Margaret Thatcher on stage and screen: the five best performances
Harriet Walter will go head to head with Steve Coogan in the forthcoming Channel 4 drama Brian and Margaret, which recreates her 1989 interview with old friend and broadcaster Brian Walden – a face-off in the Frost/Nixon vein, which many credit with bringing Thatcher’s PM career to a sticky end.
Walter, 73, is suddenly an international name after her small role in Succession, but anyone who has followed her richly interesting career on stage and screen will know how formidable she can be in juicier headline roles. That clipped, biting intelligence, which can be pure acid, makes the prospect of her Thatcher really quite terrifying.
At the same time, the long-postponed biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid as Thatcher’s opposite number, will see her played in a supporting turn by Lesley-Anne Down when it’s released in August. The 66-year-old couldn’t believe she got the part after auditioning in her own kitchen – “I stuck on a sexy blonde wig I’d worn in a soap opera”, she has admitted. Both hope to join these ranks of the most memorable screen Thatchers.
5. Lindsay Duncan in Margaret (BBC, 2009)
When Duncan took on the role in this one-off BBC biopic, much was made of how her own Left-wing politics could make it possible for her to play the part without prejudice. This is the least like an impression of all the screen Thatchers – when she belts out “What about loyalty!” in the wake of Geoffrey Howe’s resignation, she sounds like… Duncan bellowing.
And yet there’s some poise and nuance to the portrait, which Duncan credits to figuring out how isolated Thatcher was at the top, having to dominate the men in her life, and certainly finding no pathway for other women in politics. “She is iconic and unforgettable for various reasons,” Duncan said at the time. “She was a woman. Much to my dismay.”
4. Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady (2011)
Accomplished yet overrated. Streep’s legendary accent work certainly didn’t let her down in this all-stops-out turn, which bagged the star her third Oscar – but the script did, and Phyllida Lloyd’s campy direction made the whole thing awfully close to a kind of thrusting drag revue. The scenes dealing with her dementia did take risks, allowing Streep to explore an aspect of Thatcher’s human frailty that few treatments had dared tackle before.
And Alexandra Roach put in a creditable showing as the young shopgirl Margaret Roberts. But there were so many breathy soundbites – “Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it” – that the whole film simply felt like it was showing off Streep’s technique, rather than using her to illuminate Thatcher’s life and career afresh.
3. Andrea Riseborough in The Long Walk to Finchley (BBC, 2008)
Just before film stardom beckoned for Andrea Riseborough, she did some of her best work here, age 27. Subtitled “How Maggie Might Have Done It”, this campaign-trail drama spanned the decade it took Thatcher to win a seat successfully, starting with her Dartford bid in 1949, taking in her marriage to Denis in 1951, and ending with Finchley in 1959, the seat she would hold for 33 years.
“There’d be no milk shortage if I was in charge”, she muses about Attlee-era austerity, already dreaming of the top job. Riseborough put a spring in Thatcher’s step, emphasising her drive and charisma among all the grey men in her midst. But there was lethal steel beneath, as she explained: “Emotionally, she was not in touch with herself or anybody else… I would say she had psychopathic tendencies.”
2. Gillian Anderson in The Crown (Netflix, 2020)
There was tense control here that got under your skin, mainly because Anderson really did get under Thatcher’s. It made the viewer itch, rather than relishing the effect pulled off, and the performance thrives all the better for it – even in bad episodes. She works wonders with the voice, managing to suggest all the artifice Thatcher had used to lower it – supposedly by about 46Hz, so that she wouldn’t sound so squeaky and feminine.
She seems clenched and uncomfortable at all times – watch her gritted-teeth curtsy that seems to go right down to the floor. It’s a very strange take all round: studied, serious, weirdly persuasive. There was no Streep-like self-satisfaction to it – instead, a sense of Thatcher being trapped, frozen, the architect of her own undoing.
1. Janet Brown in many appearances, including For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Janet Brown did an even better Margaret Thatcher than Margaret Thatcher. The Scottish actress, born in 1923, made a career of it: she started doing impressions on the Mike Yarwood Show in the late 1970s, and was soon in the Filofax of every TV talent booker. She recorded a single called “Iron Lady” after Thatcher’s election in 1979, and speak-sang it on Top of the Pops. (It did not chart.) Then there was her cameo talking to a parrot by phone in For Your Eyes Only.
Brown’s impersonation breezily conveyed how Thatcher would love to have presented herself: if anything, she was more electable than the real thing. But she was also a sly minx, dropping Carry On-style double entendres as if butter wouldn’t melt: “I did have one anxious moment when my support fell away and my marginals started slipping…”
