Word: duchess
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...lockdown at Kensington Palace. "Even a palace can be a prison," she tells us. We're well acquainted with the downside of royalty, thanks to the current Windsors' chatty ex-in-laws, but Victoria isn't just whinging. She sleeps in a room with her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), has only her spaniel Dash for a playmate and isn't allowed to walk down stairs alone. Her governess, the Baroness Lehzen (Jeanette Hain), is the closest thing she has to a friend...
...Duchess and her "adviser" (in both boudoir and boardroom), the glowering Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), try to strong-arm Victoria into signing over her power to her mother, just in case King William dies before she turns 18. We want her to be Queen so she can finally say, "Off with his head." Conroy is the film's only outright villain, but he's not really much source of tension: once she's Queen, she's the boss. Nor are Lord M. or Lehzen, even though they try to manipulate the young Queen, because this is primarily a love...
...additional problem with the sole use of female actresses is that the two main female characters, Queen Isabel and the Duchess of York, feel compelled to deliver their lines in excessively high-pitched voices, as if attempting to declare “I’m a real girl!” to the audience with every line. It is disappointing that a play so obsessed with the supposed femininity of politics has so little to say about femininity itself...
This is not the stuff of recession-era tragedy. Christopher once came home to find his mother in a neck brace: she had curtsied too low to a duchess and caught a heel in her pearls. The Buckleys weren't plutocrats, but William's prodigious output--he could bash out a 700-word column in five minutes flat--and Patricia's inheritance made them more than well off, and the action leaps nimbly from the family's teak-and-mahogany yacht to its 10th century Swiss chteau to Patricia's memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum's Temple...
...prestigious Fine Arts medal for bullfighting would go to Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. The 35-year-old matador has killed more than 2,000 bulls, but because of both his family ties - he descends from Spain's most important bullfighting dynasty and was briefly married to the Duchess of Alba's daughter - and his abundant good looks, Rivera is as well-known for his presence in the gossip rags as for his work with the cape and sword. (See pictures of bullfighting...