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In an interview with Harpers Bazaar, Gillian Anderson talked about her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

When asked about the amount of wigs she had to go through, Anderson said, "I think in the end, there were two wigs, one that represented the first half of her episodes and one that represented the second half, and then there were doubles and triples of those. I don't think there were any situations where one of the wigs got ruined. Although, with some of the stalking in that scene in Scotland, it's possible that that one was affected, but you know, Thatcher is not doing somersaults. So, you know, I don't think many were destroyed in the process. No wigs were harmed [in the process of being Margaret Thatcher]."

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I find it so interesting seeing that so much of her persona, at least on the show, is based on image. In the first few scenes, when you are introduced to her, a lot of the way that the show is edited is you see that before she steps out, it's her fixing her hair, putting on the jewelry, and putting herself together physically before she shows herself to the world. I was wondering if you thought, at least when you were researching her, if presentation was important to her.

Whens asked about how she maintained the appearance of the Iron Lady, from the jewelry to the subtle mannerisms of fixing her hair, Anderson said, "Oh, yeah. Presentation was very, very important. But it was important for her for most of her life. If you read many of the letters that she wrote when she'd gone off to college and she wrote home to her sister—it was mostly her sister that she communicated with—almost every single letter is about clothes. It's about ribbons and things that she found in a thrift shop, or that she saved money, or she got a bargain on something and she was going to turn it into a piece that she would put on that nice felt hat that she got for Christmas, or whatever. It was all about clothes. And she grew up as the shopkeeper's daughter and she worked very, very hard and they lived a very frugal, well-budgeted life in her youth. And she really, really carried that into her premiership. I think as she became a member of the Conservative Party and she was surrounded by pretty much only men and men of a certain class, she really had to present herself as being something other than how she was brought up. And I think she was very, very aware of that from early on. She did work with a PR person at one point when she was going to run for office, who kind of shifted her away from the look that we had known her in, with the big pussy bows and lots of prints on her shirts, et cetera, into a look that was much more monotone and more conservative, I guess. Image was a big part of her experience as a woman in that world, in that class."

Information originally sourced from Harpers Bazaar.