Last but by no means least in the series comes Diana Quick, who plays the Queen in her most recent incarnation, wrestling with the issue of Charles and his desire to marry Camilla.
You get offered a great many parts. What was it that attracted you to this role?
'I suppose the first thing was that I'd recently played the Queen on stage in the Alan Bennett double bill which includes a play called A Question of Attribution, about Anthony Blunt, who has a very comic encounter with the Queen in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. She lets him know in ambiguous but no uncertain terms that she knows about his past.
'For that, I'd done a lot of work observing the Queen, the way that she moves and talks and so on, and her general demeanour in public. I also tried, for the purposes of the Bennett play, to surmise what she might be like in her private life, and discovered that she has a very, very strong sense of humour, and is a very good mimic, which endeared her to me no end.
'So the main thing was that I felt that I'd done a lot of preparation, so when the offer came to play her dealing with the issue of whether to allow Camilla to join the royal family or not, I felt that I was quite well prepared for it.
'And I felt that it was a fascinating situation and a very difficult moment in her career as a woman we all know to have had a very profound sense of obligation and of the public duty that comes with the accident of being born as a future monarch. I thought that the script had treated the subject with discretion and great sympathy.'
You talk about having studied The Queen's movements and mannerisms, but you presumably don't want to be doing an impression of her. How do you reconcile that?
'That's tricky. In fact, earlier in my career I'd resisted playing real people who were well documented for that very reason - because you end up becoming a sort of poor man's Rory Bremner, and that's not really what acting is about. It's more to do with catching the spirit of her.
'I think one has to try to be as accurate as possible. You have to wear the right clothes, and in my case I wore a white wig, because I'm playing her as a mature Queen rather than when she was a younger woman. So you try and get the externals as accurate as possible, but then I think it's like any acting challenge, you just try to play the situation as truthfully as you can. So you play the spirit of the thing rather than the documentary reality of it.'
Is there also a sense of the role being daunting because the Queen is such an important and revered figure to so many people in this country?
'No, I don't think it's daunting, because I never felt that the script was disrespectful in any way, and not voyeuristic, except that they speculate what might have gone on in her private office between her and her equerry, and what might have gone on between her and Prince Charles.
'But I didn't feel that it was invasive, and I hope that, if Her Majesty watched it, she wouldn't be offended by it. I hope she would feel that it's a sympathetic attempt to lay out what the issues were, and what the dilemma was for her.'
What was that dilemma? What was at the root of her hostility towards Charles and Camilla's relationship?
'I think it was essentially a constitutional one, which is that the monarch is the head of the church, and the church until very recently was against divorce. I think the heart of it was probably that she felt that whoever was going to be the monarch must lead by example.'
It's a fairly unenviable position that the Queen is put in, in her life, isn't it? It must be difficult to try and balance that sense of duty with her responsibility to, and love for, her family.
'Yes, and I think it must get more difficult now, because we live in an age of celebrity and speculation about people's private lives, where there is a common assumption that everything in people's lives is up for analysis and discussion and speculation.
'And particularly as a member of the royal family, she would have felt there was always a firm line to be drawn between private and public self. And this is an area, because it involved Charles and Camilla's private happiness, which bled over into very private issues.
'I think the dilemma was probably to do with having to acknowledge finally that we live in a different age, where personal happiness is considered to be as important as public duty. And I'm sure too - though I don't know this, and this is just me speculating - that she must have been haunted by what happened with the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson.'
When did you meet the Queen?
'I've met her several times. The first time was when I was a student, and she was chancellor of the university. I was introduced to her because I was the first woman president of the Drama Society, and she asked me what I'd been playing. This was in 1968, and I'd just come back from a tour in France, I was playing Ophelia in Hamlet.
'And of course '68 was the year of Les Evenements. And she asked me if I knew anything about it, and I said yes, I'd been in Paris during the tail end of Les Evenements, and she asked what they were making such a fuss about it. So with all the lack of prudence of a 19-year-old I said: "Don't you know, ma'am?" And she said she didn't. So I proceeded to tell her what it was all about, and why the students had joined in so enthusiastically.
'We talked for about ten minutes instead of the allotted 45 seconds or whatever and I felt rather pleased with myself that I'd told her something she didn't know about. She seemed genuinely interested and then off she went.
'A few minutes later I had a tap on my shoulder and one of her aides said: "Miss Quick, I need to have a word with you." He took me aside and said: "I have to inform you that it is not the correct protocol to lead the Queen in conversation."
'I was absolutely confounded by it, because I just felt like I'd been helping her. I simply wasn't aware there were these incredibly formal arrangements. I felt terribly sorry for her, that around her people were not allowed to be themselves or offer up opinions.'
But she asked you a direct question.
'Yes. I think her aide was perhaps being rather big for his boots.'
And you've met Prince Charles as well. Is he as winning a personality?
'Yes he is, particularly on the subject of Duchy products, which he's absolutely passionate about. We've had long talks about the nature of the products. He's also passionate about the activities of The Prince's Trust, which is another thing he does extremely well. Apparently he's very hands-on with it all, he does't just rubber stamp things.'
What was behind The Queen's eventual acceptance of Camilla and Charles getting married?
'Well, who knows? But I think it must have been her being persuaded that, in the interests of not only Charles' private happiness, but of the public perception of the monarchy, it was something which had to be allowed to proceed. It must have been very difficult, because by then it was so clear they were living together, and that he was very, very happy to be with her, and wanted her by his side, so it would have been anomalous to pretend that they weren't a cohabiting couple.
'I think a lot earlier in their relationship there was a very efficient screen provided by their loyal friends, to protect their privacy. But by now they'd already taken steps to appear in public, and to be seen as a couple. There was a slightly daft anomaly of us knowing one thing, but officially something else was happening.
'I think the Queen must have been persuaded by her office and by her closest advisors, that the only way forward was to allow the marriage to proceed. Also, of course, Camilla is a very decent woman, and that must have helped.'
Do you think it was easier for the Queen to move in that direction after her mother had died? The Queen Mother was, after all, closely linked to what happened with the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson.
'Yes, possibly. But I simply don't know about that. What one does know about the Queen Mother was that she absolutely adored Charles. I'm sure she would have wanted him to be happy. But I suppose that tension, between the rigour of the public office and having to sacrifice private happiness, would have been much clearer in her mind than for a more modern monarch.'
Looking back over the Queen's reign over the last 57 years, the country has changed an enormous amount. Do you think she has successfully evolved with it?
'She seems to have done, doesn't she? What she called her annus horriblis, and that whole long period of Charles and Diana splitting up, and then Diana's death and so on, has forced her to have an enormous re-evaluation of the public perception of the monarchy. I don't think that she has changed as a person.
'I think one of the reasons that people love her as herself is that in the public execution of her duties, she's always been immaculate. She's never wavered from that. She has managed to keep her private life her own.
'People think that if you're going to be a public figure then you have to have that squeaky cleanness. She does, and that's why she's held in such esteem. I think given the impossibility of being a monarch in a country that is pretty republican in its feeling, she's done a pretty good job, really.'
Having played the Queen on stage and in this series, have your feelings changed towards her?
'I feel a great admiration for her and I'm told by people who are close to her that she's really good fun in private.
'In terms of learning about her for the work, I saw a marvellous piece of footage, which was in a series made at the time of her jubilee, of her in Scotland, at Balmoral, relaxing, by going out for a day's shooting with her gun dogs, which she trains herself.
'There's a sequence of a bird falling far away, on the other side of a gully, and she sends her best dog to retrieve the bird. It's far away, and the dog is trained to stop when it reaches the end of the line of sight. She urges this dog on, which goes down the ravine and then up the other side.
'Then she has to urge it to jump up on an outcrop of rock. This is all at long distance and she's completely intent on the task. Then a bird flies up from the rock, so the dog thinks the bird was just stunned and not killed, and gets off the rock. So she has to urge it back on again, and it retrieves the bird and brings it all the way back and drops the bird at her feet.
'She then pets the dog and everybody around cheers, whistles and applauds her. The Queen looks up, having been completely intent on this task and says something like: "Oh, if one had known one was being watched, one wouldn't have done it." It's just a little glimmer of her doing what she loves.
'I think what she loves to do is be outdoors, walking, and to be with her animals and live the life of a country woman.'
Sue Jameson says that, as she was filming her episode, she felt a little bit more regal, and began thinking that people could bring her cups of tea. Did you experience that?
'Oh, I like the idea of that. No, I didn't experience that, but I did find that my whole deportment changed, and one started to be much more regal in one's bearing, with that ramrod straight back, and sitting decorously, and not fidgeting.
'It is jolly useful, actually, for when one's in public. But I don't think I quite expect people to kowtow to me.
