More on the Mary Stuart Movie

 From Deadline Hollywood:

Dr. John Guy, whose historical book “Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart” the pic is based upon, says that in history Mary and Elizabeth never met.  In 1562 they came close to meeting, but it never happened.  Though Guy agrees with other historians’ point of views that the women never met, in 2010 a letter was discovered from Elizabeth I written to Mary 18 months before Mary’s execution. In it, Elizabeth regrets everything that went wrong between them and proposes a meeting to discuss it, but the meeting never happened and Mary’s execution still came to be.

The conceit of the movie is that the two met in real life, and that’s a dramatic device that had to take place in the movie in order to understand what was going on between them. The pic’s screenwriter Beau Willimon was taken by Guy’s approach showing the duo’s adversarial nature. “Typically Elizabeth is this hardened and cold person who is fully formed and Mary is often portrayed as impulsive and reckless. What John posits, and exceeds to prove, is that Mary was the politically savvy one and her choices were well thought out and not purely driven by emotions. Elizabeth was much more insecure in her reign and Mary about leadership and strength,” said the Neflix House of Cards creator. (Read more.)

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