Crypt to script

Veteran British director Stephen Frears is taking another dig at royalty in The Lost King, his film about the search for Richard III.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The Lost King is a very Stephen Frears kind of film. It features a royal, a true story where fact and fiction are blurred, a determined woman, and a peculiarly British kind of power struggle.

These things have occurred before in Frears’ long and varied screen career as a director who, at 81, keeps up a prodigious work rate.

Having got himself noticed in the ’80s with the era-defining Brit flicks Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Prick Up Your Ears and My Beautiful Laundrette, Frears got his ticket to Hollywood via Dangerous Liaisons.

By the 2000s, he had gravitated back across the Atlantic. Since, he has delivered monarchs in The Queen – the film starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II that acted as a prototype for The Crown for its writer Peter Morgan – and Victoria and Abdul.

In The Lost King, he’s brought Richard III back to life, albeit as an occasional, friendly apparition who isn’t the villain history has made him out to be.

He appears to Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) as the amateur historian searches for the unmarked grave he went to after falling at the Battle of Bosworth Field during the War of the Roses in 1485.

Langley led archaeologists to a Leicester social services office carpark where Richard III was dug up in 2012 and his DNA checked against his Plantagenet descendants. He was reinterred with due ceremony at Leicester Cathedral, a stone’s throw from his original resting place, in 2015. His original grave is now under glass in a Richard III visitor centre built over the carpark.