Elizabeth

Elizabeth is a 1998 biographical film written by Michael Hirst, directed by Shekhar Kapur, and starring Cate Blanchett in the title role ofQueen Elizabeth I of England, alongside Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes, Sir John Gielgud, Fanny Ardant andRichard Attenborough. Loosely based on the early years of Elizabeth's reign, in 2007, Blanchett reprised the role in the sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, covering the later part of her reign.

The film brought Australian actress Blanchett to international attention. She won several awards for her portrayal of Elizabeth, notably aBAFTA and a Golden Globe in 1998, while the film was also named the 1998 BAFTA Best British Film. Nominated in 7 categories in the71st Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress, it won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

The film sees a young Elizabeth elevated to the throne on the death of her half-sister Mary I, who had imprisoned her. Her reign over the divided and bankrupt realm is perceived as weak and under threat of invasion by Early Modern France or Habsburg Spain. For the future stability and security of the crown she is urged by advisor William Cecil (Attenborough) to marry, and has suitors in the Catholic Philip II of Spain and the French Henri, Duc d'Anjou. She instead embarks on an affair with the wholly unsuitable Robert Dudley (Fiennes).

Elizabeth must counter threats from within such as the powerful 4th Duke of Norfolk (Eccleston), and from the armies of Mary of Guise(Ardant) garrisoned in Scotland. She also faces plots from Rome directed by Pope Pius V (Gielgud). Assisted by her 'spymaster' Francis Walsingham (Rush), she puts down the threats both internal and external, ruthlessly executing the plotters. Elizabeth eventually ends her affair and resolves to marry nobody except England. The film ends with Elizabeth assuming the persona of 'The Virgin Queen', initiating England's Golden Age.

Princess Kauilani

Watch full movie

Princess Kaiulani is a 2009 film based on the life of Princess Kaʻiulani (1875–1899).

The film stars Q'Orianka Kilcher in the role of Princess Kaʻiulani, one of the last heirs to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaii. This movie was shown in Hawaii International Film Festival under the title Barbarian Princess; afterward, Roadside Attractions acquired this movie's United States rights and changed this movie's title for United States release.

The movie follows the progression of Kaʻiulani's short life, beginning with a happy life in Honolulu interrupted by the events surrounding the imposition of the Bayonet Constitution. The movie follows her through her education in Victorian England, the announcement of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, her campaign to attempt to convince the United States to reverse the overthrow, and her return to Hawaii.

The historical events are generally portrayed accurately, though some of the details, for example the reasons for King Kalākaua's signing of the Bayonet Constitution, are not explained in detail. In contrast, many of the personal details of the princess's life, including particularly the depiction of her love life, are representative of who she was rather than strictly historical. Her life also included many significant events that are not in this movie.

The movie was written and directed by Marc Forby, and also stars Barry Pepper as Lorrin Thurston, Will Patton as Sanford Dole, Julian Glover as Theophilus Harris Davies, and Shaun Evans as Clive Davies.

The first public performance of the movie was in Honolulu on October 16, 2009, at the historic Hawaii Theatre, as part of the 2009 Hawaii International Film Festival. The performance was sold out.

Source: Wikipedia

The Tudors

episode 1 -8

The Countess

The Countess” is a period drama/thriller set against the violent and macabre world of 17th Century Eastern European aristocracy. Reminiscent of the political intrigue of “The Illusionist” and the haunting stylings of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, “The Countess” tells the tale of Erzebet Bathory (Julie Delpy) an aging noblewoman whose years of solitude and loneliness transforms her into a cold and distant figure among Hungarian nobility. When her violent and brutal husband, Ferenc Nadasky, dies on the field of battle, Erzebet is forced to defend her estate against the political maneuverings of her fellow nobles. After having her heart broken by the handsome, young Count Thurzo (Daniel Bruhl), Erzebet seeks the aide of a seductive witch named Anna Darvulia (Anamaria Marinca) to help win back his love. However, Erzebet’s fairy tale dream soon transforms into a nightmare when Darvulia’s corruption leads Erzebet’s already cold and selfish heart to commit an infamous series of ritualistic murders aimed at stealing the youth and beauty from innocent maidens. As rumors of her actions begin to spread, a mysterious nobleman (Vincent Gallo) further exploits Erzebet’s vanity and misguided passion to curry favor with his fellow nobles, which leads to the dispossession and damnation of a woman blinded by love and vanity. Based on a true story and widely credited by many as a primary influence of Stoker’s “Dracula” myth.

Elizabeth 1998

Elizabeth is a 1998 film loosely based on the early reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. The film was written by Michael Hirst and directed by Shekhar Kapur.

It stars Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Christopher Eccleston, and Richard Attenborough. It was the final film of acclaimed British actor Sir John Gielgud.

It also stars 12-year-old Lily Allen as a lady in waiting, Manchester United legend Eric Cantona as the French ambassador, future Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston as the Duke of Norfolk, and Daniel Craig, who would later portray James Bond, as a member of the Vatican who is heavily involved in the film's central plot. txt and image from: wikipedia.org

Bathory

Part I

Part II

Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian, Alžbeta Bátoriová in Slovak, Alžběta Báthoryová in Czech, Elżbieta Batory in Polish, 7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) was a Hungarian countess from the renowned Báthory family.

The family is famous for defending Hungary against the Ottoman Turks. She is possibly the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the "Blood Countess" and as the "Bloody Lady of Čachtice", after the castle near Trencsén, in the Kingdom of Hungary (present Trenčín, Slovakia), where she spent most of her adult life.

After her husband's death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of virgin girls and young women, with one witness attributing to them over 600 victims, though she was only convicted on 80 counts.

In 1610, she was imprisoned in Čachtice Castle, where she remained bricked in a set of rooms until her death four years later. She was never formally tried in court.

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII

The women who married Henry VIII have become defined not by the way they lived but by the way their lives ended. They are seen as victims of a bloated tyrant, deserving pity, but not respect. However, have we under-estimated them and are historians right to have merely portrayed them as bit-part players in Henry’s story? In this release, Dr David Starkey reveals them to be vibrant, powerful individuals who showed great dignity when faced with exile from the King’s favour, or even the executioner’s axe in the Tower of London. The series focuses on the stories of the women themselves, revealing in intimate detail their experiences of sex, childbirth, and the glamorous, dangerous life at court, including the deadly intruiges that dethroned them.

Click the links below or the images:

1. Catherine of Aragon

2. Anne Boleyn

3&4. Jane Seymour & Anne Of Cleves

5&6. Catherine Howard & Catherine Parr

Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971 was a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. Her extraordinary influence on haute couture was such that she was the only person in the field to be named on TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. 
Early Life

Chanel was born in Saumur, France. She was the second daughter of Albert Chanel and Jeanne Devolle, a market stallholder and laundrywoman respectively at the time of her birth. Her birth was declared by employees of the hospital in which she was born. They, being illiterate, could not provide or confirm the correct spelling of the surname and it was recorded by the mayor François Poitou as "Chasnel". This misspelling made the tracing of her roots almost impossible for biographers when Chanel later rose to prominence. 

Her parents married in 1883. She had five siblings: two sisters, Julie (1882–1913) and Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1891). In 1895, when she was 12 years old, Chanel's mother died of tuberculosis and her father left the family. Because of this, the young Chanel spent six years in the orphanage of the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital, where female relatives taught Coco to sew with more flourish than the nuns at the monastery were able to demonstrate. When Coco turned eighteen, she was obliged to leave the orphanage, and affiliated with the circus of Moulins as a cabaret singer. During this time, Chanel performed in bars in Vichy and Moulins where she was called "Coco." Some say that the name comes from one of the songs she used to sing, and Chanel herself said that it was a "shortened version of coquette, the French word for 'kept women," according to an article in The Atlantic.

Personal Life and Entry into Fashion

While she failed to get steady work as a singer, it was at Moulins that she met rich, young French textile heir Étienne Balsan, to whom she soon became an acknowledged mistress, keeping her day job in a tailoring shop. Balsan lavished on her the beauties of "the rich life": diamonds, dresses, and pearls. While living with Balsan, Chanel began designing hats as a hobby, which soon became a deeper interest of hers. "After opening her eyes," as she would say, Coco left Balsan and took over his apartment in Paris. Biographer Justine Picardie, in her 2010 study Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (Harper Collins), suggests that the fashion designer's nephew André Palasse—supposedly the only child of her sister Julie—may actually have been Chanel's child by Balsan.
In 1909 Chanel met and began an affair with one of Balsan's friends, Captain Arthur Edward 'Boy' Capel. Capel financed Chanel's first shops and his own clothing style, notably his jersey blazers, inspired her creation of the Chanel look. The couple spent time together at fashionable resorts such as Deauville, but he was never faithful to Chanel. The affair lasted nine years, but even after Capel married an aristocratic English beauty in 1918, he did not completely break off with Chanel. His death in a car accident, in late 1919, was the single most devastating event in Chanel's life. A roadside memorial at the site of the accident was placed there by Chanel, who visited it in later years to place flowers there.

Chanel became a licensed modiste (hat maker) in 1910 and opened a boutique at 21 rue Cambon, Paris named Chanel Modes. Chanel's modiste career bloomed once theatre actress Gabrielle Dorziat modelled her hats in the F Noziere's play Bel Ami in 1912 (Subsequently, Dorizat modelled her hats again in Les Modes). In 1913, she established a boutique in Deauville, where she introduced luxe casual clothes that were suitable for leisure and sport. Chanel launched her career as fashion designer when she opened her next boutique, titled Chanel-Biarritz, in 1915, catering to the wealthy Spanish clientele who holidayed in Biarritz and were less affected by the war. Fashionable like Deauville, Chanel created loose casual clothes made out of jersey, a material typically used for men's underwear. By 1919, Chanel was registered as a couturiere and established her maison de couture at 31 rue Cambon. Later in life, she concocted an elaborate false history for her humble beginnings. Chanel would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America to get rich and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was two instead of twelve. 

In 1920, she was introduced by ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to world-famous composer Igor Stravinsky (who composed 'The Rite of Spring'), to whom she extended an offer for him and his family to reside with her. During this temporary sojourn it was rumoured that they had an affair. In 1924, Chanel made an agreement with the Wertheimer brothers, Pierre and Paul, directors of the eminent perfume house Bourgeois since 1917, creating a corporate entity, "Parfums Chanel." The Wertheimers agreed to provide full financing for production, marketing and distribution of Chanel No. 5. For ten percent of the stock, Chanel licensed her name to "Parfums Chanel" and removed herself from involvement in all business operations. Displeased with the arrangement, Chanel worked for more than twenty years to gain full control of "Parfums Chanel. She proclaimed that Pierre Wertheimer was “the bandit who screwed me. 
Coco dated some of the most influential men of her time, but she never married. The reason may be found in her answer, when asked why she did not marry the Duke of Westminster: "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel. In 1925, Vera Bate Lombardi, née Sarah Gertrude Arkwright, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Cambridge, became Chanel's muse, and also her liaison to a number of European royal families. Chanel established the English look based upon Lombardi's personal style. Lombardi also had the highest possible social connections. She introduced Chanel to her uncle, the Duke of Westminster, her cousin, the Duke of Windsor, and many other aristocratic families. In 1927 she built Villa La Pausa in Roquebrune on the French Riviera hiring the architect Robert Streitz. The villa has a staircase and a patio inspired by her orphanage, Aubazine. La Pausa has been partially replicated at the Dallas Museum of Art to welcome the Reves collection and part of Chanel's original furniture for the house. 

It was in 1931 while in Monte Carlo that Chanel made the acquaintance of Samuel Goldwyn. The introduction was made through a mutual friend, The Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, cousin to the last czar of Russia, Nicolas II. Goldwyn offered Chanel a tantalizing proposition. For the sum of a million dollars (approximately seventy-five million today), he would bring her to Hollywood twice a year to design costumes for MGM stars. Chanel accepted the offer. En route to California from New York traveling in a white train car, which had been luxuriously outfitted specifically for her use, she was interviewed by Colliers magazine in 1932. Chanel said she had agreed to the arrangement to "see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures.

See also:  World War II , Later years and death
Film Depictions

The first film about Chanel was Chanel Solitaire (1981), directed by George Kaczender and starring Marie-France Pisier, Timothy Dalton, and Rutger Hauer. The American television movie Coco Chanel debuted on 13 September 2008 on Lifetime Television, starring Shirley MacLaine as a 70-year-old Chanel. Directed by Christian Duguay, the film also starredBarbora Bobulova as the young Chanel, Olivier Sitruk as Boy Capel, and Malcolm McDowell. The movie substantially rewrote Chanel's personal history, such as its portrayal of her status as a professional mistress as instead a series of "love stories," and glossing over both her Nazi collaboration and her use of British Royal connections to avoid post-war trial as a collaborator. A film starring Audrey Tautou as the young Coco, titled Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel), was released on 22 April 2009. Audrey Tautou is the new spokeswoman of Chanel S.A. The film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, directed by Jan Kounen and starring Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, concerns the purported affair between Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. The film is based on the 2002 novel Coco & Igor by Chris Greenhalgh, and was chosen to close the Cannes Film Festival of 2009. Two more projects are said to be in the works, including one directed by Daniele Thompson.

Literary Depictions

Coco & Igor is a novel, written by Chris Greenhalgh, which depicts the affair between Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and the creative achievements that this affair inspired. The novel was first published in 2003. In 2008 a children's book entitled Different like Coco was published. It depicted the humble childhood of Coco Chanel and chronicled how she made drastic changes to the fashion industry. The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman is a novel written by Karen Karbo. Published in 2009, it chronicles the humble beginnings and legendary achievements of Coco Chanel while providing insight and advice on everything from embracing the moment to living life on your own terms.

Stage Depictions

The Broadway musical Coco, music by Andre Previn, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, opened 18 December 1969 and closed 3 October 1970. It is set in 1953–1954 at the time that Chanel was reestablishing her couture house.

Source: wikipedia

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl is a historical fiction novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn. Reviews were mixed; some said it was a brilliantly claustrophobic look at palace life in Tudor England, while others weren't convinced.

Even so, it has enjoyed phenomenal success and popularity since its publication in 2002 and has spawned five sequels - The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen.

The Other Boleyn Girl portrays the Boleyn-Howard family in a way that has not often been seen in fiction. Inspired by the life of Mary Boleyn, Gregory depicts the divorce of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history (that of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and the great need of a male heir to the throne. (text&image from wikipedia)