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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Boudica review – rare cinema outing for Norfolk’s killer queen is bit of a hoot

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This take on the first-century Iceni heroine looks like a home movie, and Olga Kurylenko’s lack of majesty and grit in the lead role doesn’t help

Boudica, the Iceni queen who led an insurrection against the Roman colonisers in first-century Britain, is one of the great feminist icons from ancient history, but there are surprisingly few cinematic representations of her.

There was a British TV show from 1978 called Warrior Queen that had the great Siân Phillips daubed in woad, a just-OK film from 2003 also called Warrior Queen that starred Alex Kingston, and a smattering of others in various languages, mostly for TV. And, of course, there’s the utterly iconic segment in Horrible Histories where Queen B (Martha Howe-Douglas) sings a grungy ditty about how her bloody campaign. (“Bow man, yeoman, smash the Roman foe man / All say ‘Yah / It’s Boudic-a!’”). But all that still leaves room for a great feature film about the toughest, most heroic gal to come out of Norfolk, up there with Edith Cavell and Delia Smith.

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