The Crown has officially found its Camilla Parker Bowles, as actress Emerald Fennell will be playing the then-girlfriend of Prince Charles for season three of the series.
According to TV Guide, the Call the Midwife star will appear as a young Bowles who dated Prince Charles in the early ’70s before the two split and went their separate ways.
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Charles famously married Princess Diana, and Bowles married military man Andrew Parker Bowles. Charles and Bowles reconnected later in life and began an affair during Charles’ marriage to Diana that continued after Charles and Diana divorced, with the couple eventually marrying in 2005.
Seasons three and four of The Crown will be much different than seasons one and two, as they will focus on the later years of the British Royal family surrounding Queen Elizabeth II.
Aside from Fennell, other new cast members include Olivia Colman (Queen Elizabeth), Tobias Menzies (Prince Phillip) and Helena Bonham Carter (Princess Margaret).
While many are very fond of the award-winning drama, a recent report indicated that the real Queen Elizabeth was not one of them.
Specifically, the Queen was reportedly upset about the scenes that revolved around her husband Prince Philip seeming “insensitive” over young Charles’ depicted aversion to attending the Gordonstoun school — Philip’s alma mater — due to cruel bullying.
“The Queen realizes that many who watch The Crown take it as an accurate portrayal of the Royal Family and she cannot change that,” a Royal Family spokesperson said of the Queen’s impression of the storyline. “But I can convey that she was upset by the way Prince Philip is depicted as being a father insensitive to his son’s well-being. She was particularly annoyed at a scene in which Philip has no sympathy for a plainly upset Charles while he is flying him home from Scotland.”
The spokesperson went on to add that this situation “simply did not happen.”
Historian Robert Lacey shed some light on the controversial matter, explaining that “for Philip,” his time at the Gordonstoun school was “a wonderful, pioneering moment and in many ways was the making of him.”
“Philip has been depicted as cruel for sending him to the school, but Philip did it with the best of motives,” he went on to say. “It was a fantastic, developing stage in his life, after his broken background. He thought it would be the making of Charles, but the school had changed.”
“When Philip was there, he found the hardships, the challenges of the climate and countryside uplifting. By the time Charles was there, the school has become a much more conventional private school,” Lacy added. “It’s a poignant, powerful story.”
The first two seasons of The Crown are available to stream on Netflix now, with season three expected sometime in 2019.
