Haydn Gwynne: ‘Any time I’m in the same room as Camilla, I’m bundled off’
NB. This interview with Haydn Gwynne first ran in April 2023, prior to The Windsors Coronation Special, and has been republished following her death aged 66
Queen Camilla is telling me how she desperately wanted to wear the Koh-i-Noor at her Coronation. Charles said it would be a really big deal and she agreed, damn right, it would be. But then it transpired they were at cross purposes – impressing the Wiltshire set versus a geopolitical crisis.
“That’s coronations for you!” she rasps with throaty insouciance. “Still, I think we can all celebrate the fact I played the longer game and won. My dreams have been realised; the Parker Bowles era has finally dawned.”
I am speaking, of course, to the other Camilla, aka Haydn Gwynne, who channels the Queen as an extravagantly wicked villainess in The Windsors, Channel 4’s scurrilous, whip-smart comedy which has been running since 2016 but gained a new audience during the longueurs of lockdown.
On April 30, The Windsors is broadcasting a Coronation Special, which starts with Camilla, in seventh heaven, because her scheming has all come together. But then of course the arguments begin, with a particular highlight being William’s suggestion for a “cost of living crisis Coronation” in a Travelodge off the M40.
Then the Koh-i-Noor dispute escalates, and let’s just say there are a few scenes in the Tower of London. Silliness abounds! I can also confirm that Harry and Meghan will definitely appear – but that’s all I am allowed to say. Whether they attend the Coronation… well, you’ll have to wait and see, but it is certain to cause a stir of the very best sort.
“In recent years we’ve all got terribly po-faced,” Gwynne, 65, declares theatrically. “But back in the 18th century the British excelled at satire with cartoons that mocked the Prince Regent and poked fun at hypocrisy and vanity. The Windsors is very much in that tradition of outrageous irreverence.
“It plays on public perceptions and pushes them to the point of ad absurdum, but nobody takes it seriously, apart maybe from Harry. When I read the excerpts of his book Spare, I wondered if he’d maybe been overdosing on The Windsors – my Camilla is like something out of Dynasty, all red and black power-dressing, plunging Joan Collins cleavage and intrigue. Nothing at all like the real thing.”
The Windsors’ sharply drawn caricatures are all instantly recognisable: hopeless Edward, terrifying Anne, freeloading Andrew. The younger royals are deftly skewered too: stolidly conscientious Wills, sweetly steely Kate, stupidly gullible Harry and humourless bossy-boots Meghan. Wide-eyed Beatrice and Eugenie are so posh they can barely enunciate their wayward vowels.
Social climber Pippa hates her sister for bagging the heir to the throne and spends much of her time trying to get off with Harry. When Kate tells the femme fatale that her wedding to William was a ‘magical day’ because it ‘united a nation’, Pippa retorts: “So does a Big Brother eviction, but that doesn’t cost a billion quid in lost GDP.”
“It’s silly and affectionate and the ultimate curative to The Crown, which is a heavier watch,” says Gwynne, who has appeared in that too, as the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Lady in Waiting Susan Hussey. “I feel tremendously proud that both shows can co-exist in the same universe.”
She and comedian Harry Enfield, who plays Charles as an earnest ditherer clueless about Camilla’s machinations, are very much the mainstays of this ensemble. When he agonises about the legitimacy and relevance of British rule, Camilla sarkily replies: “When you say rule, do you mean opening the Chelsea Flower Show?”
Ouch. Cleverly, the late Queen has never been so much as mentioned in The Windsors, circumventing accusations of tastelessness. And although she was out of bounds, Prince Philip was represented in note form, his invariably splenetic outpourings read aloud by other characters.
In person Gwynne – who is married to a psychotherapist and has two adult sons – is charismatic, funny and quick-witted. Tall and willowy, her patrician features effortlessly project an air of world-weary hauteur. And yet she is neither posh nor Welsh: her father, brought up in care, was an Irishman by the name of Guy Thomas Hayden-Gwynne.
It’s vanishingly rare for an actress to excel at both Hedda Gabler and Sondheim or appear as Volumnia in Coriolanus by night while filming The Windsors by day. When I suggest to Gwynne she’s the very definition of a triple threat, she points out that she also has a degree in French, effectively making her a threat quadruplé.
“I can sing and dance – it’s doing them together that’s the real killer. They say tragedy is tough? Forget Medea, two shows of Billy Elliot a day is the very definition of gruelling!” cries Gwynne, who played Billy’s dance teacher Mrs Wilkinson in both the West End and on Broadway to critical acclaim.
Gwynne knows the value of a good teacher. While at her state school in Sussex, she joined a local acting group which took on such ambitious productions as Peer Gynt, The Cherry Orchard and The Crucible. She appeared in student productions while at the University of Nottingham but never seriously considered a career in acting, instead travelling to Italy after graduation and staying there for five years, teaching English.
“I kept suppressing the desire – the need – to act but then suddenly I knew I had to try, even though I had no training,” she says. “I wrote to every theatre company in Britain and Alan Ayckbourn offered me a job in His Monkey Wife, a play with songs. Then I was cast in Drop the Dead Donkey,” she says with a pinch-me-I’m dreaming expression, as though it were sheer luck rather than talent that got her there.
Gwynne is best known for her television work – her outstanding performance as frosty academic Dr Robyn Penrose in David Lodge’s Nice Work for the BBC in 1989 and, of course, cynical editor Alex in the first two seasons of the newsroom satire Drop the Dead Donkey, from 1990 to 1992.
“I wish there were something like it today,” she says. “Here we are gasping for political satire – proper angry satire that hits home – and there’s a complete dearth of it. Where’s Spitting Image when we need it? Instead we have all these panel shows which just isn’t the same; the rate of quickfire jokes means that nothing sticks. The thing about Drop the Dead Donkey was that it was edgy and exciting, although we were umbilically attached to the Channel 4 legal team in case we went too far.”
Gwynne decided not to do a third series because “I’m quite a restless person”, but has appeared in everything from Sherlock to Merseybeat. Upcoming, she has several thrilling projects she can’t help talking about, before immediately begging me not to write about them. Long term she’d quite like “a nice juicy TV part as a lawyer with two cracking scenes per episode where I get to wear lovely expensive clothes”. She insists all her characterisation is “95 per cent costume”, which I think is terribly generous but not entirely true. Maybe in The Windsors – it’s hard to be anything but Cruella de Vil in glittery shoulder pads.
“You know, I’m not allowed to meet Camilla in real life any more”, she says with great amusement. “Any time we’re at the same event I get shoo-ed away or bundled off in case we come face to face. Once, I was about to go on stage and I was suddenly steered in another direction. Nothing to do with the Royal family – it’s usually a charity event of some sort and the organisers are worried the photographers will get a picture and I’ll be what is euphemistically called ‘an unwelcome distraction’.”
She laughs then adds, with perfect comic timing: “If I do ever write a memoir it would be called Hadyn Gwynne: Unwelcome Distraction.”
Distraction perhaps. But unwelcome? Never.
