Margaret & Diana & Elizabeth & Nancy
The scene comes early in the first episode of The Crown’s fourth season: a drawing-room confab between two of the most powerful people in the world, a veteran ruler and an upstart newcomer. The year is 1979. The Queen (played once again by Olivia Colman) nervously adjusts a vase of flowers—the gesture of a woman subliminally preparing for the scrutiny of another woman’s gaze. When Margaret Thatcher (played by Gillian Anderson) enters the room, she proffers a curtsy so low that her royal-blue skirt scrapes the floor. “Your Majesty,” Anderson sighs, her gravelly baritone an approximation of the voice that the theater director Jonathan Miller described as “a perfumed fart,” and that the journalist Clive James likened to “a cat sliding down a blackboard.”
One moment, Thatcher is discussing her proposed cabinet of government ministers with the Queen and explaining that she finds women “too emotional” for high office. The next, she’s at home with her husband, Denis (Stephen Boxer), recounting the events of the day while pressing pillowcases. (Insert your own “Iron Lady” joke here.) The head of the British government, for the first time, is also a housewife—a woman who dishes up kedgeree to her speechwriters at 4 a.m. and sternly tells a maid who tries to unpack Denis’s weekend bag that such an intimate act is “a wife’s job.” In , as in real life,
