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Harriet Walter has become the latest in a line of actors, from Meryl Streep and Gillian Anderson to Fenella Woolgar and Jennifer Saunders, to accept the challenge of becoming Margaret Thatcher on screen. How do you play a woman who, 45 years on from her ascension, exists almost as a national caricature?
Walter plays the part in Brian and Maggie, Channel 4’s two-part drama tracing Thatcher’s relationship with Labour MP turned journalist Brian Walden, which culminated in a fraught TV interview in October 1989, as Thatcher’s fortune began to fail. The series, written by Sherwood creator James Graham, directed by Stephen Frears and co-starring Steve Coogan, digs into the former prime minister’s private persona.
Thatcher’s public image, and the way it was satirised in shows like Spitting Image, looms large over dramatic portrayals. Artists have often had fun with it, depicting her as a vampire in 2023’s black comedy El Conde, played by Saunders as a theatrical grande dame in 2011’s Comic Strip episode The Hunt For Tony Blair, and becoming a drag queen in Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, created by Matt Tedford and Jon Brittain.
In dramas, like The Crown and The Iron Lady, the on-screen Thatchers hem closer to her public persona. As Zoe Williams noted of Anderson’s performance in The Crown: “Anderson plays Thatcher with such close attention to her mode of being that it’s like seeing the corpse of the baddie reanimated.” Here, and in The Iron Lady, Thatcher’s infamous voice, shaped by elocution lessons in childhood and then deliberately deepened as leader of the opposition, is impersonated precisely, while her appearance leans on touchstones like the famously bouffant hairstyle.
Walter’s portrayal has been praised by critics as more subtle. “Is Harriet Walter the best screen Thatcher yet?” asked the Times. It’s a “staggering Maggie” said the Standard, “Walter and Coogan go beyond impersonation to draw out deeper, emotional interpretations,” said the FT.
“We’ve seen a lot of portrayals of Thatcher, and as years have gone by, the different portrayals started to become more caricature – the hair was getting bigger,” said Delyth Scudamore, executive producer on Brian and Maggie. “I wanted to get rid of that sense she was putting her lipstick on in the mirror before she could go and flirt with the men. Because that was nonsense. She was a powerhouse in a different way, so we wanted to reflect that in how she looked, to look more real.”
Walter has said she prepared for the role by watching videos of Thatcher, but also revisited previous portrayals. She went into the role “deciding that I’m not going to try and compete with those brilliant people. I’m going to just tell a different story about her that nobody else quite told. I wanted to try and get under her skin”.
Her voice is recognisably Thatcher, but with so many scenes taking place in private, it isn’t a replica of the one heard in political broadcasts. Walter said she explored “a bit more wit, a bit more candour in the way she spoke”.
Vanessa White, hair and makeup designer on the show, aimed for “realism”. She’d also studied other screen iterations but envisioned a different direction. This was partly practical – “Meryl Streep was a very different thing because she wore prosthetics,” White said, and had the edges of her wig touched out in visual effects – but mainly artistic.
“We weren’t doing a sketch show, we were doing a serious drama,” White said. She knew many shots would be tight on Walter’s face, so the hair and makeup had to be meticulous. Wigs sometimes look too fake, she said, so Walter agreed to bleach her hair, to blend more seamlessly with the hairpiece.
Walter’s brown eyes were transformed with blue lenses, and her olive complexion was altered with makeup inspired by contemporaneous images. White had done hair and makeup for the real Thatcher while working at the BBC in the 80s, so had insight into her favoured shades of lipstick.
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“We knew [Walter] didn’t look like Margaret Thatcher, that Spitting Image look. We pared it down so you just looked at the face and saw the emotion.” Once transformed: “She looked like a formidable woman and right for the period in time.”
Brian and Maggie is set across 12 years. We first see Thatcher as leader of the opposition, then during the height of her powers as PM, and finally in 1989 when her authority is threatened. White and team, working closely with Gabriela Yiaxis in costume, decided to emphasise these three eras with subtle shifts in Thatcher’s look. At first, “We wanted her to look like a 1950s housewife, like someone who didn’t have any power.” Later, she becomes “glamorous … sophisticated”.
There were three wigs: natural blonde, then dyed golden and brown. Her lipstick evolved from peaches to a bolder burgundy, and her eyes became greyer. Walter wore false teeth for her No 10 years too. “Her teeth did change in real life, she got them done when she became prime minister,” said Scudamore. “She was human, she did want to look good on camera.”
While Walter is 74, the on-screen Thatcher ages from her early 50s to mid-60s. White used tape to change the shape of Walter’s face and neck, ageing her down for the earlier era. White said: “Most people wouldn’t notice what we’ve done, but Harriet knows and she could feel that change.”
“There is a degree of separation,” Scudamore said. “You can tell it’s not Thatcher, James [Graham] had written this script looking for who the real Margaret was.”
