David, Duke of Windsor

Once King, briefly, David gave up the crown for the woman he loved and now lives abroad as the family's most glamorous embarrassment. Charming, wounded, endlessly clever, he holds court from exile, watching the throne he left behind pass to a brother and then a niece he can't help condescending to.

The show gets real mileage from splitting him across two actors and two moods — Jennings all seductive self-justification in the abdication years, Jacobi drier and more brittle in exile — so you feel the same vanity curdling with age. Both play him as a man who talks himself into his own myth and half believes it.