OBSERVER: My Duchess
At 92, Joan Collins embodies Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American socialite who almost brought down the British Royal Family.
Directed by Mike Newell, the high-class gothic horror My Duchess is set in her final years, after the Duke of Windsor’s death, when Wallis was isolated and invalided, living in her chateau on the Bois de Boulogne.
The film opens with the Duchess at a drag show where she appears alongside her drag double.
It’s a grim reminder that Wallis understood her position: mocked and ridiculed as the woman who single-handedly caused a rift in the British monarchy, a rift for which she was never forgiven.
Melodramatic and ridiculously over-the-top, this dark tale is unsparing in its depiction of lawyer Suzanne Blum (Isabella Rossellini), who cajoles and swindles her way into a position as personal assistant and to secure Wallis’s power of attorney.
Blum then becomes the carer from hell in a Misery-esque domestic thriller.
Rossellini is excellent as the obsessive and vengeful Suzanne, whose everyday cruelty ratchets up as Wallis succumbs to illness and neglect.
All attempts by her friends to see Wallis, including a wonderfully haughty Miranda Richardson as the notorious and unrepentant fascist Lady Diana Moseley, are thwarted by Suzanne, a French Jew who fled the Germans on the eve of the war.
Wallis’s sad, pathetic decline is reflected in the set’s transformation from opulence to a shadowy grotesque, mirroring the shifting power dynamics.
Sandy Powell’s costumes and Nadia Stacey’s hair and makeup transform Collins into the duchess, resplendent with designer couture, jewels and her iconic jet-black coiffure.
By the end, nothing remains of her former self; the audeince feels genuine pathos for the much-maligned duchess.
A feat only the marvellous Dame Joan could pull off.
Now screening at Palace Cinemas.
Review by Kathryn Keeble
Pictured: Wallis Simpson (Dame Joan Collins) and her lawyer Maître Suzanne Blum (Isabella Rossellini) in My Duchess.