1. Introduction
In the second half of 2006, a British film, titled ‘The Queen’, thanks to Helen Mirren’s portrayal of the Queen Elizabeth II, won an Academy Award for the best actress and gained innumerable acclaims from critics. For example, Peter Travers (2006) comments highly on this film, holding it as one of the best movies in 2006, and a film review of Entertainment Weekly (Schwarzbaum 2006) also evaluates it as “an engrossing and unexpectedly penetrating drama”
This docudrama represents a public crisis of the British monarchy which results in Elizabeth’s misreading of the Princess Diana’s death in a Paris car crash. The Peter Morgan’s well-researched screenplay is elaborately unfolded by Stephen Frears, a famous British director who is well known for his wonderful films, such as Dirty Pretty Things and My Beautiful Laundrette. As the Ebert (2006) says, Stephen’s works are associated with “conflicts and harmonies in the British class system”. In The Queen, Stephen tells a story in a similar way, but a more powerful heroine in the British upper class, the Queen of the United Kingdom.
The Queen Elizabeth II acts as a symbol of the British royal family, whose life is just like the TIME Magazine described in 1952 when she just came to the throne: “the story of Elizabeth's life had provided a quiet, well-behaved fairy tale in which the world could believe.” She is “popular at home and abroad” (Elizabeth II n.d.). However, in Stephen’s film英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】, Elizabeth has to face a crisis of damages to the public image of her and the royal family’s. This essay will first give the plots of The Queen in the following paragraphs and then dig into details of the film for the constitution of the royal family’s identity in section 2 and section 3.
1.1 Plot of ‘The Queen’
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