveying when she wants a gravitas (and she can walk like a man as well as a Duchess), at times a light poetic presence (when younger), or yearning, recently in the contemporary Killing Eve (rave reviews) she has shown herself up to the hard edginess of a Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect.

Dasha (BBC Killing Eve, 2020) — knowledge of the world making for an underlying melancholy

The trajectory of her career may be seen at wikipedia. She is the daughter of a respected actor, went to and succeeded at demanding academic schools, but preferred drama training to university, even though she had a hard time getting a place until the London Academy of Music and Art accepted her. She was a regular in the troupe with the Royal Shakespeare Company:

Ophelia with Jonathan Pryce as Hamlet (Royal Court Theatre production directed by Richard Eyre 1980)

As Beatrice, coming into her own, consulted in her costume

She was in theater in general for her first ten years, classic and good drama, continuing today; yielding to TV one-off dramas and serials by 1987 (one of her early roles the one I remember first, Harriet Vane — she favored detective heroines, mystery and spy drama even then).  She does what’s called quality drama in the TV serial type: she was powerful as Clementine Churchill burning her husband’s unwanted portrait up after his death:

Clementine Churchill (Netflix The Crown, 2014)

Then she became the present breaker-down of taboos (among other things, playing males); and in these last years, writing, directing and a patron of charities and encouraging young people to enter theater. I just love her appearances in documentaries where she will read exquisitely well deeply effective poetry (as in Simon Schama’s recent The Romantics and Us — along with Tobias Menzies). See her in a series of shots across her career in various roles in costume.

Sandra Richards in her important The Rise of the English Actress, makes Harriet one of her central portraits for recent (20th century) actresses (along with Emma Thompson, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson):

Harriet is one of those successful actresses who used her success to contest stereotyping (sometimes at the risk of being “unpopular on a set”); she also “gravitated towards plays and roles that treat issues on which [she] has strong feelings.” She chose political drama like John Berger and Nella Bielski’s A Question of Geography. A number of the roles she’s taken “question male prerogatives.” She was, early on, cast for one of the apparently most unpopular heroines in Shakespeare’s plays, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well by Trevor Nunn, and she triumphed as a figure of integrity, deep sense of self and passion, partly thanks to Peggy Ashcroft there as Bertram’s mother, the Countess. She says that she must also in a role “still be identifiable as an ordinary person.” She did very much enjoy playing Harriet Vane, a match in unusual sexiness and intelligence for Edward Petheridge’s Lord Wimsey. In two of these stories, he may save her literally, but it is she who unpicks the case.

In my view she has a real penchant for the Psyche archetype at the core of the female detective story as it used be told.

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For me Harriet Walter’s writings on her art, how she works to act and what the plays mean are what makes her so special. She has helped to make me look differently at the plays and consider the actresses who dare inhabit Shakespeare’s women. She (and others in Clamorous Women) asks us to imagine what it’s like to be the only one or one of three actresses on a stage doing Shakespeare; of what it feels like when the director and adaptor (there is often an adaptor) are themselves unconscious misogynists, when they direct you with a lack of sympathy towards the character, re-arrange the scenes to make the character less sympathetic, imagine trying to complain! when what you want to do is change the director’s direction, see the character as a woman might.

I think especially in the cases of Helena of All’s Well that Ends Well and Imogen of Cymbeline — that until I read Walter’s comments, I had not realized how horribly both women are treated, especially Imogen who (like Desdemona) is threatened with honor-killing. I realize that in the case of the romance play, Shakespeare is in part following his atavistic and incoherent sources, but it is up to Walter (and her director and other actors) to makes sense of the character. Probably what is most entertaining and fascinating about her books is her analyses of all the characters she discusses (I can see how she would have done very well as an English lit major)– and she writes in the plainest of perceptive language.

Here she is with (as Posthumous) Nicholas Farrell, a superb actor who breaks all stereotypes of macho male, and would be impressive in projecting neuroticism and remorse

It seemed to me for both female characters, Walter’s choice was to imagine them personally courageous and sure of their integrity, and desiring their husband (as one might today desire some profession). Around such a conception she made sense of the roles. For my part I’m with Samuel Johnson and will never “reconcile my heart” to the callow selfish Bertram, but can accept that Helena could value him (and what a marvelous mother she’d get too!). The fairy tale and poetry of Cymbeline enables the reader/watcher to get further on one’s own, and draws us up over life’s irrational deep griefs. What Walter does is step-by-step tell herself (and now write down) what was her whole reaction and the details in it to the other characters’ demands on her. I felt I was rereading Shakespeare’s play from a wholly new angle, as well as how I might come on stage and who is there.

I was much helped by Fletcher’s Honour Killing in Shakespeare, indeed startled as much as I was years ago when I first read Charlotte Lennox’s 18th century Shakespeare Illustrated where Lennox said, why should Hermione rejoice when she’s lost 16 years of her life. Indeed, I had never thought of what was happening truly from the particular heroine’s POV. Who wants to spend 16 years in a dark room.

Honour-Killing in Shakespeare is not just how horrible is the behavior of all these males towards Hero (Much Ado About Nothing) but a reading of Hero’s lines which shows she is really attracted to Don Pedro, not keen on Claudio and who would be. A careful reading not only of the plays where the equivalent of honor-killing goes on, but the treatment of the women in the history plays (Henry VI had a number of complex fascinating women, an analysis of further story matter which suggests the paradigm in Shakespeare’s mind was not Eve but Susannah, falsely suspected, deceived, and ostracized by the males in her community is a core icon/myth for Shakespeare. Fletcher wants us to see that not only is Shakespeare not on the side of or indifferent to the misogyny of some of his material, but feminist himself (or proto-) in plays like As You Like It (Rosalind), Twelfth Night (Maria is as much an intelligent woman as Olivia is at least able to cope with her household when she puts her mind to it. What is supportive about this book is it close reads in the traditional readerly sense and then you can turn back to these actresses trying to cope with their parts (and other people coping with theirs and the whole theater/film crew). The book is so refreshing; even when you cringe or wince over plays like Titus Andronicus (the Philomel stories) you are asked to see what you are seeing as a woman might. I still am not sure that Shakespeare does not find Gertrude complicit (and cowardly, evasive) rather than drawn along, but the whole context of the world at that court is what you must account for.

True, there is nothing as clearly on the side of real women in the world of the early 16th century as in the tragedy of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (whom Harriet Walter has played). A moment of joy with her steward, now husband Antonio, and many hours (it feels like later) strangled for it by her brother.

I did find Walter’s reasoning over the treatment of Kate in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew not persuasive — especially as I have read and seen Fletcher’s Jacobean The Tamer Tamed, where in fact the women are vindicated (I cannot recommend too strongly reading this play, in print, and seeing it if it should ever come near you — the RSC brought it to the Kennedy Center one year). It is also hard to make sense of Isabella in Measure for Measure, especially in context. Walter and other of the actresses are not beyond special pleading. To return to Clamorous Voices, I did find Sinead Cusack’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth as sensually in love with her husband, attached to him, making up for having no children left, and Juliet Stevenson’s ambivalent driving passion more gripping than the reasonable voices I’ve been following. But as each woman adds to a new way of reading Shakespeare, we can try to enable others to see with us when part of an audience, or teaching — or writing of one of his plays.

But I have digressed too far. This blog is a salute to Harriet Walter’s art as an actress so let me end here on her art as a comedienne: she steals the show, forever after filling the shoes (to use her word) of the bitingly hilariously selfish Fanny Dashwood in one of my favorite Austen films, the 1996 Sense and Sensibility (scripted by Emma Thompson):

“People live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.”

Ellen

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Peter Morgan’s The Crown, Seasons 1 & 2, Elizabeth & Philip, 1947-55

Claire Foy and Matt Smith as the young Elizabeth and Philip in the first phase of marriage

Friends,

Peter Morgan’s (with a little help from Stephen Daldry) strangely powerful The Crown has been for the past two years among the best serial dramas in the subtle naturalistic BBC English style anywhere. It was nominated for and won a number of prestigious awards and if the critical response was at times ambiguous, those who praised praised strongly. I put this first on my Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two area, but over the two days I’ve had it up, I decided to move it here — as a woman’s film even if the script writer and chief producer are men.

The films depict slowly, at length and consistently a development of inexorable embedded emotional burdens each of the major characters finds he or she has to bear as a result of engaging in life with others. There seems to be no retreat for anyone, and as they age, they grow harder or more silent in order to survive. The individual situations of these privileged people are made to resonate with experiences the ordinary person can identify with, or watch Writ Large. Thus catharsis is achieved, at the same time as the British monarchical system is justified.

It belongs to a large number of films this year where a woman who has a questionable power is at the center of the film: from the PBS Victoria (with Jenna Coleman), Spielberg’s The Post with Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, Gabaldon’s Outlander with Caitriona Balfe the central core strength of all the stories. All tell the same tale of hidden power, power welded quietly, stubbornly and when at a price, still successfully. They descend from the old queen tragedies in the Restoration theater, the 17th century French romances by women, Shakespearean heroines all.

The key characters are Elizabeth (Claire Foy) with Philip (Matt Smith) as her partner, and their performances are extraordinarily convincing. At first I saw the films as a portrait of Elizabeth but by the end of the second season, he had emerged as important in the films as she (if not as powerful), because his presence constantly affects her, hurts her, leads her to betray herself (as does her staff).

Pip Torrens as Tommy Lascelles: he plays the repressive killjoy controlling the royal family (for their own good) — rather brilliantly, convincingly

It is curious how the villains and obtuse people in episode after episode are this household staff, as if the family and many politicians are helpless against them.

The two begin with an idealistic love, and after years where she is driven to not keep her promise to Philip to let him fulfill his desires and have a say in his choices equal to hers, and betray others like her sister, Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), Peter Townsend (Ben Miles). Elizabeth allows herself to be bullied, as when she lets Philip force their son Charles to go to a school singularly unfitted for his character, so as to vicariously re-live own hard-won unexamined success over a wretched boyhood (Paterfamilias), they are barely able to endure one another. He humiliates her and threatens the monarchy by his semi-revengeful liaisons. She has made some wrong decisions (when she agrees to leave the house Philip was setting up for them and move to Buckingham palace, agrees to control his airplane flying, agrees to forbid Margaret’s marriage to a divorced man), but she remains queen (which is why she obeys) and that controls and gives her space and power.

Matt Smith is the program’s sly satyr, giving Claire Foy rare opportunities to know the pleasures of the appetite (including sex) divorced from duty. We see them come close together and then be driven apart. His advice, often cynical, is often proved right. For me the most moving scenes occur when they interact or their stories are told in tandem (as when at the beginning of the second season he is sent on a world tour). In the closing scene as he kneels and they bend over one another hugging, there is an acknowledgement of also a permanent estrangement, a gap never crossed again.

Ben Miles as Townsend, and we see in this photo how calm Margaret is with him

The other over-arching or major secondary story, which carries on through both seasons, depicts Margaret Windsor as thwarted from developing what talents she had, as not allowed to marry the man she loves and who loves her (except she give up her position and large income, which is of course unthinkable), and thus driven, as it were, forced makes a poor choice of an aristocrat, glamorous, cold, a cad, Matthew Goode as Tony Armstrong-Jones.

He renames her Beryl (second season)

Lesser characters contribute more over-the-top or overt drama. The Churchill myth is kept up by John Lithgow, with Kate Phillips as the in-love girl Friday, Venetia Scott. The Churchill matter seems to have stayed in the public consciousness (if recaps and commentary online tell us anything), and Lithgow is a powerful memorable presence. He fills the screen; like Ralph Richardson, our eyes immediately revert to him.

John Lithgow as Churchill charming Kate Phillips as Venetia Scott (who dies in the episode so eager is she to go to work in the fog)

But riveting also are the episodes featuring the resentful sneering de-throned Edward VIII (Alex Jennings); Alex Jennings is a Duke of Windsor unable to accept the position he choose; his clothes show him as pampered, perhaps rightly bitter at the way his family treats him, but also having lost perspective:

All Alex Jennings and Lia Williams as the ex-Mrs Simpson’s outfits are lavishly appointed and elegant

Maybe the most historically important episode in the series was the revelation of the Duke of Windsor’s knowing collusion with Hitler (Vergangenheit, second season): this is one of several episodes to include real film from the era, this case this Duke and Duchess and Hitler reviewing troops.

Some of the present debased or demeaning outlook on some of the prime ministers, such a Macmillan (Anton Lesser) was a weak cuckold (Sylvestre Le Tousel shows her continuing strength as a capable varied actress, here she is the appallingly mean adulterous wife), or Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) eaten up by jealousy of Churchill — all remind me of the way older historical Tudor dramas work. An re-enactment of Beyond the Fringe shows the public laughing at the ridicule the young intellectual actors threw at them, but the men (prime ministers) are too sensitive and become scapegoats. Emasculated males; once again, it’s the women who become the stoics holding on. On the other hand, the reactionary Mountbatten (Gregg Wise) is presented as kindness, gentleness itself, especially to the young Charles where Philip is asking too much with a narrow definition of manliness.

The expected is preferred, except curiously in the case of the Kennedys where an attempt is made to de-mystify them, which ends in scornful put-down of Jacqueline as utterly phony.

Among the tertiary recurring characters my favorites are the older women, especially Victoria Hamilton as the continuing to quietly grieve Queen Mary. One of my favorite episodes is about her attempt to retreat to a castle in the Scottish highlands and brief friendship with a minor aristocrat there who is not told who she is so that she can have an ordinary relationship with him (Pride and Joy, first season).

Victoria Hamilton as the Queen Mother, Elizabeth

Note how in most of the cases the men are seen with women, with women as protecting, taking care of, or importantly mocking or undermining them. I love all the stills of Harriet Walter as Clementine:

Claire Foy’s face reminded me of Elizabeth Moss in Handmaid’s Tale, Caitronia Balfe in Outlander, Merryl Strep as Katharine Graham in The Post. All nominated or noticed for awards. They are all initially more trusting than most of the people around them. Then a mask forms round their tight jaws. Margaret is the woman gone neurotic, a common type in soap opera:

The two years of this serial drama have been rightly criticized on several grounds. First for the kinds of changes in real history and politics continually set in place. Of course history will be heightened, personalized, and our protagonists made somewhat sympathetic. But the very subtlety with which the actual historical record is interwoven with false perspectives suggests truer perspective could have been put in place.

Elizabeth with Jeremy Northam as Anthony Eden consulting her

Throughout both seasons Elizabeth is made to seem more pro-active than she was, and more compassionately concerned about the average person living in the UK. What is put before us is sometimes the opposite of what happened: thus it was not she who insisted on going to Ghana to mend the relationship but her gov’t ministers who insisted she go. In the first season (damningly), Clement Atlee, the man who did more to reform and make the UK into the decent social democracy with opportunity for all in a large community it became (until Margaret Thatcher put her hatchet to it, and the Tories and then Blair’s gov’t followed suit), Atlee is made into a minor non-entity in one episode, with Churchill’s time as prime minister becoming what was important and the key over-arching secondary story. Elizabeth is made to seem innocent or at least not at all to blame for the understandable revolt of the empire against the English, and that revolt not explained with any sympathy.

And of course it’s a white world: Nasser, the African leaders, I cannot find any stills online of these. It is unblushingly Anglophilic, even if there is perfunctory criticism of how the UK reacted to Nasser nationalizing the Suez canal. Eden’s behavior is seen as well-meaning and a political error. He is misunderstood and he misunderstands a new post-colonial world. A tremendous idealization of George VI goes on, astonishing speeches put into the mouth of the queen grandmother (Eileen Atkins) about the monarchy as if it were a mythic realm placed on earth by God for the good of the English people, far exceeding any divine right exegesis I’ve ever come across.

Eileen Atkins impeccably over-the-top theatrical as the Queen Grandmother — smoking on

I don’t find if marmoreal because of performances like these. Don’t underestimate Jared Harris playing the cancerous George VI, still slaughtering birds as he weeps over his daughter’s “hard” fates and sings “In the bleak midwinter.” Drenched in the sentimental.

Children with George VI admonishing them

All that said, the films function to build compassion and understanding, reciprocation as a basic stance towards experience. The good characters hold onto some kind of integrity and honesty not just because to make the public think they are so keeps them in power. They mean well, they feel guilt, they see themselves as involved in bargains. Each of the episodes is character driven, and while different recurring characters emerge as dominant in this or that or a couple of episodes, there are major presences we care about and watch age and mostly harden or grow old and move into retreat, often stubbornly trying to hold onto what they thought their lives were about when younger.

The scripts are superb and found online. One of the curiosities of the films is how little happens in any given one, at least outwardly. Yes sometimes there is a Suez crisis and we see much action, but more commonly we watch Claire Foy drink coffee. I often cried over a resonating pair of lines towards a given closure, such as Pilgrim’s Progress. This is typical of the woman’s film based on a woman’s novel. Elizabeth gives a new turn to old lines about how she is paying a heavy personal price for the sake of some larger whole or ideal, and I find myself unbearable touched.

The first season shows us the making of a woman, Elizabeth into a queen, from a young girl in love, engaged, dependent on her father (Lilibet), to her walking alone, alienated from those she loves in order to be this symbolic figure. The second season traces a gradual hardening where she is presented as now and again scolding (in effect) her prime minister and urging them onto a course of action she thinks the wiser: they don’t always obey but they don’t ignore her either. She grieves alone.

Elizabeth in the last episode, pregnant with Andrew, aware Philip has not kept his word to be sexually faithful

Even if by logic and space, we actually follow Philip’s story (including his young years in flashbacks) as much as Elizabeth, and the outer political world whether through the weather or political or economic crises, it is Elizabeth the film focuses on again and again, at each stage of her life. Here she is reading Walter Bagehot as a child and learning about the theatrical, the ceremonial (her) and the efficient, the legislative, the instrumental (everybody else):

Even if there are major parts for males, they are seen as the domestic woman experiences them, from a home-perspective. Other favorite episodes: on safari (Hyde Park Corner, the first season)

When Elizabeth hires a tutor to improve her academic knowledge (Scientia Potentia Est, the first season): I loved the actor who played the mussed-up uncomforable tutor clutching his briefcase.

The episode where we see her relationship with Porchester amid the horses today with memories of what was meaning a great deal more to her than him (she phones him, and he puts her off as an American lover walks into his room). This episode also includes the painting of Churchill in old age by Sutherland and Clementine’s burning of the canvas (Assassins, first season).

The Queen and Porchie

Some may like the episode where Mike Parker’s wife rebels and sues him for divorce based on adultery (A Company of Men, second season). What emerges for me are women standing alone. The bitterness of Margaret when what talents she had are not wanted and she finds herself living with a cold cad (Mystery Man, second season), so she renovates her quarters without regard to others. Most evidently Elizabeth by herself, apparently surrounded by aides, servants and of course swathed in money and protection, and yet somehow isolated and holding on. Finding herself pushed and prodded by conventions, turned into a statue, and having to pick out which customs are still operative and which no longer.

When I first started to watch the films, I loved the 1950s outfits,so carefully studied and accurate but gradually they are just the way one dresses, un-costumy.

I’m reading slowly the excellent thorough study of the time and film, Peter Lacey’s The Crown: The Official Companion. The history is corrected there. The changes justified. One of the pleasures are the photographs of the actual historical people juxtaposed to the actors: we see how closely aligned the choices for actors were, how their costumes are often recreations of the originals.

Some representative reviews, mostly ambiguous: The Telegraph rounded up a bunch and linked them in; from the New York Times on the second season (Goode was born to play the seductive Armstrong). Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wanted to dislike the film but found it bloody compelling

Not quite gawdy?

I look forward to the third season, with a little trepidation that the change of actors will change the chemistry of the films too much or in directions I won’t care for. I don’t know the work of a number of the new actors: when I do, as Helena Bonham Carter for the aging Margaret, I can see it. I loved Olivia Coleman in Night Manager and can see her as a warm fundamentally sound older Elizabeth. Tobias Menzies (late of Outlander) as Philip when older is worrying: he often plays hard mean and cold people, yet he has his gentle psychological side as Frank Randall too (Paul Bettany said to have been considered would have been better at that).

It has emerged as something of a scandal that Smith was much much better paid than Foy; both my daughters informed me he is much better known, a star, while she with her superb performances as Amy Dorrit in Andrew Davies’s Little Dorrit, the younger Nazi sister in the return of Upstairs Downstairs, as good as unknown. Even Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall doesn’t match Dr Who. I wonder. At any rate we are assured next year salaries will not be so gender unequal.

Ellen

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