Timothy Dalton’s licence to thrill Crown audiences as Princess Margaret’s former lover
Timothy Dalton is to join the cast of The Crown as Group Captain Peter Townsend, as the drama stages a poignant reunion scene with Princess Margaret.
The former James Bond actor will play Townsend in the final years of his life.
In the forthcoming fifth season of the Netflix drama, he and Princess Margaret, played by Lesley Manville, will meet when they are both guests at an Armed Forces reception in the early 1990s.
The event did take place and their attendance was on record, Netflix sources said. However, the private conversation between them will be imagined by Peter Morgan, the show’s writer.
Townsend died in 1995, aged 80. His thwarted love affair with the Princess was dramatised in the early scenes of The Crown, when the couple were played by Vanessa Kirby and Ben Miles.
The Princess fell head over heels in love with the former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, who was equerry to King George VI, her father.
The pair wanted to marry, but Townsend’s divorcee status meant that the union was opposed by the Queen, the court and senior members within the Church of England.
On October 31 1955, the Princess issued a statement in which she renounced him, saying: “Mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.”
She later entered into a turbulent marriage with Antony Armstrong Jones. They divorced in 1978. The Princess died in 2002.
Baroness Glenconner, her close friend, has disclosed that the pair did meet in 1993: “Peter Townsend came to lunch with her and I said, ‘What was it like seeing him?’ She said, ‘Charming. He hadn’t changed at all’.
“I lived with her at that time, and I looked out of the window and saw him getting out of the car. He was an old man and yet, in her eyes, he hadn’t changed.”
Dalton, 75, is best known for his role as 007 in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. He made his debut in another royal drama, playing Philip II of France in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter.
