Helen Mirren is winning deserved salutes as Queen Elizabeth II in the new film The Queen (now coming to a theater near you). God save the Queen and DCI Tennison anyway.
But don’t forget James Cromwell, who plays Elizabeth’s consort and hubby Prince Philip. Cromwell has had some juicy biographical roles in the last decade: he also played President Lyndon Johnson in the 2002 TV movie RFK and William Randolph Hearst in the 1999 TV movie RKO 281. Philip, Johnson and Hearst — three big personalities indeed. He also played the Roman poet Virgil this year in a nutty rendering of Dante‘s Inferno.
This is all on top of Cromwell’s very colorful film and TV career, which has seen him play everything from Archie Bunker’s chum Stretch Cunningham in All In the Family to the nefarious police Captain Smith in the 1996 film L.A. Confidential, while doing guest shots in seemingly every iconic TV series of the last three decades, from M*A*S*H to Barney Miller to Dallas to Knight Rider to Star Trek: The Next Generation to E.R. to The West Wing to Six Feet Under. And of course, showing his (pork) chops as kindly Farmer Hoggett in the pigstacular Babe (1995).
Take a peek at his IMDB filmography. Dude has quite a range.