Catherine of Aragon in The Tudors: Dark Hair, Devotion, and Dignity in Despair

Abstract

Catherine of Aragon was a strawberry blonde. That is one of many things The Tudors gets wrong, for Maria Doyle Kennedy, who portrays Catherine in Seasons One and Two, has dark hair. Ironically, Showtime executives wanted to make Natalie Dormer’s character, the brunette Anne Boleyn, a blonde, and they were chagrined when she dyed her naturally flaxen hair a darker hue after her initial audition. Perhaps this is because blondes reputedly have more fun—Anne certainly has a better time than Catherine for most of the first two seasons of The Tudors. More generally, series creator and writer Michael Hirst is often carelessly inattentive to details or—as more favorable commentators claim—willfully ignores them from a sense of postmodern playfulness.¹ In any case, The Tudors is not alone with regard to Catherine, who has appeared on-screen as a blonde only once—played by Annette Crosbie—in the BBC mini-series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970). Otherwise, she is dark-haired, like Kennedy, Irene Papas in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), and Joanne Whalley in Wolf Hall (2015), though early in the latter show Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce) mentions to Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) that the young Catherine had red hair.²