Queens for a Day

Spotlight

Swerving between heartbreakingly sad and wickedly funny as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos's whimsical 18thcentury period drama, The Favourite, Olivia Colman shows her range and deftness. She is "like lightning," says the filmmaker, who first directed Colman in 2015's The Lobster. "She can be in a completely different mood, and then her mood and composure and her whole energy changes in a millisecond." The British actress, who graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, says, "I feel things very quickly," explaining that she relies on her acute empathy—inherited from her mother, a nurse, and her father, a surveyor who "will sit and cry at anything on the telly"—to connect with a character. Queen Anne's tragic personal life informed Colman emotionally. "To have lost 17 children, it's just too awful to picture," she says. "Once I knew that about her, I didn't care what she did. If that's happened to you, I think you behave however you want."

Spotlight

"Olivia can be in a completely different mood, and then her whole energy changes in a millisecond."

"Everything is very close to the surface with Olivia," says David Tennant, Colman's co-star on BBC America's Broadchurch. "She has incredible access to her emotions ... that's part of what gives her her humanity and her warmth, and what people read in her performances so vividly."

Colman began her career in comedy on the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show and then BBC's mockumentary series Twenty Twelve. She pivoted to drama in 2011 with a devastating performance in Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, as well as a role opposite Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. In September, she won the best-actress prize for The Favourite at the Venice Film Festival. (The last actress who received the award for playing a monarch, Helen Mirren, went on to win an Oscar.)

Colman's reign continues on The Crown, where she succeeds Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II. Preparation for the role has given Colman, who grew up about three hours northeast of London, a new appreciation for her monarch: "I sort of thought, I don't know if it's right that we have a monarchy. Now, less the monarchy, more the Queen. I think she is extraordinary."

JULIE MILLER

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