Judi Dench has joined the growing opprobrium over the storyline of The Crown, in a ‘strongly-worded letter’ to the Times. The Oscar-winner, who is one of Britain’s most distinguished actresses, has accused the Netflix series of ‘crude sensationalism’ and said that it was ‘cruelly unjust’. She called on Netflix to insert a disclaimer at the start of the programme to say it is a ‘fictionalised drama’, a move that the streaming giant has resisted so far. This, she said, would not only be a mark of respect for the late Queen, but would also help preserve Netflix’s reputation.
Dame Judi Dench
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‘The time has come for Netflix to reconsider — for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers’, Dame Judi told the Times.
‘While many will recognise The Crown for the brilliant but fictionalised account of events that it is, I fear that a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true. Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series — that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence — this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.’
