Clive Irving: Helen Mirren Exposes the Slut-Shaming of Catherine the Great
Helen
Mirren can do it all. Here she is, at the
age of 74, playing a woman half her age, in HBO’S Catherine the Great,
and she is on fire—a woman seizing absolute power in a nest of male vipers, the
Russian court of 1762. Make no mistake:
Nobody could better carry off the audacity of the casting. We’re so used to
Woody Allen Syndrome—old male actors partnering with far younger women—that
it’s a revelation to see the roles reversed as Mirren’s Catherine works her way
through a series of muscular young lovers.
And this scenario
raises another challenge to long-established sexual prejudices. After her death,
Catherine was subjected by her successors to a smear campaign that has shown
surprising stamina -that her life was one long banquet of inventive sex
culminating in a scene where she dies attempting to mate with a horse. That never happened.
Catherine certainly had a healthy sex drive and, as we see in the opener of the
HBO drama, she employed a kind of sexual food taster in the person of Countess
Bruce who personally auditioned potential lovers - a role played with ribald
enthusiasm by Gina McKee.
The traducing of
Catherine’s life and reputation was based on one word: nymphomania. It’s
extraordinary how damning that word could be, propelled along by Victorian
ideas that a healthy sex drive was unseemly in a woman. Guess what? Queen
Victoria herself had nine children in 17 years with Albert, her Prince Consort,
and after he died she had a long fling with the groundkeeper of her Scottish
estate.
To those who launched this campaign,
Catherine’s whole reign was an offense against male supremacy, hence the
backlash. She brought culture to a court that had been brutish and backward.
Like her contemporary, Frederick the Great of Prussia, she conducted a long
correspondence with the great sage of the Enlightenment, Voltaire. At the same
time she had to outwit and outthink the Russian male power centers of the
church, the military and the court... read more:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/helen-mirren-exposes-the-slut-shaming-of-catherine-the-great?ref=home
