Warning: SPOILERS for The Crown Season 4, Episode 3 – “Fairytale”
In The Crown season 4, Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) tells an entertaining story about meeting Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos and the unexpected punchline has a ring of truth to it. Netflix’s award-winning historical drama has arrived in the 1980s, an era dominated by the marriage of Prince Charles (John O’Connor) and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin) as well as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), and Margaret tells her Imelda Marcos tale during a royal family gathering for Diana at Buckingham Palace in 1981.
Princess Margaret was one of the central figures of the first three seasons of The Crown. In seasons 1 and 2, the princess royal was played by Vanessa Kirby and the series depicted her difficulties living in the shadow of her elder sister, Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), and her rocky relationship with her husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon (Matthew Goode). When Bonham Carter took over the role of the older Princess Margaret, The Crown season 3 showcased her meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Clancy Brown) at the White House in 1965 and her affair that led to the end of her marriage to Lord Snowdon in the 1970s.
Margaret is more of a background player in The Crown season 4 as Charles, Diana, and Margaret Thatcher claim center stage, but she finds impactful moments, such as the engaging scene in “Fairytale” when she tells a story about her state visit to the Philippines in 1980. As Princess Margaret elaborately tells her tale to her amused family: “So there we are, in Manila, in the middle of a state banquet, when who barges into the room but none other than Imelda. Marcos. She makes a beeline straight to me and says she’s desperate to show me her—wait for it—” Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) interrupts with the natural assumption, “shoe collection” before Margaret corrects him: “shell collection.” They joke about the Filipino accent before Princess Margaret is angered by the interruption of Diana’s arrival upstaging her, and The Crown leaves her story hanging. So, did Princess Margaret’s encounter with Imelda Marcos really happen?
In the real-life period in which The Crown season 4 is set, Princess Margaret did travel to Manila in April 1980 and she was met by First Lady Imelda Marcos at the airport. The Princess attended the inauguration of the Philippines Children’s Medical Center before she attended a gala held in her honor at Malacañan Palace. It was there that Princess Margaret was likely shown a collection of seashells by Imelda, but it’s also natural to assume that the princess royal may have also glimpsed the legendary shoe collection Marcos was infamous for owning.
Imelda and her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, controlled the Philippines from 1965-1986 and they went into exile after they were deposed, having stolen billions from the Filipino people. In fact, the Marcoses hold the Guinness World Record for “Greatest Robbery of a Government”. After Ferdinand died in 1989, the Philippines President Corazon Aquino, whose husband Benigno was assassinated by the Marcoses, allowed Imelda to return to the country. Imelda was elected to the House of Representatives of the Philippines four times and ran (unsuccessfully) for the Presidency twice.
However, The Crown‘s version of Princess Margaret’s meeting with Imelda Marcos, while having the basic facts correct, was largely improvised by Helena Bonham Carter, who had fun making it more and more elaborate before she was interrupted by the soon-to-be-Princess Diana’s arrival. The scene was ultimately not about Margaret and Imelda but about Prince Charles’ future bride’s awkwardness and the embarrassing mistakes she made in terms of royal protocol. Meanwhile, despite all of her crimes and infamy, Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection, not her seashells, is still what the former First Lady of the Philippines is best known for to this day.
The Crown Season 4 is available to stream on Netflix.
