The entry begins:You might think it would be a daunting task to pick out actors to play characters who have been cast, often memorably, many times before. But actually, it’s an opportunity that I have fantasized about. It is well known to Tudor scholars but virtually no one else that the BBC, Hollywood, and Showtime have rarely made choices that remotely resembled—either physically or in their “essence”—the central players in the drama of Henry VIII and ill-fated Anne Boleyn. Charles Laughton caricatured dynamic, quixotic Henry as a chicken-tossing buffoon; at the other end of the spectrum, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in the Showtime production, refused to get fat (“Jonny would never have allowed us to make him appear grotesque,” the show’s creator Michael Hirst told me.) Anne has usually been played, from Merle Oberon to Natalie Dormer, by actresses who are way too conventionally gorgeous to convey the not-exactly-beautiful but striking je ne sais quoi that Anne was said to embody. Most annoying, Katherine of Aragon has, with one exception (Annette Crosbie in the 1970 BBC The Six Wives of Henry VIII) been played by dark-complected, dark-haired actresses. Katherine had golden hair and fair skin—but she was Spanish, and ethnic stereotyping has prevailed over historical fact.Learn more about the book and author at the official The Creation of Anne Boleyn website.
My book is neither fiction nor a full-blown biography, so it’s unlikely to be made into a movie. However, if some creative screenwriter was to do for it what Sofia Coppola did for Caroline Weber’s The Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and turn a cultural study into movie art, here is my dream cast:
For Henry, Russell...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Creation of Anne Boleyn.
--Marshal Zeringue
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