Cultural depictions of Anne Boleyn

A common view in the 18th and 19th centuries was the image of Anne as a romantic victim; a strong-willed and beautiful woman who was destroyed by her husband, who was presented as a brutal tyrant by most popular historians. A 19th-century biography of Anne by Elizabeth Benger was particularly full of praise for Anne, as was one entitled Star of the Court by Selina Bunbury. Famous writers and novelists who subscribed to this view of Anne (which persisted into the 20th century) included Jane Austen, Agnes Strickland, Jean Plaidy and playwright Maxwell Anderson. The play and Oscar-winning movie Anne of the Thousand Days is inspired by this interpretation of Anne's life, as is Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena (from 1830). Various popular novels have also adopted this sympathetic idea of Anne Boleyn.

In the latter half of the 20th century, academic historians who were determined to study Henry VIII's government and court as serious political and cultural institutions argued that Anne Boleyn was one of the most ambitious, intelligent and important queens in European history. They researched her political sympathies, patronage network and influence over foreign policy and religious affairs. This led to several academic studies of her life, the most famous of which are the first and second editions of the comprehensive biography written by the British historian, Eric Ives. The second edition, influenced by fellow historian David Starkey's focus on a reformist sermon commissioned by Anne, posits that Anne may have had an authentic spiritual mission and may have been as much an agent as a catalyst for the British Reformation. They both suggest that it may have been her particular Reformist agenda (and not simply her inability to produce a male heir) that put her at odds with Cromwell and led to her execution. David Starkey, the historian who hosted a television program about all six of the wives, keenly promotes this particularly attractive view of Anne. Combined with the intellectual force of feminism, which has interpreted Anne Boleyn in a highly favourable light, most academic histories write about her with respect and sympathy. Authors David Loades, John Guy, and Diarmaid MacCulloch have also published works that were sympathetic or admiring on the subject. Popular biographies by Joanna Denny and feminist Karen Lindsey have taken similar approaches, both being highly favourable to Anne. Lindsey, in Divorced, Beheaded, Survived, makes the case that Henry's relentless pursuit of Anne, far from being part of a manipulative flirtation which she enjoyed, was a form of royal harassment from which Anne's delaying tactics were the closest she dared come to escape. This is consistent with Henry's "courtships" of Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr, which have traditionally been seen as not wholly consensual on their part.

The work of American academic Retha Warnicke focuses on the unmitigated gender prejudices of the early 16th century and how they formed Anne into being first a pawn and ultimately a willingly venal and unscrupulous agent for her own and her family's advancement. Warnicke's Anne is controversial, and some of her hypotheses (that Anne's brother was part of a clandestine homosexual clique at Court; that Anne would have stopped at nothing, including using her brother's own seed, to birth a male heir for the king) are not supported by the majority of scholars, however compellingly lurid they may be. Other notably unattractive portraits come from the work of British historian Alison Weir and novelist Philippa Gregory. In her best-seller The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory puts Anne as the hard-hearted villain in a story with Anne's sister Mary Boleyn as its sadder but wiser heroine. (In her "author's note" to the book, Gregory said her novel's conclusion was based upon Warnicke's findings in The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, but Warnicke has publicly distanced herself[2] from the novel and its presentation of the Boleyns).

There have been various treatments of her life by popular historians such as Marie Louise Bruce, Hester W. Chapman, Norah Lofts, Carolly Erickson, Alison Weir, Lady Antonia Fraser and Joanna Denny. In film, television and the performing arts, she has been played by a variety of well-known actresses and sopranos, including Clara Kimball Young, Merle Oberon, Joyce Redman, Geneviève Bujold (Oscar-nominated), Maria Callas, Beverly Sills, Dame Dorothy Tutin, Dame Joan Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, Jodhi May, Natalie Portman, Natalie Dormer and Claire Foy.

• Anne Boleyn was portrayed by Clara Kimball Young in a 1912 short film about Cardinal Wolsey.
• She was portrayed by Henny Porten in the 1920 film Anna Boleyn, directed by the young Ernst Lubitsch.
• She was portrayed by Merle Oberon in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII which won an Oscar for Charles Laughton's portrayal of Henry.
• Joyce Redman played Anne on Broadway in 1949 opposite Rex Harrison's Tony Award-winning portrayal of Henry in Maxwell Anderson's play Anne of the Thousand Days
• Elaine Stewart played Anne Boleyn in the 1953 film Young Bess, starring Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton.
• Vanessa Redgrave played Anne in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons.
• Geneviève Bujold won a Golden Globe Award, and was nominated for an Oscar, for her portrayal of Anne in the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days.
• Dorothy Tutin was nominated for a BAFTA TV Award for her role as Anne in the 1970 drama serial The Six Wives of Henry VIII. That drama was compressed into a 1972 film version entitled Henry VIII and His Six Wives, starring Charlotte Rampling as Anne.
• Julia Marsen portrayed Anne in historian David Starkey's 2001 documentary TV series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
• Jodhi May portrayed Anne in the 2003 British TV movie version of the novel The Other Boleyn Girl.
• Helena Bonham Carter portrayed Anne in the 2003 TV movie Henry VIII, later released as a DVD (Ray Winstone portrayed Henry).
• Natalie Dormer portrayed Anne in the Showtime series The Tudors in seasons 1 and 2 (2007 and 2008); and season 4 (brief cameo, 2010). She was critically praised for her performance, and won two Gemini Awards.
• Natalie Portman portrayed Anne in the film The Other Boleyn Girl in 2008.
• Howard Brenton's 2010 play Anne Boleyn (Shakespeare's Globe) was centered on Anne's life.
• Claire Foy portrayed Anne in the 2015 BBC two television series Wolf Hall.
• Maria Callas, Leyla Gencer, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé, Edita Gruberová, Anna Netrebko, Sondra Radvanovsky, and Angela Meade all portrayed Anne Boleyn onstage and/or in recordings of the Donizetti opera Anna Bolena.
• Lydia Leonard portrayed Anne in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Wolf Hall Parts One & Two both on Broadway and in London's West End.
• In 2016, Claire Cooper portrayed Anne in the documentary series Six Wives with Lucy Worsley
• In 2017, an episode of Horrible Histories featured Gemma Whelan, portraying Anne Boleyn.
• From 2017 to the present, Anne was portrayed by Christina Modestou, Millie O'Connell, and Courtney Bowman in London, Andrea Macasaet in the US, Maddison Bulleyment on the UK tour, Hazel Karooma-Brooker and Kelly Sweeney for the Norwegian Cruise Line productions, and Kala Gare in Australia for the stage production of Six.
• Jodie Turner-Smith portrayed Anne in the 2021 Anne Boleyn miniseries.
• Amy Manson portrays Anne in dream sequences in the 2021 film Spencer.

• Playing on claims she was a witch, her portrait can be seen hanging along the staircases at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
• In a dream sequence at the start of Kevin & Perry Go Large, the teenage character Kevin is reading a book on Anne Boleyn for his homework, but instead his mind wanders to a sexual fantasy in which Anne (played by Natasha Little and speaking in 20th-century teenage slang) convinces her executioner (Kevin) that to kill her would be a waste of her beautiful body and in return gives him oral sex.