If Netflix’s The Crown piqued your interest in Princess Margaret, the tragic younger sibling of Queen Elizabeth, you are not alone. British actress Vanessa Kirby, who plays the vivacious, unlucky-in-love sister, is with you.
“I’ve even got a picture of her in my room, framed,” Kirby laughs of the real-life royal she is again embodying in The Crown’s second season, which is currently filming in London. “It’s so cringe, but I just fell in love with her.”
When preparing to film the first season, Kirby says she was careful to only read materials about the royal up to 1955—the year that Princess Margaret decided to split from Peter Townsend, the dashing, divorced war hero and longtime family friend, a painful breakup depicted in the Season 1 finale. The heartbreak was so brutal—many believed that Townsend was the great love of Margaret’s life—that it transformed the royal afterward.
“I really had to be vigilant about reading as much as I could, but only from the early Princess Margaret years,” explains Kirby. “The younger sister to an amazing woman, but one equally as radiant and effervescent who had all this potential, until her father died suddenly and everything changed . . . I watched loads of [video] archives that featured her during that time, looked through lots of different images, and listened to all her favorite music.”
Kirby even stumbled upon a real-life relic from Townsend while appearing onstage in a production of Uncle Vanya.
“I found a letter that Peter had written to [Margaret] while he was in Brussels,” explains Kirby, who says the letter came from a cast member whose father was in contact with the captain. “I think he worked for Peter at one point . . . But, oh my God, to hold it was amazing. [My co-star] made me a copy, I stuck it on my mirror, and I got really emotional when she showed me it. It was really special to look at it and see Peter’s handwriting.”
“At that moment I fell in love with them both,” Kirby says. “I felt like it was our duty to bring this romance back into the public consciousness, especially because they aren’t with us any more—for their love story be remembered. They could’ve had a life together and children and they didn’t. It’s one of the tragic love stories of that century, I think.”
Ultimately, Princess Margaret broke off her relationship with Townsend after an hours-long, closed-door meeting with Queen Elizabeth, who said that the only way Margaret could marry the divorced captain was if she moved out of England and forfeited her royal claim.
“We filmed a version initially where Margaret decides not to marry him because she does not love him enough . . . but Peter [Morgan, The Crown creator] met somebody who knew them both very well and said, ‘No, Margaret was always totally in love with him, and they made a pact never to marry anybody else.’”
In her research, Kirby says she discovered other details about Margaret and Peter’s relationship that she wishes viewers could have seen depicted on The Crown—including revelations about the romance from Townsend’s own memoir, Time and Chance.
“He said that they had a shared vulnerability and fragility,” says Kirby, “and they both felt like they were orbiting in outer space, and they found each other within that. That was really useful. . . . I read about another time, when they were all out having a picnic. I think he was sunbathing, and Margaret lifted the blanket off him and looked into his face. At that moment he thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m in love with her.’”
“There’s so many beautiful moments that you couldn’t see in the Peter/Margaret story that I wish we could’ve been able to do,” says Kirby. “I knew them all inside out. I wrote this timeline that’s everything that she had done in these years . . . I wish there’d been a whole series about Peter and Margaret because they’re amazing.”
Kirby says that during The Crown’s next season, viewers will see how the heartbreak “propels her” in the next phase of her life.
Asked whether we should be worried about Margaret’s Season-2 trajectory, Kirby responds, “You should be worried . . . I don’t want to spoil it, but the history’s out there. She meets Antony Armstrong-Jones, and she goes head first into a completely new, exciting, dangerous, volatile, dysfunctional relationship and then marriage . . . We’re about to start filming all that stuff, and I’m so excited.”
“Tony starts this whole trail of a more bohemian life outside,” Kirby says. “Margaret was best friends with Elizabeth Taylor, and she had loads of American actress friends and singers. You see these two worlds collide—hers and Tony’s, who is a member of the public and was a creative, liberal, dark horse. Meanwhile she is this epitome of the establishment. I’ve been doing tons of research about it recently, and seen people say there was never such an ill-fated match because Margaret and Tony were just so alike personality-wise that he was the opposite of Peter.”
Even without the ill-fated romances, though, the unique constraints of the crown ensured that Margaret was a tragic figure for other reasons.
“Some biographers said she would’ve been an actress or a ballerina had she not been a princess,” says Kirby. “She was involved with so many charities and theaters, yet always watched from the stalls and was never out there doing what she loved. It’s tragic to think what this person could have been. I’m always really fascinated in characters like that though, characters who don’t fulfill their potential because [of] some constraint, psychological or otherwise.”
