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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It’s a vintage year for the Oscars. But what was the strongest year in cinema history?

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The current crop might be the best Academy Awards list in years, but which was the best ever year for films? Guardian writers present their case for the winner of winners

In three weeks’ time, the credits will roll on the best cinema season in recent memory. Ten films are up for the best picture Oscar on 10 March and not a dud among them. That is unusual. Usually you will find an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in there somewhere. Or maybe more than one (Babel, The Blind Side), or even a trio (Crash, Les Miserables, Bohemian Rhapsody). Often, it’s hard to get jazzed by the awards race; sometimes it’s tricky to feel strongly about any of the big contenders.

This year is different. Not only is the quality elevated; audience engagement has been sky-high. Much of that is down to the Barbenheimer juggernaut, giving brainy blockbusters their post-Covid event movie moment. But the watercooler would have been noisy nonetheless: The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things are all strikingly ambitious and singular works of art that have fuelled robust debate.

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