Biopics of the House of Windsor is the first book-length treatment of the current royal family on film, and an indispensable source for anyone interested in biofiction about the lineage from George VI to Charles III, as well as Diana, Princess of Wales. Covering well-known examples such as The King's Speech, The Queen, and The Crown, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into how biopics help shape cultural memories and disseminate ideas about British national identity to global audiences.

Katherine Scheil, Professor of English, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA

The curious denizens of the House of Windsor have surely inspired more biofictional productions than any other collection of royals in English history. After all, their very existence coincides with the birth and growth of electronic mass communications Bethany Layne minutely details a wide range of televisual and filmic efforts that treat the endlessly fascinating and sometimes disturbing public and private complexities of The Firm, a singular family.
Biopics of the House of Windsor explores the royal biopic as a vibrant subgenre while offering a new model for the understanding of biofiction as a liminal form living in a productively troubled relationship with historical truth and artistic purpose alike.
This granular study of how biopics show the Windsors "weathering moments of crisis"-through a continual process of "exiling" and "rehabilitating" and "policing"-details the minutiae of what is real and what is invented in a host of royal biopics. It also reveals the very nature of monarchy in the age of mass media as fundamentally a matter of performance.
As always, Layne is here a meticulous and patient close reader and viewer. She is also a most readable critic, her solid scholarship leavened with a wry wit. She writes, for instance, of the royal biopics boom that followed the unprecedentedly "intimate" 1969 documentary Royal Family (watched by 68% of the British population): "The genie was not willingly reacquainted with the bottle." Layne's examination of the royal biopic's "power to shape public perceptions" of the monarchy compellingly shows that this artistic form, rooted not in biographical fact but in the imaginative use of its subject, reveals "how images are constructed and myths made." Biopics of the House of Windsor is a welcome and superb addition to the rapidly proliferating field of biofiction studies. It is, indeed, a crowning affair.

Todd Avery, Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA