There are few opportunities more exciting and perhaps intimidating than taking the role of a young Margaret Thatcher, opposite two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, in a production for Britain’s highest grossing director, Phyllida Lloyd...
"She was such an overwhelmingly complex character, but essentially it was important for me to focus on the fact I was playing her before she was Margaret Thatcher, that my role was Margaret Roberts. When I first got the role, I didn’t know anything about Margaret Roberts, so what really struck me when doing the research were her unexpectedly humble roots. I'd always just assumed that she’d had a grand upbringing, but she didn’t. She came from Grantham and her father owned a grocery shop. In those times, it was the men who went into politics or to university, yet she strove to be different, got a first class degree from Oxford and knew that she wanted to enter the world of politics.
But when I looked into her personal life, her younger life, what fascinated me was that she didn’t really have any friends ever growing up. She was such an earnest, serious young woman from what I understand. She was alone a lot of the time. Through her time in Oxford she didn’t have many friends, there was no sign of any friends. When she met Dennis she found a rock. I loved filming those scenes just because it showed a softer side of her, of what she’s like with Dennis. Her relationship with Dennis is really fascinating. He was so supportive to her, was behind her 100%. If she didn’t have him then you wonder, would she have been alone all her life? He was so very important. I loved that bit of the film.
She just had this burning ambition, incredible drive. She was so unusual, something that came across incredibly strongly when I was filming in the House of Commons. There were all these men with their grey suits on and I was there with my little blue pencil skirt, fitted shirt and hat, and I knew instantly that I stood out just for being a woman. I was quite terrified. But it helped having to think like her. What Margaret would have done is pull herself together and be like ‘You’re meant to be here, you deserve to be here’. So I gave myself a little Margaret Thatcher pep talk before going on set."
There are few opportunities more exciting and perhaps intimidating than taking the role of a young Margaret Thatcher, opposite two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, in a production for Britain’s highest grossing director, Phyllida Lloyd. Alexandra Roach, a young actress who learnt her trade during seven years on the set of BBC Wales’ soap opera Pobol Y Cwm, got the part fresh out of drama school, taking a vast, surreal step out onto the world stage, in one of the most controversial film projects of the past decade. Dispensing with convention, the film does battle with the difficulties of portraying a subject who is not only one of the most polarising figures in British politics, loved and loathed in equal measure, but also very much still alive. The Iron Lady therefore is an unusual beast – an exploration of Thatcher’s rise and fall, and also a deeply personal portrait of ageing, seen through the prism of the pivotal relationship in Margaret’s life, that with her husband Denis.
Roach is a miner’s granddaughter, and a policeman’s daughter; a heritage seemingly entwined and perhaps at odds with the woman she plays. Yet this played no part in her preparation, as the later years in policy making were far from the young woman who emerged from a Grantham grocer’s shop to go, via Oxford and Finchley, to take her seat in the House of Commons. Instead she focused on portraying the overwhelming ambition of a woman intent since childhood on the achievement of her political aspirations, shored up and softened by the extraordinary relationship with her husband. For many, playing so seminal a role would be a career defining experience, yet Roach will spend the summer inhabiting another icon of the 20th century, the teenage Princess Elizabeth in Girl’s Night Out, an fictionalised account of VE Day 1945, when Elizabeth and her sister Margaret headed out incognito into the celebrating crowds.
The Iron Lady is released in UK cinemas today.
Text by Tish Wrigley
