Archive for Year: 2011

I wrote The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn because I thought she was totally misunderstood, especially about her part in the Reformation. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have happened without Anne Boleyn but it happened when it did in England because of her.

Since my goal is to resurrect the person (as much as humanly possible, so they would be pleased and say, “hey, that’s just the way it was!”) that means I am a stickler for accuracy and don’t have much truck with the idea that ‘history is what you make it’—‘well, who can say what really happened’ etc. I ran into a lot of that with Cleopatra, where people said that as long as there was one iota of ‘doubt’ (usually meaning their own doubt, not experts’ doubts) then the gate was wide open to claiming just about anything. (“Well, how do we know she was a Ptolemy?”) This can reach ridiculous lengths and come to ridiculous conclusions. Then they hide behind, “Well, it’s fiction!”

Casting Genevieve Bujold was Hal Wallis’s smartest decision in making Anne of the Thousand Days, and he did so without benefit of a screen-test or even a personal interview, simply on the basis of viewing her in the French-Canadian film Isabel (1968, and directed by then-husband Paul Almond). "The minute she appeared on the screen, Wallis wrote in his autobiography Starmaker, “I was riveted. I saw a tiny, seeming fragile woman made of steel—willful, passionate, intense. She was exactly the actress I wanted to play Anne.”

In the summer of 2010, just a few days after Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn opened to rave reviews at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Brenton met with me in the coffee shop of the theatre to talk about the play, what inspired him to write it, his conception of Anne, Henry, and Cromwell, and the difference between polemic and art.

All the courts of Europe were run by people in their teens and twenties…that’s why they were so crazy. We have this image now that the court is always middle aged, but it wasn’t true. You know, Henry was 18 when he became King, and I thought it was ridiculous that people were telling me he was really rather prudish and there was no sex because there was no heating in the palaces…

Michael Hirst, on the “psychological crisis” that led to Anne’s execution,and how it altered Henry