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 The Virgin Queen
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The Virgin Queen
Starts on 91Èȱ¬ ONE on Sunday 22 January at 9.00pm
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Tara Fitzgerald plays Kat Ashley
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With Anne Boleyn losing her head at an early age, Kat Ashley was the nearest thing that Elizabeth had to a real mother.
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Originally joining the princess as her governess when Elizabeth was four, Kat quickly became a trusted friend who was instated as First Lady of the Bedchamber on Elizabeth's accession.
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"She was very much a friend and a confidante - she cared about Elizabeth like a younger sister or a child," says Tara Fitzgerald, the distinguished actor playing in her first Elizabethan drama as Kat.
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"But she was also very well-educated herself and was quite politicised and involved as a political tool to a some extent. That's something we tried to draw out a bit in the production – the fact that she was used as a sort of mediator and a good mouth on the ear of the Queen.
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"Certainly when suitors were deemed unsuitable, like the ongoing Dudley, they contrived as much as possible to recruit Kat Ashley to their cause."
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Sadly for Robert Dudley, Kat's astute enough to eschew any endorsement of him.
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"On a human note, I think she realised it would be disastrous, but also politically – and I would imagine it would at that time have been almost impossible to separate the two.
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"But what comes through is that she cared about Elizabeth and felt very maternally towards her, realising that her greatest weapon was her virginity and that the moment that that was deemed to be gone she made herself vulnerable."
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It's fair to say that Kat's wise words steadied somewhat the impulsive nature of the young Queen.
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"Elizabeth was a bit of a loose cannon," smiles Tara, "and I think Kat having a nurturing influence on her probably curbed that hot-headed tendency, or at least made her double-think when she needed to.
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"It's a hypothesis, but I think perhaps it would have been much harder for Elizabeth to feel strong and reassured without Kat there.
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"It must have been terribly lonely for Elizabeth and so to know that she could have trusted people around her, especially this strong female presence, must have been very reassuring.
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"And also, what an extraordinary thing – to have a court that was headed by a woman and then women given power for the first time in a way that they hadn't formerly had, and not bound by religion to the same level."
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In a way, royalty was a kind of religion in Tudor times.
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"Kat's heart was with her queen," Tara agrees. "She died in her service and there's no real sense of her husband anywhere or Kat having any sort of life for herself. It's not something we understand nowadays, the idea of a vocation of that level – it's almost religious."
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Tara admits to scant knowledge of the period before making The Virgin Queen, but found it fascinating.
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"I think the most interesting thing for me was the idea that one was always being watched, that you were always having to check your back and nothing you said ever came without some price," she says.
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"It must have been very paranoid a lot of the time, living in that hothouse environment was very strange – but on the positive side it was an incredibly exciting time to be alive, because of the potential."
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Another positive for Tara was the beautiful costumes of the time.
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"I'm unusual, I think, in that I like being in corsets!" she laughs. "At the beginning, you always find them slightly uncomfortable, but then I think they're actually quite comforting in the end; you feel you're strapped into something and therefore you're strapped in to the production, and I find that quite interesting.
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"And the dresses, once you've worn them a few times and got around a train a couple of times, you find it comes quite easily. And it's easier to suspend disbelief when you walk into an extraordinary palace and everyone's dressed up in 16th-century costume. It's properly entering another world, which is part of the reason I starting acting."
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She began her acting career after a couple of teenage years travelling around Europe and got her first break in 1990, straight from drama school, when she was cast in the offbeat comedy Hear My Song and received rave reviews.
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Since then, she's enjoyed much success in film, theatre and on TV, with some notable highlights including Sirens and The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, both with Hugh Grant; A Man Of No importance with Albert Finney; an award-winning Ophelia to Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet in London and on Broadway; with another Fiennes, Joseph, in Rancid Aluminum; and Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor.
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Tara can currently be seen in the West End production of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.
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"My favourite scene was the very first day when we did the boat arriving at the Tower – I liked that!" she smiles.
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"We all agreed it wasn't a bad job to be doing, spending a sunny day on a boat, getting out and getting back in again!" Ìý
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