Once you start [filming] you have researchers who are constantly giving you information. Ultimately it isn't about impersonating or trying to be an image of somebody and more trying to capture the spirit and the soul of the person somehow.

Once you start [filming] you have researchers who are constantly giving you information. Ultimately it isn't about impersonating or trying to be an image of somebody and more trying to capture the spirit and the soul of the person somehow.

I started to really enjoy the fact that [princess] Margaret was an exhibitionist. Even on a day-to-day basis, Margaret's costumes were always so much more dramatic and bold than Elizabeth's were.

Everybody has an image of [princess Margaret], to a certain extent. But I felt it would have been harder if we were playing them as they are now. In a way, I don't know how much of a living memory we as a collective have of them in the '50s, when Margaret was 21 and this sort of Elizabeth Taylor. You don't think of your grandparents as being teenagers. You just can't - your brain just can't go there!

At the same time, [princess Margaret] had a fragility and an insecurity in who she was and her position, because her sister had always got the education ever since David [Edward VIII] abdicated.

I remember somebody saying something to me about Frost/Nixon, when Anthony Hopkins does his famous speech, and the difference in the way Anthony did it was to dramatize, essentially, what was a documentary-style version of that speech. I remember someone saying to me, "There is artistic liberty."

That external struggle mirrors the struggle of this life force of energy that [princess Margaret] was.