Movie News

Elizabeth's historical failure

Tue 06 Nov 1:20 PM

Elizabeth: The Golden Age has come in for its fair share of flak from movie critics - and now historians are taking it to task for its loose approach to the facts.

Writing in The Guardian, historian Alison Weir calls it "a travesty of history", finding fault with everything from the costumes (Clive Owen, as Sir Walter Raleigh, would've been arrested for wearing an open-necked shirt in the Queen's presence) to the battles.

Weir complains: "Owen's Raleigh is a romantic hero for the MTV generation, sailing fire-ships into the Spanish fleet and swinging about on ropes. But the truth is that he shouldn't have been there. Raleigh didn't sail against the armada; he was probably manning coastal defences in Devon."

But director Shekhar Kapur shrugs off the lukewarm reception, in stark contrast to the critical and commercial triumph of 1998's Elizabeth.

"I am far more comfortable with failure than I ever will be with success."

And the Indian-born director is interested in filming a third part based around the monarch's death.

"There's a story that Elizabeth stood for 12 hours when she thought she was going to die," he told The Guardian. "She thought if she lay down she would die. I find that very interesting. You rule by divine right, you think of yourself as divine, now suddenly you have to become mortal. I'd like to shoot a film of Elizabeth in those 12 hours reflecting on her life."