Film

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

Name: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
Genre: Drama, History, Romance
Released: 1939
Cast: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale

Bette Davis commands the screen as Elizabeth I in this 1939 Technicolor swoon, built around her tempestuous affair with Errol Flynn's Essex. It's operatic, lustful, and gorgeously mounted—a Hollywood imagining of power and passion where romantic melodrama outweighs historical accuracy. For anyone who loves old Hollywood stars doing their absolute best in lavish costume drama.

TMDb rating

3.2

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like period romances built on sharp dialogue and a rivalry between two strong-willed people, where the costumes and stagecraft matter as much as the history.

Skip it if you want history treated with care, since this takes plenty of liberties with fact and its theatrics can feel dated to modern eyes.

What it asks of you: Expect a talky, unhurried film where the big emotional beats arrive through long conversations and glances rather than action, and where you need to keep track of a crowded court.

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The Tudors2007

Jonathan Rhys Meyers blazes as Henry VIII across four seasons of palace intrigue, seduction, betrayal, and blood. It's everything *Elizabeth and Essex* promises but stretched over time with room to breathe and plot.

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Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

The wildcard

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Sofia Coppola gives us a teenage queen drowning in luxury and loneliness, using anachronistic pop soundtracks and candy-colored excess. It's visually stunning and emotionally acute.

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Fire Over England1937

Laurence Olivier and Flora Robson play in this earlier Elizabethan adventure film, very much in the same vein as *Elizabeth and Essex*—patriotic, romantic, and visually rich.

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Elizabeth R1971

The exact inverse: where *Elizabeth and Essex* gives us the queen as lover, *Elizabeth R* gives us the price of choosing crown over heart—the same woman, the same choice, seen from the opposite shore.

Six BBC television plays starring Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth I across her entire reign—not romance, but monarchy as lonely, cunning, endless work. Jackson is extraordinary, and you see Elizabeth as she lived: strategic, aging, abandoned.

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