The Crown: Elizabeth Debicki as Diana should work
The latest Australian to be cast as Diana Spencer follows a long, not always glorious tradition of our actors playing princesses.
The news that Elizabeth Debicki is to play Princess Diana in the final series of The Crown is a reminder of how brilliantly this 29-year-old Australian actress has handled her career since she dropped out of a 2010 Melbourne Theatre Company production of Joanna Murray Smith’s The Gift to play Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.
The Crown is a great queenmaker for the right kind of actress: think of what it did for Claire Foy, as the young Queen, and Vanessa Kirby, who was so stunning as the young Princess Margaret. Diana will be the plum role in the last sequence of The Crown, which will have Imelda Staunton as the great old matriarch. Staunton will be replacing Olivia Colman, whose performance as the middle-aged Elizabeth more or less coincided with Colman’s historically kinky impersonation of Queen Anne in The Favourite. That latter role brought her an Oscar for the sheer bravura of her performance. And there would have been no performance without that crazy and original script by Australia’s Tony McNamara (co-written by Deborah Davis).
It stands to reason that there should be an Australian angle on all these monarchical characterisations as well. The casting of Debicki seems brilliant because she doesn’t look like Diana but she’s arguably starry in an analogous way: remember how Diana the tentative girl-next-door turned into that dazzling master of publicity by the time she was interviewed by Martin Bashir, someone who could punch the monarchy squarely in the jaw?
Though the greatest blow was the tragedy of her death.
Debicki –– who was superb with Hugh Laurie and Colman in John le Carre’s The Night Manager –– has just been handed a dream role given the attested high standards of The Crown and the propulsive popularity it enjoys. It hasn’t always been the case when it comes to Australians having to put some kind of hollow crown –– Shakespeare’s phrase from Richard II –– on their heads. Nicole Kidman was better equipped than most people to take on the impossible job of impersonating Grace Kelly and she did her best in Grace in Monaco, but
the film is not good and besides she had the complexity that Kelly was screen royalty before she became the real thing and she was widely adored for her performances in films such as High Noon and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. (In some ways Kidman had more support and a superior vehicle when she played literary royalty in the person of Virginia Woolf in The Hours.) But the shadow of history is a very tricky thing when the history is almost contemporary. Naomi Watts, on the face of it, was very qualified to play Diana. She had the right kind of “ordinary” good looks that can transfigure and she has the ability as an actress to go from looking like a candle in the wind to what English novelist Julian Barnes called a great bloody chandelier. But Diana (2013) doesn’t work; despite the riveting events of the time, it’s all a bit lacklustre.
Debicki, with The Crown team behind her, has an excellent chance of reinvigorating the figure of the doomed princess for a millennial generation — but history and the key to its successful interpretation is always a mystery.