Post your questions for Imelda Staunton

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...

I Know Where I’m Going! review – Powell and Pressburger classic is a pure joy

The story of a headstrong heroine who knows what she wants, but is waylaid by the elements and an unexpected romance is one of the most lovable films in British cinema history

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 classic, rereleased now as part of the BFI’s nationally touring Powell/Pressburger season, has to be one of the most purely lovable films in British cinema history. There is outright joy in that inspired, forthright title. Surely I’m not the only Powell/Pressburger superfan to have screamed halfway through this statement from Emeric Pressburger about his writing practice, in Kevin Macdonald’s biography: “But if I can help it, I never sit down to write the real script until I know where I’m going and I’ve worked out the rhythm and so on beforehand.” Was that deliberate? I can’t tell.

I Know Where I’m Going! is a movie of romance and myth, comedy and whimsy, but fiercely rooted in reality – and geography. And it is very unusual, maybe entirely unique, in that it is set during wartime but the war is entirely absent and irrelevant, even if the hero is often to be seen wearing his Royal Navy uniform.

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