Netflix’s The Crown ‘has it all wrong’

Millions watched the episode but no one was more appalled than the Melbourne sister of the man depicted as the palace playboy.

Mary Fitzgerald at home in Melbourne with a painting of her brother Mike Parker (behind on the right). Picture: Stuart McEvoy

As TV viewers worldwide gorged on The Crown earlier this month, an urgent call was placed to a house in Melbourne’s east.

Since Mary Fitzgerald was ­related to one of the characters, her friend thought there was something she needed to see. She tuned in, and the problem was ­apparent at once.

“I was appalled,” she said. “The whole thing was completely fabricated. There was nothing true about it at all.”

The second season of Netflix’s award-winning series about the royals is full of colour and drama. One storyline follows Prince ­Philip in 1956 on a five-month ­adventure that reaches all the way to Melbourne for the Olympics. The Duke of Edinburgh and his private secretary, Mike Parker, enjoy the company of women at every port, as Commander Parker boasts in a letter back home: “What happens on tour stays on tour.”

The letter leaks, Parker’s wife asks for a divorce, and the Prince angrily demands his friend’s immediate resignation.

Actors Daniel Ings as Mike Parker and Matt Smith as Prince Phillip in The Crown.

All this, according to Ms Fitzgerald, is “fallacy and invention”.

She is Parker’s sister — and at 87 his oldest living relative.

She told The Weekend Aus­tralian that said she was speaking on behalf of the family to correct the record.

“They completely falsified the history of the Olympic Games tour,” she said. “Even the smallest details have been so misrepresented. The agenda seems to be to belittle individuals, anybody connected with the palace.”

Beyond the broad historical outlines, Ms Fitzgerald said none of the events depicted in The Crown took place. Commander Parker served the royals with ­loyalty, discretion and valour, she said, just as he had during his time in the navy.

His resignation — indeed ­offered after his wife asked for a divorce — was accepted with ­reluctance by the Queen and ­Philip.

Prince Philip and Mike Parker on their way to the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956.

“Here he was a man who fought for his country … and he then served his queen and Prince Philip with the same dedication and the same loyalty. And he never ever revealed any private matters, ever, no matter what the press tried to do to him,’’ Ms Fitzgerald said.

She also took aim at the casting. While Claire Foy (the Queen) was an exception, she said Matt Smith (Philip) and Daniel Ings (Parker) were poor echoes of their characters. “They made Philip look like a wimpy schoolboy, and my brother, they made him look like an oafish Aussie, a ratbag type, just out for fun and games,” she said. “(Prince Philip) was so very upstanding, very dignified. He had a sharp, intelligent look and this guy, he looks like a teenager who’s lost the plot.”

Born in Bath and raised in Melbourne, Ms Fitzgerald came to prominence as an actor in the early years of Australian television. She married Paul Fitzgerald, an artist who painted several portraits of the Queen and Philip.

Upon her husband’s death last year, Ms Fitzgerald ­received a letter from the Queen in which she said she remembered him “with affection”.

Commander Parker’s abrupt departure depicted in The Crown was not only wrong but “brutal, horrible and scandalous”.