Anne Boleyn in Film and Television
While visual representations of the Tudors have always been popular, screen narratives about Anne’s life have appeared in three distinct waves. The first wave of early adaptations culminated in Alexander Korda’s 1933 The Private Life of Henry VIII, in whi
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Anne Boleyn in Film and Television
The lives and deaths of the Tudors have been a popular subject for film since the 1895 silent short film The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in which camera tricks are used to convince the audience that the actress had been executed.1 While the popularity of films about Anne Boleyn has ebbed and flowed, her story has been adapted into film and television numerous times over the past 100 years of cinematic history. There have been three distinct waves of interest in screen adaptations of Anne’s life: early adaptations, culminating in The Private Life of Henry VIII; the 1970s revival after the release of Anne of the Thousand Days; and the twenty-first- century wave of film and television, which reached its height with The Tudors. Cinematic Annes are generally far more uniform than those found in novels. With the exception of the earliest silent short films, screen Annes are usually agentic, ambitious and intelligent women, even when plot elements of her story are treated very differently. As with historical novels, films about Anne reveal much about the circumstances in which they were produced and the ways in which women, power and sexuality were thought about at the time.
1 The film can be seen at: “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895),” YouTube, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIOLsH93U1Q
© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_11
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Anne’s Cinematic Debuts The first time that Anne herself appeared in film was in a 1911 short film called Henry VIII, in which Anne Boleyn was portrayed by the Scottish actress Laura Cowie.2 The film collated five scenes from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, but all copies of the film were burnt by William G.B. Barker, the director, so nothing is known about Cowie’s performance.3 Anne was then portrayed by Clara Kimball Young, a popular silent film star, in two Vitagraph Silent Films in 1912: Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey.4 The former film does not seem to have survived, but Cardinal Wolsey, which is again loosely based on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, portrays Anne as an innocent victim of Henry’s lust. In the first scene in which Anne appears, she is changing her clothes while Henry surreptitiously watches. The film largely aligns with Victorian representations of Anne as passive and virtuous, and clearly predates the twentieth century’s shift towards imagining a more agentic and ambitious Anne, making the film our only brief glimpse on the screen of the kind of saintly Anne that had been so popular for centuries. While this book’s scope is limited to Anglophone representations of Anne Boleyn, it would be remiss to exclude Ernst Lubitsch’s 1920 film Anna Boleyn (retitled Deception at its American premiere) from any discussion of her representation in film, as it was the first full-length feature film to centre on Anne’s story.5 Anne, played by Henny Porten, is depicted as the victim of Henry’s lecherous attentions
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