The dropped project that almost cost Natalie Dormer her career: “I was properly unemployed”
Of all the roles you could play right now as an actor that you would probably place fairly near the bottom of potential jobs, then Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Prince Andrew or Mountbatten, would have to be well in the mix, but that’s exactly what Natalie Dormer has gone for in an upcoming ITV drama.
The Lady tells the story of Ferguson’s former assistant Jane Andrews, who would eventually go on to be jailed for the murder of her boyfriend, which, to be honest, with everything that’s going on, doesn’t even sound that shocking anymore.
Filming was completed on the project before Prince Andrew got a knock from the Met police’s finest, and so Dormer has since decided not to do any promo for the series and to donate her fee to charity.
It’s something of a shame for her, though, who we haven’t seen as much of over the last ten years since she did some genuinely sterling work on not just acclaimed drama The Tudors, but the dragons and incest megahit Game of Thrones throughout the 2010s. She was very much in demand at that point, snapping up a Marvel debut in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger and another huge franchise in the shape of two Hunger Games movies a couple of years later.
For some reason, despite those movies bringing in billions at the box office, Dormer’s career didn’t go on the kind of trajectory you might expect, and by the end of the decade she had co-written and starred in a thriller with her former partner called In Darkness which barely anyone saw and so headed back to TV with the dark fantasy series Penny Dreadful alongside Billie Piper.
That kind of up-and-down experience was also prevalent in her early career, as far back as her first film, in fact, when she appeared in the Heath Ledger starrer Casanova in 2005, impressing the director so much that her small part was expanded to give her more screen time.
Off the back of that, she was offered a three-movie deal with industry giants Touchstone Pictures, which would then unfortunately fall through, leaving her out of work for almost a year.
The actor recalled that time to The Telegraph, saying, “I was properly unemployed for ten months, temping in an office again to pay for Christmas presents. That was the best lesson I’ve ever learnt: you’re never home and dry.”
Fortunately for Dormer, she then picked up the role of Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, a part that ran for two years until, like most of Henry VIII’s companions, she had to have her head lopped off. Aside from her TV work, she has also had a couple of stand-out movies in the years since, notably the Chris Hemsworth retro-racing biopic Rush in 2013, and more recently the psychological thriller The Wasp from 2024 with Naomie Harris, which gained excellent reviews.
As things stand, The Lady hit screens on ITV on Sunday, February 22nd, and depending on what kind of other insanity emerges about what on earth was going on between the Royals and that chap over the pond who definitely killed himself in prison, there’s nothing to see there, nothing at all.
