There’s a moment in the film Mary Queen of Scots where Queen Elizabeth I of England urges the Queen of Scotland to marry a man she wants for herself. Robert Dudley was Elizabeth’s ‘favourite’ and the two were particularly close – but as a trusted ally, she plans to have Dudley to subdue and report back on her royal rival Mary. If asking your nemesis to wed the objects of your affections sounds a bit twisted, well, that’s par for the course for these two monarchs.
Elizabeth I and Mary I of Scotland had a famously conflicted relationship, a duality brought to life in Mary Queen of Scots. After a childhood spent mostly in France, Mary (Saoirse Ronan) arrives back in Scotland believing she has a greater claim to England’s crown than her cousin, Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie in a prosthetic nose). In the years that follow the pair provoke and plot against each other, never going to war but not quite at peace either. And yet, as Mary Queen of Scots depicts it, there’s always a mutual respect between them. Had they not both been such direct threats to each other’s power, they might even have been friends.
Ronan’s Queen of Scots believed she had a greater claim to England’s crown than her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, played by Margot Robbie.
The world has changed a lot since the days of Queen Mary and Elizabeth I but powerful women are still balancing “frenemy” relationships, where once-genuine friendships morph over time into a toxic tug-of-wars.
Perhaps competitiveness is what happens when women are left to fight for the scraps of pie left to them by the patriarchy, or maybe these relationships are just the result of politeness being so culturally enforced that we smile and shake hands even when we hate each other.
Whatever the reason, it’s a common experience – research from Kelly Valen, author of The Twisted Sisterhood: Unravelling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships, found that 84 percent of females said they had suffered emotional damage at the hands of other women. Similarly, on the podcast This American Life, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad stated that on average half of our relationships are with people we have negative feelings towards.
After her return to Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I plotted against each other, never going to war but not quite at peace either.
These days, though, the frenemies we see on the public stage aren’t vying for the English throne but the top spot in their chosen field – in recent years, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, and Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have all had high profile falling outs over their line of work. But back in the ‘90s, it was the feud between Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow that made headlines.
The pair were once inseparable, sharing a flat in the early years of their careers and even dating another set of best friends (Paltrow was in a relationship with Ben Affleck while Ryder was linked with his right-hand man Matt Damon). It all fell apart in 1998 when Paltrow was cast in Shakespeare in Love – snagging a role it’s believed Ryder was gunning for. The story goes that Paltrow found the script at Ryder’s house, asked to audition for the film and eventually picked up an Oscar for her performance. The pair no longer arrived arm-in-arm at red carpet events together and while Winona kept mum on the situation, years later, on her website Goop, Paltrow wrote about a “frenemy” who was “was pretty hellbent on taking me down”.
“I restrained myself from fighting back. I tried to take the high road,” she wrote. “But one day I heard that something unfortunate and humiliating had happened to this person. And my reaction was deep relief and happiness.” It wasn’t hard to surmise that this was probably a reference to Winona Ryder’s very public arrest on shoplifting charges in 2001.
The catalyst for Paltrow and Ryder’s rift is believed to have been a role in Shakespeare in Love, which Paltrow won an Oscar for. Madonna, meanwhile, is believed to have fallen out with Paltrow over a shared trainer.
Paltrow’s also fallen out with Madonna, the former friends reportedly rowing over a shared personal trainer. We know this because, once more, Paltrow wrote about it on Goop – penning a (since deleted) post about a friendship that left her “drained, empty and belittled”, which readers quickly deduced was about the Queen of Pop.
But while the worst the demise of those friendships resulted was a couple of thinly veiled blog posts, not all frenemies find a way to coexist. In Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth imprisoned Mary for over 18 years before eventually having her executed. “It ages me to bear such a burden, ordering to death the only other woman who knows what it means to rule as a queen in this land,” she wrote in a letter to her cousin, before signing the edict that would have her beheaded. Sometimes, even with the greatest of mutual respect, only one can be left standing.
Mary Queen of Scots is New to Blu-Ray™, DVD and Digital.
