The Royal Treatment

Queen Elizabeth II is so last year. This season's royal obsession takes us back to a perennial favorite, her 16th-century namesake, Elizabeth I. Since the dawn of movies, great actresses have crowned their careers playing the enigmatic Virgin Queen. Sarah Bernhardt portrayed her in a 1911 film, Bette Davis starred in "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" in 1939 and again in 1955's "The Virgin Queen." Glenda Jackson was, in the 1971 BBC series, the best Queen Bess, say some ardent fans. Dame Judi Dench won an Oscar as the theatergoing ruler in "Shakespeare in Love," and Helen Mirren played her on HBO (though not as brilliantly as her Oscar-winning turn as QE2). Even the flamboyant gay writer Quentin Crisp once had a go at old Queen Liz—which could've ignited those long-dead rumors that she was really a he.

But the greatest Elizabeth I may well be Cate Blanchett, who became an international star with her 1998 portrayal in Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth." Now she's back on the throne in the second installment of Kapur's potential trilogy, "Elizabeth: the Golden Age," playing the monarch at middle age, in full command of her intellect, wit and subtle ability to manipulate her courtiers—if not in full control of her heart.

That the story of a queen dead for 400 years still captivates our imagination might be surprising—until you realize that here in the Colonies, we're just coming to grips with the possibility of the first woman president. "Elizabeth really is the first woman to rule a country without a king in the modern world," says Susan Ronald, author of "The Pirate Queen." Highly educated and clever, she ruled over the expansion of England from a fragile, insolvent kingdom to an international power on the brink of empire.

Thanks to recent feminist history, "There has been a lot of study of the problems she faced and how she ruled surrounded by men," says Oxford scholar Susan Doran, whose books on Elizabeth include "Monarchy and Matrimony." The courtships of the maiden Queen by European princes were deftly turned into diplomatic tools—though the popularity of her story isn't due just to romance and politics. There's plenty of violence and intrigue—Elizabeth survived more than 20 assassination attempts—and the ongoing fascination with one of the most dysfunctional families in history. Her father beheaded her mum, Anne Boleyn, when Elizabeth was 3; at the age of 9, she witnessed her stepmother, Katherine Howard, dragged screaming by the hair down a palace corridor to her own death on the chopping block. And for fashionistas, there's the enduring appeal of the costumes in the drama: all those ruffs, opulent detachable sleeves, the pads (called, hilariously, bumrolles). And all that bling—encrustations of gold, filigrees of silver, pearls the size of gumballs.

In "Elizabeth: the Golden Age," the focus is definitely on the spectacle, though much of it is based on fact. On the eve of the Spanish Armada, the queen, on horseback and in armor, rallies her troops with the stirring words: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too." And Elizabeth did indeed agonize over the fate of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, refusing her advisers' counsel to execute her rival until Mary's treachery in a plot to seize the throne made her beheading inevitable.

But history doesn't bear out a romance with Sir Walter Raleigh—played in the film by Clive Owen with a little too much swash to his buckle—though he was a favorite at court and Elizabeth was a notorious flirt. Nor do historians believe he tossed his cloak over a puddle at her feet, let alone defeated the Spanish Armada almost single-handedly, as he does here. And when Blanchett surveys her navy's victory from a windswept clifttop, wearing a rippling white gown and bare feet, she looks as if she just wandered in from a scene in "Lord of the Rings."