Margaret Thatcher, Mrs T, The Iron Lady, is dead. 31 years ago she was the most unpopular UK Prime Minister in history. Then, after winning the Falklands War she was re-elected in 1983. She was elected again in 1987 before being defenestrated by her party in 1990, a defeat she never quite came to terms with. Politically she was deeply divisive but on one point everyone is agreed – she recast British politics, and to a certain extent global politics, with her doctrine of open markets, privatisation, financial deregulation and tax cuts. Thatcher made the world we live in now. To some she was the greatest prime minister who ever lived, to others a devil in a blue dress. Here are five films either about her or in which she featured prominently.
Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley (2008, dir: Niall MacCormick)
The breakthrough for the astonishingly versatile Andrea Riseborough who plays young Margaret Thatcher, a woman determined to make it in a man’s world. The decision to show Mrs T (even before she was Mrs T, in fact) as a plucky striver – is a brilliant one. Regardless of politics we’re on Thatcher’s side as a grim cavalcade of awful chauvinists, misogynists and old duffers spend ten years knocking our heroine back as a prospective parliamentary candidate. For those who think Meryl Streep is great as Mrs T, watch Riseborough do something similarly brilliant.
The Long Walk to Finchley – at Amazon
The Iron Lady (2011, dir: Phyllida Lloyd)
The amazing Meryl Streep plays Baroness Thatcher in old age, looking back through a haze of dementia at the handbagging Mrs T in her prime. It’s a tender portrait of a human being that has little to say about Mrs Thatcher as a political beast, or of the era she lived through. Best scene: Mrs T is haranguing Alexander Haig, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, for trying to talk her out of the invasion of the Falklands. Having torn him off a strip, she jumps up and says, “Now, shall I be mother?” Bewilderment from Al Haig. “… Tea, Al, how do you like it, black or white?” Beautiful observed, and Meryl Streep’s comic timing is exquisite.
The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011, dir: Peter Richardson)
Stephen Mangan plays fugitive prime minister Tony Blair in a cod 1950s detective thriller from UK jokesters The Comic Strip. Dropped by all his political allies because of his increasingly unhinged behaviour and now a murderer on the run, Blair takes refuge with Baroness Thatcher (Jennifer Saunders), who now lives in Norma Desmond delusional obscurity with her manservant, Tebbit (John Sessions). Between them Sessions and Saunders manage to squeeze some of the better laughs out of a script that is as stop-go as the UK economy.
Not available at Amazon – not yet
Elizabeth (1998, dir: Shekhar Kapur)
The film is about Queen Elizabeth I of England, but Cate Blanchett plays her very much as an iron lady of four centuries later, the voice swooping low, the eyes blazing with fire, all intransigence and feminine wile (when it suits her). It says something about Margaret Thatcher that she’s become a resource, an archive reference for actresses to go to when reaching out for something tough, possibly something unholy. Imelda Staunton did something similar in 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, playing Ministry of Magic apparatchik Dolores Umbridge as at least 50 per cent Mrs T. How that would have made the former prime minister’s blood boil – being presented as a bureaucrat, I mean.
Margaret (2009, dir: James Kent)
A “last days of Thatcher” drama starring Lindsay Duncan as the prime minister hemmed in on all sides, not quite grasping that it is the party that made her leader, not the electorate, and that those who live by the sword are expected, when the time comes, to fall on it. And it is this failure to self-immolate that Richard Cottan’s screenplay is about. Duncan presents what is probably the iciest and most furious of the many portrayals of Thatcher, but then it was widely believed, by friend and foe alike, that by 1990 the country’s first female prime minister had slightly lost the plot. Incidentally, John Sessions turns up as Cabinet minister Geoffrey Howe. He played former Conservative party leader Edward Heath in The Iron Lady and minister Norman Tebbit in The Hunt for Tony Blair.
Noble mentions: Lesley Manville in the TV series The Queen (2009), Anna Massey in Pinochet in Suburbia (2006), Patricia Hodge in The Falklands Play (2002), Steve Nallon as Thatcher’s voice in the Spitting Image TV series, Angela Thorne in Anyone for Denis? (1982). Highly effective Thatchers one and all.
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© Steve Morrissey 2013