The Hot Dynasty: The Tudors on Film and TV

The Tudors are a hot dynasty. This has happened, of course, not thanks to historians of Tudor-Stuart England like me, but thanks to Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and a range of other 30-something stars who have appeared in recent high profile depictions of the Tudor monarchs. The last decade has seen a veritable Tudor-mania—not just in films and television dramas, but also in historical romances, detective stories, graphic novels, and children’s stories. This is not the first time (nor likely will it be the last) that Americans have discovered the narrative possibilities of 16th-century England. Long before the advent of sound, full-length features explored the lives of Mary Stuart, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I. The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895) was one of the earliest silent movies made. The Tudors remained popular as sound films took over in the 1930s, and every 20 years or so since, they have been rediscovered. After the cluster of movies on Tudor subjects in the 1930s, another emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we are currently a decade into the latest iteration.1 Matching royalty with star power is a long tradition, too: Sarah Bernhardt and Bette Davis have played Elizabeth I; Katherine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave have portrayed Mary Stuart; Charles Laughton and Richard Burton have depicted Henry VIII....