Fans of 16th-century British history anticipating BBC2’s six-hour miniseries of Hilary Mantel’s novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” will be intrigued to know that two movies and a miniseries about Mary Stuart (1542-1587) are coming their way. In each case, the accent will be on youth.
The talented French ingenue Camille Rutherford has completed her portrayal of Mary in the Swiss-French coproduction “Mary Queen of Scots,” which has been directed by the Swiss maverick Thomas Imbach and will have its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
It was adapted from the Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s 1935 biography “Maria Stuart,” which speculatively offered some of the queen’s innermost thoughts. Though the trailer below suggests the influence of energetic French costume dramas like “Queen Margot” (1994), “The Horseman on the Roof” (1995), and “The Princess of Montpensier” (2010), there are signs that Imbach is interested in psychological insight. Zweig, after all, was a friend of his compatriots Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler.
The 19-year-old Irish actress Saiorse Ronan (“Atonement,” “Byzantium”) will play the title role in another “Mary Queen of Scots,” which is in pre-production for a 2014 start at Working Title. It has been written by Michael Hirst, who wrote “Elizabeth” (1998) and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007) for the same British company. That pair of theatrical films played fast and loose with history, but not as much as 2007-10’s “The Tudors” series, which Hirst created for Showtime.
A travesty and a popular success, “The Tudors” attracted thousands of viewers interested less in the historical record than airbrushed sex performed by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as an unaccountably slender Henry VIII and various hotties. “Reign,” which will debut on the CW this fall, promises to be its slightly less lusty offspring.
Starring 22-year-old Australian actress Adelaide Kane, it begins when Mary is the 15-year-old Scottish queen regnant at the French court and about two years from becoming the queen consort of France. Apart from costumes and a carriage, the trailer for Brad Silberling’s pilot makes not the slightest concession to period atmosphere.
Purists will prefer instead the 18 seconds of “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots” (1895), even if Mary was played by a man, Robert Thomae. Directed by Alfred Clark for Thomas Edison, it was reportedly one of the earliest films to use a jump cut as a trick effect and a trained cast.
Three Mary Stuarts will be two too many, as wise Elizabethans know from experience. In 2005, HBO’s two-part “Elizabeth I,” starring Helen Mirren as the Virgin Queen and efficiently directed by Tom Hooper, interrupted the royal progress of “Elizabeth” and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” starring Cate Blanchett and gaudily directed by Shekhar Kapur.
Mirren’s Elizabeth was earthy, stirring, a bit Margaret Thatcher-like. Blanchett’s high-spiritedness as the young Bess gave way to predictable remoteness and manufactured iconicity. Both incarnations left viewers with long memories recalling the fierce, yearning Tudor queen definitively embodied by Glenda Jackson in the BBC’s six-part “Elizabeth R” and the movie “Mary Queen of Scots” (both 1971). In the latter, Vanessa Redgrave, then 34, played Mary, who was 44 when she was beheaded after 18 and a half years of imprisonment. At 5-feet, 11-inches, Redgrave was exactly Mary’s height.
Mary Stuart fared well in “Elizabeth I” and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” because of the nuanced performances by 57-year-old Barbara Flynn and 30-year-old Samantha Morton respectively. The encounter between Mirren’s Elizabeth and Flynn’s was fictitious, of course, but made for tense drama. Morton, who used a Scottish accent when French would have probably been more accurate, was otherwise memorable as a bitter but proud woman facing an inevitable fate.
Watch the trailer for this year’s “Mary Queen of Scots,” starring Camille Rutherford: