Why Are We Still So Obsessed with Catherine the Great?
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When Tony McNamara first thought of dramatizing Catherine the Great’s life, he says, “I didn’t know much except the infamous rumors about the horse,” referring to a nasty, apocryphal legend about the 18th-century Empress.
McNamara, creator of the Hulu series The Great, soon learned that the empress corresponded with Voltaire, championed women’s education, and ruled Russia for 34 years after ruthlessly deposing her husband. Yet she has been reduced to a femme fatale in the popular imagination.
In The Great, a witty romp with a contemporary feel, Elle Fanning is a fresh-faced Catherine, an intellectual and idealist married to the brutish Peter III (Nicholas Hoult). McNamara sees Catherine as unapologetically ambitious and sexual, if flawed—a timelier image that speaks to women today. As he did in his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Favourite, in which Hoult also starred, McNamara toys here with history to make characters feel alive.
“I was interested in details that would be funny and relatable,” he says. “You get up in the morning and you’re trying to overthrow an emperor but you’re still a kid.”
His Catherine is delighted with a live bear Peter gives her, and is profoundly disappointed on their wedding night. After her husband burns down a school she has created, she begins to plot against him. She has always felt that God destined her for greatness, she tells her loyal servant, Marial. “Why did he make you a woman then?” Marial asks. “For comedy, I guess,” Catherine responds.
While Catherine has been maligned through history, she’s also irresistible. A strong-minded woman who lives according to her own rules always invites speculation—just look at the current state of the British royal family— and that’s why her story has been told over and over again. Catherine was cinematic before movies existed—the sumptuous palaces, the jewelry collection to die for, all that sex and intrigue.
Vampish Pola Negri played her in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1924 silent, Forbidden Paradise; he would later direct Tallulah Bankhead in the same part for 1945's A Royal Scandal. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Ormond created sympathetic portraits in two 1990s miniseries. But it was Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s 1934 The Scarlett Empress who cemented her screen image. Swathed in furs and dripping diamonds, she surveys a line of soldiers, eyeing which man to choose for the night.
The real Catherine was far more fascinating says Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose book about her longest love affair, Catherine the Great & Potemkin, has been optioned by Angelina Jolie. “She was cultured, enlightened and generous spirited,” he says. “She was also proudly an autocrat and crushed intellectuals who criticized her power." The double standard that once shaped her image seems to be vanishing.
In the HBO series Catherine the Great, with Helen Mirren, the empress was an astute politician and a die-hard romantic. Mirren has railed against the image of Catherine as promiscuous, saying “It’s such an easy way to belittle a woman who’s been successful in history. They did the same with Cleopatra.”
As in Mirren’s version, in The Great we see Catherine’s intelligence and empathy, as well as the personal cost of being a royal in the public eye—it’s just the latest reminder of why Catherine’s story has never gone out of style.
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