Yahoo Movies Dame Judi Dench Makes Royal Fuss Over ‘The Crown’, Calling Netflix Hit “Crude Sensationalism”
Judi Dench might be a Dame, and she’s portrayed real-life queens of England in several films, but she apparently isn’t a big fan of The Crown.
In a blistering open letter to UK’s The Times, the iconic actress calls out the Netflix hit series for presenting “an inaccurate and hurtful account of history,” and urges the streamer to add a disclaimer at the start of each episode describing the show as a “fictionalised drama.”
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Netflix has resisted calls for such disclaimers.
Writes Dench, “The time has come for Netflix to reconsider – for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve its reputation in the eyes of its British subscribers.”
While Dench at one point refers to The Crown as “brilliant,” she notes that “the closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
“Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series – that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence – this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
Read the full letter below.
Dench is making reference to the recent criticism about The Crown offered by UK Prime Minister John Major, who complained about a plot line in Episode 1 of Season 5 suggesting that in 1991 Prince Charles, now King Charles III, summoned Major to complain about having to wait to take the throne.
Titled “Queen Victoria Syndrome,” the installment is based on an actual poll that once ran in the UK Sunday Times which argued that the monarchy was dated and that Queen Elizabeth should abdicate in favor of Charles. The drama features scenes of Charles (Dominic West) privately agreeing with a passage in the Sunday Times back in 1991, that ”an ageing monarch, too long on the throne whose remoteness from the modern world has led people to grow tired not just of her but of the monarchy itself.”
Dench has played Queen Victoria twice – in 1997’s Mrs. Brown and 2017’s Victoria & Abdul, annd Queen Elizabeth in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love.
Deadline has reached out to Netflix for comment.
Queen Elizabeth II died on Sept. 8 at age 96 after a reign of more than 70 years.
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