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The three actresses who played the Queen in the Netflix drama The Crown are reunited in the finale of the last series - out today. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman, who portrayed the monarch in the first four series, appear at the shoulder of Imelda Staunton, the final actress to take the role, as she leaves the blessing of Prince Charles 2005 marriage in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the closing moments of the Netflix drama.

The apparitions - not so dissimilar from Diana appearing after her death to Prince Charles - are a flight of fancy from dramatist Peter Morgan which moved some watching a preview of the show to tears this week.

They will likely prove less controversial than scenes earlier in the episode when Staunton’s Queen discusses a desire to abdicate with the two younger Queens.

Those scenes, set in a stable, show The Queen contemplating whether the time has come to step aside in Charles’ favour. She is depicted as considering doing this and announcing it in a speech following his wedding blessing at Windsor Castle in 2005.

The thoughts are prompted after meetings during which she oversees plans for her funeral, having recently grieved her sister, Princess Margaret and The Queen Mother, who both died in 2002.

She asks herself: ‘What about the life I put aside, the woman I put aside, when I became Queen?’

There was fury last year when Morgan wrote an episode which showed Prince Charles apparently musing over whether the Queen should abdicate with former Prime Minister John Major - scenes which Major said were untrue and hurtful.

Crown director Stephen Daldry, who helmed the finale, said: ’The questions that are challenging the Queen in episode 10 are, I found, absolutely fascinating, and deeply moving, having come from the moment in history where the Queen has just died.

‘The Queen actually planning her own funeral, thinking about her own death. Thinking about what she had lost to be the Queen she was, in terms of what she’d had to give up, in terms of her family life, or the unlived life, as she would say. I thought it was fascinating.’

He went on: ’I think the marriage of Charles and Camilla is joyous. I think for the way the story we depict, there were many challenges leading up to that marriage and, I’m not just talking about challenges of titles.

’I’m talking about challenges with the Anglican Church, challenges of the children, challenges of a family, challenges of faith. As well as challenges of her direct relationship with her son and what her son needed and wanted, and had asked for and, how the Queen responds to that.

‘And, the balancing act the Queen has to achieve to deliver a marriage that she feels probably is a sustainable situation. But, maybe against the wishes of a certain number of people, which might include the British public. So, it was a careful and very delicate series of personal negotiations with herself, with her faith, with her children, about how to manage this very complex situation.’

The monarch was not in attendance when Charles married Camilla as she felt that her role as head of the Church of England meant she needed to uphold the church’s values and discourage divorce.

In an interview this week Morgan said: ‘I can only repeat what I have always said. Some of it is necessarily fiction. But I try to make everything truthful even if you can’t know if it’s accurate.’

The final two-part series of the show, which closes with the wedding of King Charles to Camilla, cost £115 million to make. The first series, broadcast in 2016, cost £57 million.

In total, the show has cost £407 million, seen three complete casts rotated, won over 100 awards, been watched globally by 73 million people, and employed 2,500 crew and 45,000 extras.

Morgan, 60, grew up in London, the son of two refugees: his Jewish father had fled Nazi Germany; his Catholic mother escaped communist Poland. ‘If I weren’t the son of immigrants, I wouldn’t have dared write about the British royal family,’ he said. ‘You have to have to feel one foot outside, one foot inside, to understand it.’

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