Royal stinker: how Henry VIII changed from heroic to hideous on our screens

Greasy, hairy, large and smelly are not words that instantly summon up the image of Jude Law. Until now. Because the actor’s latest role, Henry VIII in the film Firebrand, will show him in an almost entirely unflattering light. And the effect will be topped off in later scenes by the pustulant ulcers shown on his legs.

Law is, perhaps unfairly, still best known for his line in clean-shaven leading men, from the inconstant Alfie to the suave Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. He has clearly relished the chance to look so unappealing on the big screen.

In fact, it seems he also wanted to disgust his co-stars on set. According to Alicia Vikander, who plays his last Queen, Catherine Parr, he got fellow actors into the mood with a bottle of a vile-smelling scent he had mixed up to recreate the worst personal odours of the period.

The film star is the latest in a blue-blooded succession of actors drawn to both the charisma and the self-indulgent cruelty of this famous monarch, known to every schoolchild for having had six wives.

“There will be a lasting fascination with Henry VIII, I believe,” said bestselling historical author Philippa Gregory, who is now working on a new story set during his reign, and whose hit novel The Other Boleyn Girl was filmed in 2008 with Eric Bana in the role of the king. “What makes Henry and the Tudors so interesting is that they were the first to get the idea they had to project an image down to their subjects. So, of course, the portraitist Holbein was employed in court, and this was a peak time for royal miniatures.”

Five centuries later, Henry’s major impact on English politics and the state’s relationship with the established church often serves merely as a backdrop to the extraordinary, murderous chicanery of his marital career. “We know more about his private life than we do about other monarchs because of the legal proceedings surrounding his two divorces and the two trials of his wives,” said Gregory.

Understandably, Bana is up among Gregory’s favourite screen Henrys: “He gets across a man who still had potential – when he still had some elements of faith and trust – and was on the threshold of all the wickedness to come.”

In later life Henry VIII was rather like a fading film star. This dissolute decline of a king once celebrated for his all-round creativity and physical prowess into a “decomposing old toad” is what appealed to Law. “He had been a huge, beautiful, physically powerful, vibrant man, a dancer, a fighter, a jouster, a musician,” the actor has said. “To have all this behind him and to be this embittered, blistering, rotting old man seemed full of potential.”

The corpulent king’s lethal game-playing has also ensured that he remains a towering cultural figure. The well-known heavy silhouette still casts a big shadow over not just genuine English history but the imagined versions of it repeatedly presented on screen.

Law, 51, read up on some history before filming, he told The Hollywood Reporter, seizing in particular on Antonia Fraser’s 2009 biography The Six Wives of Henry VIII, for a female perspective: “I had to fully understand just how unhealthy he was at the very end, although he was my age. It became really important to me – the pain he was in with these deep vein ulcers.”

Gregory said: “He would be absolutely right to play Henry as quite monstrous at this stage. As a ruin of a man who had killed two wives, he was not good husband material.”

The actor said he also spotted the way historians “weave their own interpretations” between the known facts, something Gregory has noted, too. “Historians of each era bring in their own perspective on Henry,” she said. “We know he had been a famously fabulous jouster, and so one academic paper has recently suggested he must have had PTSD after the terrible jousting accident he suffered.”

At the turn of the 20th century, as the early cinema industry eagerly turned royal fables into costume dramas, the grim story of the Bluebeard-style monarch began to attract leading actors. The first known to have stepped in front of a camera in a feathered cap and beard was Arthur Bourchier in a lost silent short film of 1911 directed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But the template was really set in 1920 by German-born director Ernst Lubitsch, with his film Anna Boleyn. Emil Jannings, later to become a celebrated star in the US, played the king as a tyrannical, laughing, almost pantomime villain.

This summer’s film, from Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz, was shot largely at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and is based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2013 novel Queen’s Gambit. The story tells of Parr’s tricky time as regent in 1544, ruling while her husband is away fighting the French. In her spare moments, the queen also sallies forth in disguise to see the secret evangelical preaching of Anne Askew, played by Erin Doherty.

While the screenplay’s main focus is on the precarious royal marriage, Parr’s struggle with religious orthodoxy is also crucial.Elizabeth Norton, a Tudor historian who was a consultant on the film, told the New York Times just how much hung on her faith. “It’s hard for contemporary audiences to understand, but just one change of word in a doctrine can mean heresy and death, and Catherine faces that charge.”

As the sixth wife and – spoiler alert for those who don’t remember the rhyme and haven’t seen the musical Six – a rare survivor, along with Anne of Cleves, Vikander, is the key to the film’s plot. Nevertheless, reviewers are singling out Law’s gross performance as the standout.

It is tempting to say that not since 1971, when Sid James played his majesty, has the part created such a stir. A broad comedy romp set in the Tudor court, Carry on Henry reused the costumes from Anne of the Thousand Days, made two years previously with Richard Burton in the role.

However, the only Henry to win an Oscar was Charles Laughton, who played the title part in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. This 1933 film was a vehicle for Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester, who played Anne of Cleves, and it clearly built on the Jannings model of a king who is a childish, dangerous egotist.

For many years, history fans would probably have picked Robert Shaw’s performance as Henry VIII in A Man For All Seasons for the highest praise. This adaptation by Robert Bolt of his own play was filmed by Fred Zinnemann in 1966 and is still much admired. It tells of the monarch’s early tussle with Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield.

In subsequent years, television has brought viewers a procession of these younger, more hopeful Henrys. In 1972, Keith Michell starred in Henry VIII and his Six Wives, BBC2’s popular and fairly accurate account of the reign. It won awards as well as record-breaking audiences and was broadcast in 75 countries. Its success prompted not just a spin-off film with the same name but also laid the groundwork for more recent television series, including The Tudors in 2007, in which Jonathan Rhys Meyers was a matinee idol version of Henry.

Ray Winstone, an actor more closely associated with the modern-day cockney underworld, brought a convincing gangster menace to the role in a 2003 television film. Most recently, the serialisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books breathed sinister life into Henry’s court. Peter Kosminksy’s acclaimed 2015 handling of Thomas Cromwell’s relationship with Henry VIII starred Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as the king.

Lewis had a more forgiving attitude to his character than some, recognising how entertaining and dynamic he is recorded to have once been. “He would have been a wonderful man, I think, to spend a summer holiday with,” said Lewis.

“Chopping off the heads of two of your wives is quite drastic, but at the time chopping off heads was pretty much à la mode. The great thing about Henry was that he kept killing the people he loved – that’s his great tragedy, I think.”