Post your questions for Imelda Staunton

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She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her? It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride . She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort. On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appear...
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Apolonia Apolonia review – artist and film-maker evolve together in artworld memoir

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The hypocrisies of the art world are exposed in this epic undertaking that sees the development of both the film’s subject and its director

Filmed over the course of 13 years, Lea Glob’s dynamic and intimate portrait of figurative painter Apolonia Sokol also charts the twin evolution of two women: the one in front of the camera and the one behind it. Having grown up in a bohemian Parisian theatre founded by her parents, Sokol seems destined to make her name as an artist, though her journey to recognition is far from rosy.

A graduate from the ultra prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Sokol however carries a more underground sensibility. When threatened with eviction, she turned the run-down theatre – her childhood home – into a haven for performers and activists. Her large-scale paintings of friends and acquaintances show them in a state of repose, yet Sokol’s energy is anything but placid. Forever sprinting from one adventure to another, she travels to America to be sponsored by collector Stefan Simchowitz, famously dubbed “The Art World’s Patron Satan” by the New York Times. His assembly-line approach to artistic patronage, which requires Sokol to produce 10 paintings within one month, soon leaves her disillusioned.

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