Dame Judi Dench pens open letter dubbing 'The Crown' as an 'inaccurate and hurtful account of history'

Dame Judi Dench has dubbed The Crown 'cruelly unjust' in an open letter to The Times, slamming the hit Netflix series.

The Crown season 5 is yet to air and backlash is already mounting against it. Merely days after it was reported that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Netflix show has been pushed back, owing to controversy surrounding the show, national treasure Dame Judi has voiced her disdain.

The veteran actor showed she means business in the missive, sent to The Times. From the outset, Dame Judi backs up the recent criticism of the hit show, from former Prime Minister, Sir John Major. “Sir John Major is not alone in his concerns that the latest series of The Crown will present an inaccurate and hurtful account of history,” said Dame Judi. “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series - that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence - this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”

The Oscar winner is a long-time supporter of the Royal Family and has previously played British monarchs Elizabeth I in Shakespeare and Love and Queen Victoria on two occasions - in Mrs. Brown and Victoria and Abdul. As such, she asserts with great authority on the matter, that “no one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.”

In response to the mounting criticism, a spokesperson for The Crown said, “The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events. Series five is a fictional dramatization, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the Royal Family - one that has already been scrutinized and well-documented by journalists, biographers, and historians.”

This statement has not sated the appetites of those who see it as a potentially dangerous piece of work - including Dame Judi, who references it in her letter.

“Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalized drama,’ the program makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode," she continues.

The actor closes her letter with a rousing call to action. “The time has come for Netflix to reconsider - for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve its reputation in the eyes of its British subscribers."