Storyline
This show focuses on Queen Elizabeth II as a twenty-five-year-old newlywed faced with the daunting prospect of leading the world’s most famous monarchy while forging a relationship with legendary Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill. The British Empire is in decline, the political world is in disarray, and a young woman takes the throne….a new era is dawning. Peter Morgan’s masterfully researched scripts reveal the Queen’s private journey behind the public façade with daring frankness. Prepare to be welcomed into the coveted world of power and privilege and behind locked doors in Westminster and Buckingham Palace….the leaders of an empire await.
Did You Know?
The series is one of the most expensive television series ever made. Each episode is budgeted at £5 million and it had already been commissioned for two seasons, with the intention of four more, before the first episode had even been completed, or any episode broadcast.
The iconic black door of 10 Downing Street had to be made larger in scale so that John Lithgow, who is 6′ 4” in height, would not look significantly larger than the real-life Sir Winston Churchill, who at this stage was around 5′ 6” tall.
For his role as Sir Winston Churchill, John Lithgow’s dialect coach was William Conacher, who also had to coach the other mostly British cast because of subtle changes in English accents over the decades. Lithgow actually stuffed cotton in his nostrils in order to capture the faint nasal timbre of Churchill’s intonations, while a dialect evolutionist was on set to monitor the accuracy of accents over the time span of the series. It was noted, for example, that Queen Elizabeth II’s pronunciation of vowels during the 1950s differs enormously from the way her grandson Prince Harry speaks today.