McDiarmid and Duncan cast in BBC2 Thatcher drama

Published Thursday 24 July 2008 at 15:05 by Matthew Hemley

Ian McDiarmid, former artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, will join Lindsay Duncan in BBC2’s forthcoming drama about Margaret Thatcher.

As reported in April, Duncan is to play Thatcher in the show, called Margaret and set in the year of the former prime minister’s fall from power.

It is being made by Great Meadow Productions, which was also behind BBC4’s recent Thatcher programme, The Long Walk to Finchley.

McDiarmid, who played Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars, will play Thatcher’s husband Denis, while James Fox, who was in A Passage to India, will feature as foreign policy advisor Charles Powell.

Meanwhile, Robert Hardy, who played Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies and who was in TV’s All Creatures Great and Small, will play Willie Whitelaw, while Kevin McNally, who has appeared in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, will take the role of Kenneth Clarke.

Margaret is written by Richard Cottan and directed by James Kent.

Great Meadow Productions’ co-founder Robert Cooper said: “Richard Cottan’s dark and powerful drama intimately explores the strengths and tragic flaws of Margaret Thatcher’s character that led to her closest political allies turning on her, precipitating her final, humiliating downfall. Most of all, it shows us a Margaret Thatcher - the woman who changed our lives more than any other in British history - that has never been seen before.”