


There's Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful "commoner" from a Lancaster family who snags the York king when he spots her on the side of a road as he rides past. Gregory's mission and that of the series is to highlight the compelling stories of medieval royal women who led dramatic, shocking, tragic lives - suitable for cable TV - that even the British know only vaguely, never mind the Yanks. "You're always bound to feel ambivalent but I really, really like what's been done with it." "A really good movie is going to have different criteria (from a novel or a work of history)," she says. "The exercise of power by men is a familiar story, (but) women have to exercise it in their own individual and subtle ways," says Philippa Gregory, the English historian whose best-selling novels about the women of The Cousins' War ( The White Queen, The Red Queen and The Kingmaker's Daughter) were adapted as the basis for the series.īesides, an absolutely accurate adaptation is not necessarily the best approach, even if full documentation of the medieval period were available. Queen stars Swedish-born beauty Rebecca Ferguson, 29, as the title character, Elizabeth Woodville, and Max Irons (son of Jeremy) playing her king, the impulsively lustful Edward IV. Women wage war," reads the tagline for the 10-part series (which also airs Saturday), a British production filmed in the gloriously antique canal city of Bruges across the channel in northern Belgium. You think the Windsors and the fictional Lannisters had their problems? Meet the Plantagenets and Tudors, Yorks and Lancasters, the royal cousins whose struggle for the throne soaked England in blood in the second half of the 15th century.

It's about blood, lust and tears, all in the same family. It's royals lying and scheming, stealing and torturing, loving and hating. It's not just about royals behaving badly it's about royals throwing out every rule in the Good Book they claim to follow. Can't get enough about the royal Windsors and their progeny? Take a look at the triumphs and traumas of their medieval predecessors when the lavish costume drama The White Queen lands Friday (10 p.m.
