Talk:The Iron Lady (film)

Melodramatic final sentence to article?
The article ends "something she had promised Denis she would never do". In fact, she did not promise to never wash a teacup. She had promised not to die doing that and having never accomplished anything else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.230.19.38 (talk) 13:38, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

I think you're right and I've deleted it. Please feel free to make these changes yourself. Nandt1 (talk) 19:12, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Pedantically, you are right in that she does not actually die whilst washing it. However, it's clearly deliberate (as opposed to the stuff about Denis's shoes on which the article now ends and which is inexplicable - are we supposed to infer that her haze of dementia she's confusing the destruction of his shoes by the Brighton Bomb?) given what she says to Denis, and the tension with her mother who berated the teenage Margaret for listening to her Dad's speech when she should have been helping the other women wash the teacups. Now her career is over and she's got nothing better to do than wash up. So it's a pity to lose it altogether.MissingMia (talk) 14:02, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Similarly, it's a pity to lose the stuff about her poor relationship with her mother, which is done in a very nice understated way when she gets her Oxford place. The film doesn't say anything about what effect it had on her - the viewer is left to draw his own conclusions - but it's consistent with biographies in which Thatcher said she had nothing to say to her mother after the age of fifteen.MissingMia (talk) 14:09, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, well. You and I clearly see different things in the film, and perhaps in the life story too. You have made much more of the (you say, "strained") relations with the mother than I would -- no doubt the mother had mixed emotions when Margaret was accepted into Oxford, and no doubt they grew apart thereafter, but that is not so unusual when a child from a provincial background leaves home for Oxbridge and then London... You say (in the tag to your edit) that "there are no aristocrats in the film". You base this on the sole example of Heath, and I'm not sure how you can claim to tell the class background of each person in a roomful of Tory MPs, Ministers or constituency members. The Tory Party in the '40s and '50s was still largely dominated by the aristocracy (how many Old Etonians in Macmillan's Cabinet?). The members of the selection committee that Miss Roberts faces may or may not have been strictly-speaking aristos, but they clearly looked down their noses, socially speaking, at the small-town "grocer's daughter".... As one who remembers England in those days, class distinctions could be very marked indeed. Nandt1 (talk) 14:00, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

MT’s poor relationship with her mother is a matter of record, not least because of MT’s own admission quoted above – Leo Abse rightly or wrongly devoted an entire book to the subject. The only time her mother is shown in the film is berating her for running out during the bombing raid to please her Dad, and for listening to his speech when she should have been helping with the teacups, and then failing to congratulate her for her Oxford place, whereupon the camera cuts to the look of hurt in young Margaret’s eyes. They grew apart, we are told, long before she left for Oxford, because of her mother’s narrow horizons and lack of intellect.

Class distinctions mattered a lot in those days but as far as ascending to a white collar role or being selected as an MP what really mattered was being (for want of a better description) “officer class”, which included a lot of grammar school boys commissioned from the ranks like my late father, or young men from middle class homes who had got to University like Powell, Macleod or Maudling. Provided you had climbed that hurdle class distinctions weren't going to hold you back. The social background and elocution-lesson tones of the young MT would actually not have been unusual at the time. You are right that the members of the Dartford Association are shown as looking down their noses at Miss Roberts although I’m not sure how accurate that really is – they did select her after all - in reality what held MT back from getting a good seat in the 1950s was being a woman and thus not having a war record, as shown in “The Long Road to Finchley”.

It would be an exaggeration to say that “The Tory Party in the '40s and '50s was still largely dominated by the aristocracy”. Besides a few landed gentry like Eden, it was dominated by affluent people, a lot of whom had gone to Eton or similar schools, some of whom, like Butler and Macmillan were sort of on the fringes of the upper class (“And what’s changed?” I hear someone muttering at the back :) ). It’s harder to say what the social composition of a constituency Association would have been. Macmillan was a wealthy publisher who was looked down on by the aristocracy into which he had married and who spent the latter part of his life pretending to be one, which didn’t help the party’s image in the 1960s when times changed, ie. it would be truer to say that satirists et al were able to portray the Tories of the early 1960s as “dominated by the aristocracy” because Macmillan had put a few too many of his Devonshire in-laws in the Cabinet and rigged the succession for Lord Home.MissingMia (talk) 18:11, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I will leave the discussion of "mother" alone, even if I worry a little whether we are describing what the film shows versus what is known from other sources. On class, I can live with dropping aristocracy from the article but have redrafted it as a reference to "upper class" males. Hope you in turn can live with this -- just to pick up on the names you mention, Powell, Maudling and Macleod had all attended public schools. Nandt1 (talk) 22:03, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Vol I of the John Campbell biog is pretty clear about her relationship with her mother and inability to say anything warm about her memory even when invited to do so (the special pleading in her memoirs doesn't really count). Campbell was, I think, an adviser for the film - her behaviour at her final Cabinet (red-eyed with sleep-deprivation, ranting rather than engaging in rational discussion, repeating herself and even flickering in and out of consciousness) is also consistent with descriptions in his book.

What Campbell has to say about her selection is more interesting. I suspected the Dartford Association would have been Rotary Club types, and sure enough the Chairman, Mr Miller, was a local builder who was encouraging various local businessmen to apply, including her future husband Major Thatcher. Slightly off-topic, but by the time she was applying for winnable seats in the late 1950s she had a much harder time as she was up against barristers and ex-officers with war records, and a reluctance to select women. There is no evidence that she was held back because of her social origins - hardly surprising as she was the wife of a rich businessman by then, the mythologising of her origins came later - so it's rather surprising that the film should peddle this line which seems to have little basis in fact.

I'm not sure "upper class" really cuts it as that would normally mean "aristocrats". Maybe "snobbish" would be better. The people I mentioned above were seen at the time as a sort of new class of meritocrats. Powell was the son of schoolteachers and went to a grammar school which, like many, charged fees - so not very different from Thatcher. Maudling and Macleod went to public schools but neither was rich - luckily for all of them the Woolton reforms had just gone through which forbade local Associations from demanding large cash donations from their candidates. Mark Thatcher was sent to Harrow iirc as his parents were not short of the odd bob by then - very much grander.MissingMia (talk) 00:06, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Rather than dragging this out (e.g., debating the status of King Edward's School -- a member of the Headmasters' Conference), I'll limit myself to reiterating the earlier point that this is an article about the film, and what it actually shows, and not about Thatcher's biography per se, which has a separate article of its own. Nandt1 (talk) 01:09, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Lots of grammar schools are centuries old and charged fees, although in many cases by the 1930s there would have been County Council aid for poor kids who had won places. Not every fee-paying school is a “public school” – the name once meant that they took boys (from wealthy families) from across the country, not just in the local area. Merchant Taylors, a day school where Maudling went, just about qualified on some lists; King Edwards Birmingham certainly wouldn’t have done. Without getting too politically ranty about it, one of the effects of comprehensivisation (some of it pursued by Heath’s Education Secretary, whoever she might have been) was to deepen the binary divide between state and fee-paying schools, many of the remaining grammars now falling into the latter bucket even though they were, strictly speaking, no more “public schools” than every person who spoke RP was “upper class” or every rich Old Etonian is an “aristocrat”.

I agree with you that this is an article about the film. Even if in reality it was probably just a slip-up by the researchers, I think the way one has to rationalise the selection scene is that this is the memory of an old lady who remembers being nervous before her interview and has persuaded herself that she had to climb a wall of snobbery to get where she got. By the 1970s she was banging on about her upbringing over the shop and the father whom she seems seldom to have visited after moving to London, and she was indeed attacked for them in the way that a politician’s enemies will seize on anything that might draw blood. But it doesn’t actually seem to have been much of an issue before then.MissingMia (talk) 17:43, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm keen to move on, but will just point out that membership in the Headmasters' Conference has traditionally been a widely-accepted test of whether a school is or is not a "public school". Nandt1 (talk) 18:35, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

So am I, but a more widely-accepted test would be whether or not the school is a household name that a reasonably well-informed person would have heard of, even if he doesn't live nearby, or more narrowly still is it the sort of school to which somebody like Harold Macmillan might have contemplated sending his son. That definition, if as imprecise as (proverbially) trying to define an elephant, would get somewhere nearer the two dozen or so schools of the Clarendon Commission or the 1868 Public Schools Act. Many of those in the Headmasters' Conference would more properly be described as "private" or "independent" schools, even if "public school" has in some circles become a bit of a shorthand because of the replacement of an historic patchwork with the deep binary divide mentioned above.MissingMia (talk) 16:58, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Alcoholic husband?
I'm not sure whether Denis was an alcoholic. I've never heard of it and there's no reference to it on the Denis Thatcher page so I'm going to remove it. In any event, it's hardly vital information that should be in the header of the page. Ottens (talk) 16:03, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

He was fond of "a snifter" and Thatcher herself was fond of whisky. Film seems reasonably accurate about these matters. Denis cultivated an image as a golf- and gin-obsessed buffoon (as per Private Eye "Dear Bill") but doubt he was alcoholic.Paulturtle (talk) 00:09, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Sufferer of dementia
I'm removing the phrase "which she is not" after "a sufferer of dementia". Thatcher's daughter Carol discusses her mother's dementia in this 2008 article. Davemck (talk) 00:26, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

US release date
The U.S. release date is inaccurate. The film was released in what they euphemistically refer to as "selected cities" (LA, NY, etc.) on December 30, 2011, then went into wide release (more theaters, more cities) on January 13 (not 30), 2012. If the film was released in 2012, it would not have been eligible for the 2011 Oscars, and given Streep won one for Best Actress, it clearly was released in 2011, as affirmed by the seminal authority, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. --Drmargi (talk) 06:38, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Reception
Not sure. Streep's performance was brilliant and you couldn't have asked for a better portrayal of her character, but the actual execution of the film rather poor I thought, it irritated me the constant jarring between the past and present. And it skipped from 1982 to 1990 within a minute with merely a single shot of her dancing with Reagan, nothing with Gorbachev, I'd have much preferred a comprehensive biopic from her as a girl to her last years chronologically. It didn't really capture her effectively as a prime minister largely due to the constant returning to the present. The central focus should have been on her political career and policies, not dementia in the present. The film was a let down.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  09:40, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree entirely. Concentrating on her latter years, which was the least interesting part of her life, is puzzling. The article should say what the explanation for the film being made the way it was, cutting back and forth between different parts of her life. Her most important years, in the cabinet and as PM, were only shown briefly, which I've not heard an explanation for. I'm sure that many people must have made similar criticisms of the film and they should be mentioned in the Reception section. Jim Michael (talk) 13:58, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Budget and Box Office take
it seems as though for clarity reasons, that the films budget and box office gross should both be listed in the same currency. With the budget in £ and the gross in $ it seems unclear — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.56.13.99 (talk) 20:45, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Jimmy Saville
Was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's four attempts to have her friend paedophile Jimmy Saville knighted before succeeding in her final year in office shown in the film? Mobile mundo (talk) 19:24, 23 July 2017 (UTC)