Playing the Princess Royal in the new series of The Crown has made Claudia Harrison a big fan of her

We’ll never know, but I suspect Princess Anne would thoroughly approve of the actress playing her 90s incarnation in the new series of The Crown . 

‘I think we share a sense of humour and a massive lack of vanity,’ says Claudia Harrison, 46, a self-described ‘jobbing actress’ who has appeared in TV shows Humans and The IT Crowd, runs a farm in Essex with her husband James Gray between acting roles, and has two daughters and a son aged between 13 and 17. Both women are also comfortable around horses, as the photos here attest. 

Production on the forthcoming season five of Peter Morgan’s Netflix drama, dealing with the divorces of the Queen’s older children and her ‘annus horribilis’ in 1992 among other ructions, was ‘quite rightly halted’ when Her Majesty died on 8 September. Season six, which will include the death of Princess Diana, is being filmed. Both feature a new cast, with Imelda Staunton replacing Olivia Colman as the Queen, Dominic West supplanting Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles, and Lesley Manville taking over from Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret. 

As Anne, Harrison took the reins from Erin Doherty, who became the breakout star of the last two seasons: and she got a small taste of the press interest the younger actress experienced when her casting was leaked online. ‘Paparazzi turned up at my house but I was away working in Scotland, so they got my mother, which was hilarious,’ she says. 

‘I’d be lying if I didn’t see this as a big shift in my career, but I doubt I’ll get as much media attention. Erin was at the start [of her career], she was amazing and it was a big part of making her a new star. I’ve been round the block a bit.’ Whereas the first four seasons had the gloss of historical distance as well as glamorous young performers, the 90s royals are more familiar. ‘Us lot look older, more tired,’ Harrison says. ‘The characters have been doing the job for 20 years.’ 

If not a royalist, Harrison is now ‘a complete Anne-orak’, as she puts it, about the princess. ‘What I love about her – and it’s why she should be a feminist icon – is that she is not there to decorate a room,’ she says

Born and raised in Surrey, her father a commercial property lawyer and her mother a drama teacher, Harrison was catapulted into the spotlight on her first job. In 2000, she won the lead role in Tony Garnett’s series Attachments, about the dotcom boom, before she had even graduated from Rada. 

There have been ups and downs since then, though. ‘I could do a whole comedy routine about the jobs I didn’t get,’ she laughs. ‘My first audition was for Tomb Raider. You know, up against Angelina Jolie. Absolutely ridiculous. I had a lot of auditions to be an alien-slaying, gun-toting badass woman who looks good in a catsuit: I wasted so much time and got nowhere.’ She did appear alongside Daniel Craig in the 2005 TV film of Robert Harris’s Archangel: ‘But I was barely in it, hardly anyone saw it and he [Craig] wouldn’t even know who I was. I had a meal with Robert Harris on the set and he couldn’t remember writing my character.’ 

Though overshadowed by her brothers, Anne is also a world-class horsewoman with a dedication to duty that rivals the Queen’s. ‘She’s an athlete, an Olympian, she did flat racing and she won the European Championships,’ says Harrison

Mostly she spent years ‘chipping away’ in TV and theatre, teaching part time at Rada and in schools, and taking career breaks when her children were young. She and James, who have been together since they met at Birmingham University aged 21, were working full-time on the farm during lockdown – they have sheep and pigs and used to have a breeding herd of Hereford cattle – when her agent told her The Crown’s producers wanted to see her. She presumed she’d play ‘a corgi trainer or something’ but the brief was for Princess Anne and she was asked to self-tape a number of scenes. 

‘You get sent secret script pages through a website that is encrypted and you can’t print them out,’ she says of the hush-hush audition process. ‘You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and promise not to tell anyone, though of course I told absolutely everyone.’ Already a ‘superfan’ of the series, she watched historic footage of Anne in preparation: ‘I did quite a bit of work. You can’t just pull Princess Anne out of the bag, can you? I did my hair and wore clothes that, I’m embarrassed to say, I already owned – a blazer, scarf and gilet – and got my husband to read in the parts of the Queen Mother, John Major, Charles and the Queen: he did all the voices.’ 

Harrison then met with the show’s director and producers and did a scene with Imelda Staunton. She heard she’d got the part during lockdown, while having ‘a socially distanced gathering’ in a garden with local, non-actor friends in Essex. ‘I was on the phone for ages, and they were all, like, what was that about, and I just went, “I’mgonnabeinthecrown!” 

‘I phoned my husband and when I got home my kids were really excited. They made a paper crown for me, and played the show’s theme tune when I walked into the kitchen.’ After two decades in the game, Harrison doesn’t get starstruck, ‘but the cast I’m working with really is acting royalty – Imelda and Jonathan [Pryce who plays Prince Philip], Lesley and Dominic.’ And a part in The Crown, where each episode reportedly costs around £10 million, is a big deal for any actor. 

Left: Claudia as Princess Anne and Theo Fraser Steele as Timothy Laurence in The Crown. Right: Claudia Sonya Cassidy in Humans

As is playing a member of the royal family. When the Queen died, ‘It really felt like this was the passing of an era,’ says Harrison. ‘She had been part of the fabric of our nation for so long.’ Queuing to pay her respects, then later watching the funeral, she felt that a sense of dignity and duty was being restored amid mad and troubling times. After the mourning period for the Queen ended, production on The Crown resumed. ‘The rationale was that the story of who wears the crown is a legitimate thing to be dramatised and examined. As an actor, it would be an extraordinary moral position for me to take to turn down the part.’ 

Harrison and her elder brother, who works in finance, grew up in ‘a not-posh, perfectly happy, boring, middle-class home’ in Claygate. The family were ‘the sort of people who would stand up for the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day. My great aunt was an absolute monarchist, my granny bought Majesty magazine and I remember being taken to buy a dress for Princess Diana’s wedding when I was five or six. Then I sort of grew away from that. 

‘I wouldn’t call myself a republican because I can’t imagine which prime minister could pass an act getting rid of the crown, but I was engaged in that debate. Working on the show hasn’t turned me back into a royalist, but I am a realist: the royals are not going anywhere. As an actor it’s your job to defend your character, and you look at these people as human beings, at their emotional landscape. And they are good people, by and large. Certainly the Queen and Anne. Charles, absolutely.’ And the Duke of York? ‘You’d have to ask the actor playing Andrew,’ she says, tactfully. 

If not a royalist, Harrison is now ‘a complete Anne-orak’, as she puts it, about the princess. ‘What I love about her – and it’s why she should be a feminist icon – is that she is not there to decorate a room,’ she says. ‘Her job is to meet people, to learn, to help, to assist. I got a sense of her physicality from that workmanlike part of her personality. When we meet her in the new series she is recently divorced: we see her notice Tim [ Laurence, her second husband] and later on decide that she is going to remarry, and that is non-negotiable. Otherwise, she is a support to the Queen, and a support, and at times a critic, to Charles.’ 

Though overshadowed by her brothers, Anne is also a world-class horsewoman with a dedication to duty that rivals the Queen’s. ‘She’s an athlete, an Olympian, she did flat racing and she won the European Championships,’ says Harrison. ‘She can ride a horse over a six-foot fence, get knocked out, get back on and finish the course. She was Sports Personality of the Year. She was nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work for Save the Children and lost out to Mikhail Gorbachev. She was fronting something like 300 charities at the time I am playing her, had 36 other posts such as university chancellorships, ten military titles and around ten livery companies. And they all say she took an active part. She has two children and she is the Princess Royal. This is a woman who can handle admin, and she doesn’t have much time.’ 

All of this contributes to the no-nonsense, fists-on-hips manner of Harrison’s version of Anne. She downplays the extent of her own equestrian abilities: ‘As a girl I had a share in the ugliest horse in the world that used to bolt down the A3 with me on it, and we have a scruffy pony on the farm I sometimes steal from my children for a gallop across the field. But horsey people wouldn’t call that riding.’ 

There are of course etiquette, movement and speech advisers among The Crown’s vast production retinue to make sure there are no gaffes or off-key body language. Protocol demanded that the first time she met the Queen each day, Princess Anne would be permitted to kiss her, but then have to curtsy, Harrison explains. She and Staunton had to learn how they ate soup for one scene. The performances are supported by the impeccable set and costume design. Harrison says that between takes in one scene with Prince Charles, she picked up a box on a dressing table that wasn’t even in shot: it had Charles’s insignia on the lid, and on the cufflinks within. 

In spite of the furore about invented plot lines, there is painstaking dedication to accuracy across the board – and the actors are not above a little joshing. Harrison often tried to get in front of West and the actors playing Andrew and Edward in family scenes, in contradiction of orders of precedence, only to be bundled to the back. 

Princess Anne is not always the easiest character to let go of at the end of a long period of shooting. ‘There have been odd times when I’ve been brusque with my family and catch them looking up at me and saying, “that’s so Princess Anne”,’ she smiles. 

Not every man would be comfortable living with Princess Anne but I suspect Harrison’s husband doesn’t mind: their relationship sounds pretty solid and each has made sacrifices for the other. ‘He was working in international development and wanted me to live abroad with him in our 20s, but I was working all the time in London and I didn’t want to go,’ Harrison recalls. So he took on a farm that had been in his family, where he and Harrison built an eco-farmhouse after they married in their late 20s.

She refers to him affectionately as ‘pointlessly handsome James’ but is reticent about sharing too many details about their life together, including the names of their children. She may not expect too much media furore around her role in The Crown but there’s no point tempting fate. Similarly, she’s cautious when I ask if she thinks her two-season stint will turbocharge her future career. ‘I hope it will give me more choice,’ she says. ‘So watch this space.’

• The Crown season five can be seen on Netflix from Wednesday