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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Streaming: High & Low: John Galliano and the best films about fashion

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Kevin Macdonald’s finely balanced portrait of the disgraced Dior designer, on Mubi from Friday, is the newest arrival on a catwalk of fashion industry movies, from Funny Face to Zoolander

For those who bleat on about the iniquities of supposed “cancel culture”, the career of British fashion designer John Galliano is a useful counterpoint. Sacked in 2011 as the creative director of Christian Dior after an appalling incident of antisemitic abuse on his part, he spent two years in the wilderness before being hired by Oscar de la Renta and subsequently Maison Margiela, where he has been for a decade. A-listers still wear his gowns on red carpets. Life goes on. Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano (streaming on Mubi from 26 April) chronicles Galliano’s rise and fall and rise with a more distanced, critical eye than you may expect from a film co-produced by Vogue publisher Condé Nast. There’s due appreciation of his distinctive design sensibility, but sharp scrutiny of personal flaws enabled by an unruly, permissive industry.

With its loucheness and capacity for bad behaviour, the rag trade has always made a great film subject: the clothes provide the visual dazzle while the volatile business of it all provides the drama. Macdonald’s film is the latest in a recent run of fine fashion docs: Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s ravishing McQueen told the markedly more tragic story of Alexander McQueen, the ill-fated enfant terrible of the industry, with a formal flamboyance well matched to his extravagant aesthetic and a humane consideration of his demons. Frédéric Tcheng’s Dior and I isn’t as burdened by pathos in its spectacular overview of designer Raf Simons’s debut season for the venerable French fashion house, but is compelling in its detailing of creative process. The same film-maker also made Halston, a tricksily framed but compulsive portrait of the disco-era American designer, who went from ubiquitous tastemaker to sellout by the time of his Aids-related death in 1990.

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