Simulating the Past in the Present through Biopics: Queen Elizabeth II on Screen and on TV

ABSTRACT Except for a brief representation of her as a child in The King’s Speech (2010), Queen Elizabeth II’s life has been adapted to the screen through The Queen (2006) and A Royal Night Out (2015). Moreover, the release of the TV series The Crown has added a new perspective to the ways in which the queen’s life has been revised, rewritten, and adapted, although the dynamics of film and of television remain dissimilar. When analyzed in a singular framework, the three movies and the four seasons of the TV series provide an adapted version of the life of Queen Elizabeth II as biopics, providing alternative biographical representations, fictionalized versions of what is believed to be factual material. More significantly, such adaptations of history could be analyzed as simulations, and the historical figures they represent as simulacra. In this framework, this study analyzes Queen Elizabeth II’s biopics as adaptations of personal history to claim that all such versions of history are radically adaptive and revisionist in their very nature. The study also argues that, if these biopics are to be accepted as simulations, the fidelity debate would be rendered obsolete.