The Bloody, Bawdy History of Henry VIII Onscreen

For someone who sat on the English throne for almost 40 years, Henry VIII is far less famous for being a king than for being a serial husband, serial cheater, and, shall we say, serial killer by proxy. Pop culture is less interested in how he reigned than how he ran through six wives in the process, and this has been true since film’s silent era. In other words, when the cameras started rolling, so did the heads.

Even prior to that, popular fiction about the Tudor court allowed otherwise respectable audiences to revel in the salaciousness of “what went on in royal bedrooms by dignifying it as history, therefore instructive,” according to the late British writer Hilary Mantel. The same proved true for Henry’s first wave of cinematic depictions. As time and tolerance progressed, however, Tudor film and TV proved increasingly thematically malleable. It could be a highbrow period piece, a morality play, a sex comedy, or vigorously researched prestige television. Henry began appearing as a supporting character viewed through one of his wives or an adviser.

In a rather novel narrative shift, the forthcoming drama Firebrand offers Henry’s final wife, Catherine Parr, a chance at playing the protagonist. Given that she lacks the name recognition of Anne Boleyn or Catherine of Aragon, the film’s tagline makes sure to contextualize her within the historical saga: “Henry VIII had six wives. One survived.” (Technically two did, just for the record. This is Anne of Cleves erasure.)

In Henry and the Tudor court, the political and the sexual coalesce. The stakes of Henry’s reign and the so-called Great Matter — only a legitimate male heir could avert dynastic crisis, and Henry couldn’t get one without divorcing his barren wife — are (Mantel again) “graphically gynaecological.” This history hinges disproportionately on “women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature.” With characters’ exits historically predetermined, dramatic tension takes the form of invisible swords dangling over every scene of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Thomas More. The camera lingers on Princess Elizabeth during finales, underscoring the dramatic irony of her coming glorious reign, as opposed to the male heir’s so sought after by her father.

The character of Henry VIII predictably modernizes with time, evolving from a comic figure who eats with his hands and leers at every passing maiden to a dramatic role that ranges from well intentioned but deeply tormented to borderline sociopathic. Costume designers rely on his iconic silhouette by referencing the Holbein portrait’s enormous puffed sleeves, tight stockings, and bejeweled doublets. These Henrys are driven by lust, jealousy, and gluttony that is never satiated by all that he can (and does) devour.

And yet, ever since Anne Boleyn made her feature debut in 1920, film history has repeatedly subjected Henry to a very specific fate — to be never more than the second-most-interesting person in the ornately paneled room. She’s refusing to divorce him. She’s making him break with Rome. She’s dying in childbirth. She’s living out her days on a generous settlement after getting an annulment. She’s getting beheaded for committing adultery with a distant cousin. She outlives him. He’s just king.

Not counting a handful of short films made in the first half of the 1910s, film history’s first proper Henry VIII was neither English nor even an Anglophone. He was a German creation, and the ideal subject for merging the sex films and historical pageants popular with German audiences after the First World War. Fresh off 1919’s similarly historically titillating Madame DuBarry (which French critics, still smarting from said world war, hated on principle), filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch made Anna Boleyn for an exorbitant 8.5 million marks with some 2,000 extras. Emil Jennings plays the prototypical Henry, slugging ale from a stein and doggedly pursuing a reluctant Anna. Although slightly exaggerated as required by the silent format, Jenning’s performance and Lubitsch’s film set the template for cinematic Tudor courts to come: spectacular wedding scenes, a lusty and larger-than-life Henry, and a big execution for a finale.

Back when we were a proper country, bazillionaires (newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst) would do things like make their age-gap girlfriend (Marion Davies) into a superstar by single-handedly producing her in one of the most expensive silent movies ever made (When Knighthood Was in Flower). Adapted from Charles Major’s 1898 novel, the historical romance follows Henry’s sister Mary Tudor as she falls for dashing guardsman Charles Brandon. Lyn Harding plays Henry as a moon-faced comic brute eager to marry his sister off to the geriatric French king, alternating between Santa Claus–levels of jolly and gesticulatory rage, particularly when calling his sister a “hussy” for showing her bare arm. There’s no denying that Hearst’s dollar went further in that the film is overlong but beautifully framed, wonderfully optimistic about true love, and spectacularly costumed right down to the Frenchmen in tights. Reject modernity (nepo babies), embrace tradition (nepo mistresses).

Henry VIII joined the Criterion Collection on the back of Hungarian-British filmmaker Alexander Korda, now best known for his work on The Third Man and for incidentally introducing Powell to Pressburger. Opening on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution, The Private Life of Henry VIII gives most of its wifely screen time to Elsa Lanchester’s Anne of Cleves, who becomes a wise sisterly figure post-divorce despite starting as something of a German caricature. Although he’s absolutely a lecherous glutton belching and bellowing his way through meals and marriages — Anne of Cleves describes the four wives who didn’t make it as (in order) “spiteful, ambitious, stupid, and young” — Charles Laughton’s Henry is somewhat sympathetic, prone to flashes of self-reflection and genuine contrition. It’s not a popular pull in the storied Closet, but then again, it isn’t an Antonioni or Come and See.

In addition to having been significantly better at running England, Elizabeth I has a more impressive as-portrayed-by roster than her father. Sarah Bernhardt, Bette Davis, Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Margot Robbie have all played the Virgin Queen post-coronation. She doesn’t fare too poorly as a princess either, taken up by a 23-year-old Jean Simmons in MGM’s Young Bess. Charles Laughton reprises his role as Henry, this time in a supporting context following The Private Life of Henry VIII. He’s ominously vulgar as he bites chunks of meat off the end of his dagger and strokes the necks of his assorted wives, but he’s not totally one-note and surreptitiously revels in Elizabeth’s defiance even while referring to her as “Anne Boleyn’s brat.” Otherwise, he doesn’t stick around, kicking the bucket roughly 30 minutes in. Take it away, Jean.

Commercially unsuccessful in its day and a minor entry in Disney’s 1950s live-action output in retrospect, The Sword and the Rose is nevertheless a rather charming PG period romance. It plays into all the tropes of Tudor pop history — Catherine of Aragon as a pinched Spanish killjoy and Henry as boorish bon vivant — and costume dramas with Charles Brandon as the handsome knight who sweeps Henry’s sister Mary Tudor off her feet. Standing in the lovers’ way is Brandon’s lower rank, Mary’s betrothal to the French king, and the occasional assassination plot. Although the historical Henry was in his 20s for the actual events, James Robertson Justice’s Henry is the significantly thicker middle-aged ruler who eats with his hands and is easily swayed by flattery and financial gain. Like its predecessor When Knighthood Was in Flower, but unlike any of the real Henry’s marriage plots, true love wins in the end.

The Tudor drama morphs into a morality play via Sir Thomas More, beheaded by Henry in 1535 for refusing to recognize him as supreme head of the Church of England. The historical More has enjoyed a rather complimentary afterlife, not only as an enduring symbol of personal integrity in the face of tyranny but as the only Catholic saint to have won the Triple Crown of Acting plus a BAFTA courtesy of the late Paul Scofield. Initially conceived by playwright Robert Bolt as a radio play and eventually reworked for stage and then screen, A Man for All Seasons centers on the legal and moral trials of More’s role within the Great Matter. Compared to the usual Tudor fare, the film is a sexless showcase of thespianism, from Robert Shaw’s wildly charismatic but mercurial Henry to Orson Welles’s scowling Cardinal Wolsey. But in terms of bisected endings, it’s right in line with the rest of its genre.

In light of his personal experience with multiple wives and headline-grabbing marriages, Richard Burton is theoretically the best casting choice possible for Henry VIII. Depicting him as bold, brash, constantly conflicted, and driven half-mad by desire, he’s not bad in practice either. Never mind the filet mignon and Champagne dished out at Universal’s special screenings for Academy members, Burton’s Oscar-nominated Henry gamely accomplishes something few other Henrys on this list do by leaning into the ambiguity of the king’s inner life and leaving it an open question as to whether or not Henry actually believes his own bluster. Genevieve Bujold is an excellent match as an especially fiery Anne Boleyn, never more so than when she’s telling Henry what’s what: “You make love as you eat, with a good deal of noise and no subtlety.” Ouch.

Morality play, torrid romance, sex comedy — no one can accuse Tudor historical fiction of lacking range. Its bawdy lampooning came in 1971 as a Carry On film, which may mean little to those of us who are not Brits of a certain age. Primarily made during the 1960s and 1970s, the Carry On series took a medium-low budget and parodied a given subject (e.g., Hammer horror, James Bond, Cleopatra, the education system) into the ground. Anne of the Thousand Days provided ample fodder for Carry On Henry, which consists mostly of cinema’s most needlessly drawn-out garlic-breath joke and a relentless barrage of poorly aged double entendres. Rather than rehash the historical wives, the film invents two new ones to face off with Sid James’s chronically horny Henry. Is it good? No. But there are worse visual gags than a “Please close the door after you” sign hanging on an iron maiden.

The most episodic of the Henry VIII films, the obligingly titled Henry VIII and His Six Wives takes its cues and its Henry from the Emmy-winning BBC miniseries The Six Wives of Henry VIII, released two years earlier. Beneath a series of increasingly geometric haircuts, Australian actor Keith Michell’s Henry is an overgrown man-baby with a healthy plume of chest hair and a topsy-turvy conscience. He reviews all six wives in flashback but isn’t one for even distribution: Catherine Parr gets roughly the same amount of screen time as Anne Boleyn’s fabled sixth finger. The rest of Anne, played by Charlotte Rampling, is almost manic and fiendishly jealous. Although more — the adjective, not the Sir Thomas — is more here, the film suffers for its lack of style and narrative discipline. That its characters also suffer from an endemic lack of heads perhaps goes without saying.

More than a cameo, but not quite the historical-figure-as-plot-starter à la Napoleon in The Count of Monte Cristo, Henry VIII’s first appearance in the 1977 adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper may be his best, cinematographically speaking. On the run from the 16th-century fuzz, the titular pauper flings himself over the palace walls and meets the stately king in one long, sweeping vertical pan from royal feet to flat cap. Charlton Heston (he’ll be back later, albeit on the head-losing side of the Great Matter) plays the mirthful but declining king as a grand old man who won’t let age or illness keep him from smacking Lady Jane’s ass or dropping ice-cold one-liners on his deathbed such as, “I am a king of England. I will look God in the eye.” The rest of the movie is devoted primarily to Oliver Reed fighting everyone within slashing distance, so automatic ten out of ten, no notes.

The 1988 made-for-television version of A Man for All Seasons has the good sense not to try to outdo its lauded predecessor, sticking instead a straight and faithful adaptation of the stage play. The problem is that in doing so it justifies most of playwright Robert Bolt’s creative decisions in his 1966 screen adaptation, especially his nixing of the play’s fourth-wall-breaking Common Man character. Charlton Heston directs and stars as Thomas More, playing him with a firmness and gravitas that befits the man turned myth. As Henry, English actor Martin Chamberlain throws himself into his one mood- and dick-swinging showdown with More, yelling himself hoarse about his lack of a son, his bitch wife, and so on and so forth. It’s nothing if not an overacting master class and all draped in gold lamé.

For a film Hilary Mantel couldn’t resist calling “inert and vacuous” in her otherwise unrelated review of a Jane Boleyn biography, there’s certainly a lot of questionable things happening in The Other Boleyn Girl. As the Boleyn girls in question, Scarlett Johansson is completely miscast and Natalie Portman periodically forgets how to act, but the dialogue is so stilted that it wouldn’t matter either way. Meanwhile Eric Bana stomps about Whitehall as a hot but humorless Henry whose character never goes deeper than “womanizer who is mad a lot.” The first time he and Anne have sex is when he rapes her in her chambers, which is not only wildly inaccurate but also a downright baffling and voyeuristic narrative choice. It’s so bad that even its surprisingly hefty supporting cast (Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas as Lord and Lady Boleyn, plus Eddie Redmayne, Jim Sturgess, and Benedict Cumberbatch) can’t save it. And by the halfway point, you can sense they’ve stopped trying.

With no hang-ups about accuracy and an ironclad commitment to casting absurdly hot actors as their far uglier historical counterparts, The Tudors gives the Tudors the fleshy, sensational, soapy treatment they deserve. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is the horniest and most intense Henry by a long shot, playing the king as a hot-blooded sex fiend and anti-hero who grows progressively more sociopathic with age. There’s ample room in its four seasons for peasant rebellions, Henry’s debilitating leg injury, jousting matches, and church reform as contact sport amid the pulpy erotic drama. The later seasons lack the punch of the earlier ones, and the show suffers once Natalie Dormer’s pitch-perfect Anne Boleyn and Annabelle Wallis’s Jane Seymour give way to Joss Stone as Anne of Cleves and buckets of questionable old-man makeup. No matter. We’ll always have Peter O’Toole as Pope Paul III, stealing all his scenes while pioneering new pronunciations of putain.

With the Criterion Collection and the Oscars duly conquered, Henry VIII takes on prestige TV by way of Wolf Hall, the miniseries adapted from Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. As Henry, Damien Hirst is especially virile if privately conflicted and a sentimental drunk. Vulture’s own TV critic Margaret Lyons felt Hirst’s performance was “less grounded, less textured” compared to his castmates’, but with castmates like these, whose Henry wouldn’t be? A pre-Crown Claire Foy is in fine form as one of the snootier and sharpest Anne Boleyns; Mark Rylance is unmatched as a refreshingly sympathetic Cromwell, his next three moves always brewing just under the surface (and at the edges of those eyebrows). As purist friendly as it gets, Wolf Hall is the opposite of salacious and simply not built for phone-in-hand viewing. Casual Anne Boleyn enjoyers need not apply.

Poor Catherine of Aragon. Like Iberian ham, she tends to come pre-aged. Prior to The Spanish Princess, she only ever appeared as a shriveled Spanish stick-in-the-mud, destined to be defeated and shunted off to a nunnery so Anne Boleyn can take the role of queen and female lead. Starz’s two-season show, however, supposes that she was not hatched at barren middle age, and opens with her arrival in England to marry Henry’s older brother, Arthur. Aware that whether or not she and Arthur boned will be somewhat relevant later, the show takes a creative and plot-driving approach to the question that feels feminist without feeling forced. Irish actor Ruairi O’Connor plays the young Henry as we very rarely see him — the somewhat coddled spare with a sensitive soul made heir by Arthur’s sudden death. His believable romance with Catherine unfolds in flirtatious swordplay and kisses in corridors primed for fancams. Even knowing how it ends, you kind of can’t help rooting for them …

By casting the Black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn, BBC’s three-part miniseries generated more of an internet firestorm than the show itself was probably worth. The show is, in a word, fine. The costumes and sets are nothing special. It feels anachronistic less for the colorblind casting than for the modernized dialogue and dynamic between Anne and Henry, played by Game of Thrones’s Mark Stanley. In trying to summon something between the fleshiness of The Tudors — Henry goes down on a pregnant Anne — and the prestige feel of Wolf Hall, it manages neither. Far too many lines feel overripe with foreboding, such as Henry telling Anne, “I have no use for an animal that won’t obey me,” after killing his horse. The marital relationship never fully develops, and neither does Henry’s character, even if we do learn that he’s into being choked. If only his neck fetish had ended there, hardee har har.