Skull duggery! A delightful new film tells the true story of the woman who found Richard III’s bones – and the rivals who tried to steal the credit
- Philippa Langley is the woman who found King Richard III’s bones years ago
- A new film shows the true story behind the search for the monarch’s remains
- The Lost King stars Steve Coogan and Sally Hawkins, hits cinemas from Friday
Here’s a question for you? Who was the last British monarch to be buried before Elizabeth II? Was it her father George VI, or perhaps her Uncle David, the former Edward VIII?
It was neither in fact. It was King Richard III, who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and whose body was discovered in 2012 buried under a car park for Social Services staff in Leicester.
It was reinterred in 2015 with all the ceremony befitting a king.
The true story of the search for Richard’s body, spearheaded by determined amateur historian Philippa Langley, is told in Stephen Frears’s new film The Lost King (pictured)
The true story of the search for Richard’s body, spearheaded by determined amateur historian Philippa Langley, is told in Stephen Frears’s new film The Lost King.
Philippa was a longstanding member of the Richard III Society, the group who insist Shakespeare’s portrayal of the king as an evil hunchback was a blackening of his character to curry favour with Tudor Queen Elizabeth I, whose family had battled Richard’s, the Plantagenets, for the throne.
Philippa led a mission to find the king’s lost body, which was said to have been thrown into the River Soar after the dissolution of the monastery, Greyfriars Priory, where it had originally lain.
Based on a mixture of research and intuition, she became convinced Richard’s body was still waiting to be found and spent years on historical detective work which finally led her to Leicester, where the archaeology department at the University originally pooh-poohed her idea.
Nevertheless she persisted, and finally tracked the king down to his unlikely resting place – only to have the University of Leicester then step in and take the lion’s share of the credit.
‘I’ll just give you one fact,’ says Jeff Pope, who co-wrote the script with Steve Coogan. ‘At the original press conference that was given to announce that the remains were Richard’s, there had been 13 people arranged by Leicester University to speak. Number 13 was Philippa. She was literally the last speaker. That’s not us spinning; that’s a fact.’
The on-screen result is an irresistible mix of detective story and fantasy with a sprinkling of comedy, with Sally Hawkins playing Philippa and Steve Coogan as her ex-husband John
It’s a remarkable tale, and one that caught the eye of Frears’s erstwhile collaborator Coogan when he saw Channel 4’s documentary Richard III: The King In The Car Park.
So taken was he, in fact, that the next time he was in Edinburgh, where Philippa lives, he asked her out for lunch.
‘It was about eight years ago,’ Coogan recalled at the Toronto premiere of the film. ‘I’d just seen the documentary and I had lunch with her and asked her about the experience. She told me the story from beginning to end – it was a long lunch – and when she told me about being elbowed out at the end, I thought, “This is definitely a good story.”
‘There was a real balance between Richard having been judged for all those centuries, and her having been judged in a different way. I went to Stephen with the idea because I’d worked with him before on Philomena [the 2013 film], and this does share some DNA with that in that it’s the story of one woman’s struggle against mighty powers. Jeff Pope and I showed him the script we’d written and he said, “All right, if you make it better, I’ll direct it!”‘
Coogan and Pope are old writing partners, having worked together on both Philomena and Laurel & Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie. ‘Philippa told me she’d imagined having conversations with Richard,’ says Coogan.
‘So Jeff and I thought, “Well, we’ll bring him to life and make him a character.” And it developed from there.’
‘This is beginning to look like an unhealthy obsession,’ fantasy Richard tells Philippa reprovingly at one point, to which she responds indignantly, ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’
The on-screen result is an irresistible mix of detective story and fantasy with a sprinkling of comedy, with Sally Hawkins playing Philippa, Coogan as her ex-husband John who’s still her best friend and Harry Lloyd playing a young Richard who’s neither villainous nor a ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’, as Shakespeare described him (Richard did have scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, but it was not acute).
‘This is beginning to look like an unhealthy obsession,’ fantasy Richard tells Philippa reprovingly at one point, to which she responds indignantly, ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’
Like Philomena before it, the film is already being tipped for Oscar nominations, but one group who might be less than happy with it are the people at Leicester University who, to put it mildly, do not come out of it squeaky clean.
‘I have the strongest feeling this is a very important historical site,’ Philippa tells the archaeological department in one scene, to which a male member replies, ‘A feeling is what you get when you sit on a bus seat that’s still warm.’
Nevertheless, when Philippa’s ‘feeling’ proved correct and the body of the king was recovered, she was edged out.
The Lost King, which sees actor Harry Lloyd playing a young Richard, will be in cinemas from Friday
‘Big institutions don’t act in a self-consciously pernicious way,’ says Coogan. ‘They just behave like that as a cohesive whole, and if you’re not part of them then you’re intuitively marginalised and made a footnote. What we wanted to do for Philippa was put her back in the spotlight. When I’d say, “We’re doing a film about the woman who found Richard III”, people would say, “Oh, was it a woman? I thought it was Leicester University.” And I’d say, “Well, good, because we’re going to correct that.”‘
Happily, there was one person around who was well aware of Philippa’s contribution to the find, and that was Her Majesty the Queen. A history fan who reportedly took a keen interest in the story from the beginning, she presented Philippa with an MBE in 2015.
‘The Queen was fascinated by the whole project,’ she said. ‘She asked if we always thought he was buried in Leicester and I confirmed we did. I said once we’d gone into the research, the car park looked like a real possibility. It was a hypothesis but a real possibility. She said, “Yes, to find a king in a car park is not an everyday occurrence.”‘
Quite so.
The Lost King will be in cinemas from Friday.
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