5 of the best … screen Thatchers

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One of the juiciest-sounding drama commissions for months has just been announced: Brian and Margaret, depicting an infamous TV exchange: the final television interview between Margaret Thatcher and the journalist Brian Walden. This was the one when he pressed her about whether she was responsible for Nigel Lawson’s resignation. “Nigel’s position was unassailable,” she kept saying. It was the beginning of the end for the prime minister, and she and Lawson never spoke again.
The Channel 4 drama, written by the prolific James Graham (and yet to start filming), will ask whether the slow death of full-length political TV interviews puts modern democracy at risk. Steve Coogan will play Walden, while Harriet Walter takes on the ultimate challenge of playing the Iron Lady. How will Walter compare to these five screen Thatchers?
Patricia Hodge meticulously researched her role in Ian Curteis’s The Falklands Play, perhaps realising how contentious it was. Originally written in 1986, it was filmed and then shelved for its supposed jingoism and political bias. In a perhaps unusually sympathetic portrayal, Hodge nonetheless gave a formidable death stare while navigating the politics of going to war.
If you can find a copy of this fanciful 2008 BBC drama (just why isn’t this on iPlayer?), you’ll be rewarded by an uncannily good portrayal by Riseborough — note the scene in which she trains her voice to a lower register. Jaunty in tone, it imagines Thatcher’s single-minded struggle in the 1950s to become an MP, mischievously fabricating the daft notion of her wooing her fellow up-and-comer, dishy young Ted Heath (Samuel West).
As a portrait of the former prime minister in her dotage, The Iron Lady divided opinion. There was no faulting Meryl Streep’s uncannily accurate portrayal — those steady, carefully lowered tones duly won both an Oscar and a Bafta — but some felt depicting her as a frail elderly lady losing her mental faculties wasn’t the fairest way to portray one of our most influential prime ministers. Thatcher is unlikely to have approved, but Streep really was superb.
One of the dangers of portraying Margaret Thatcher is lapsing into caricature. That wasn’t a problem for Janet Brown, who spoofed her so ubiquitously back in the day, but perhaps an issue for Gillian Anderson’s slooow-talking performance in The Crown. By contrast, Jennifer Saunders had free rein in The Comic Strip Presents… The Hunt for Tony Blair to go beyond parody, depicting the ex-PM as a kind of crazed Norma Desmond figure holed up in a gothic stately pile with Norman Tebbit. It made Spitting Image’s business-suited Thatcher look restrained.
In 2014 Woolgar won rave reviews for her sensational performance as the Prime Minister in the play Handbagged in London’s West End, a pitch-perfect portrayal she repeated in one of the queasiest TV dramas of recent years. Playing opposite Steve Coogan as Jimmy Savile, she had that intimidating edge of firmness even as she is flattered and blindsided by his obsequious remarks. Woolgar’s might just be the most uncannily accurate of the lot: close your eyes and her low, croaky voice could be the real thing.
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