Nicole Kidman did an excellent job of the Gertrude character in The Northman. She was complex, and showed many of the characteristics I talk of as appropriate for a queen in her own right, such as status, drawing focus, maturity, intelligence, aggression and violence, even to her own son, whose image of her was simplistic and fanciful

My Gertrude story Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen and Gertrude’s Hamlet began when I tried to play the part for some students in some short films. She was a challenge to act, and the play was a challenge to make sense of from her point of view. To begin with, she doesn’t speak a lot. To construct the character,…