Princess Anne’s hilarious response to The Crown star’s comments about her ‘time-consuming’ hairstyle

Princess Anne’s response to The Crown star Erin Doherty’s revelation about the time-consuming nature of recreating her iconic hairstyle is just as brilliantly down-to-earth as we might expect.

• Erin Doherty played the Princess Royal as a teen in the hit Netflix drama and has previously spoken about how long it took to recreate her hairstyle.
• Responding to the comments, Princess Anne opened up last year about what goes into her hairdo – and it seems it doesn’t take quite so long after all.
• In other royal news, Prince Harry has reportedly spoken with Prince Charles and Prince William but conversations were 'not productive'. 

Princess Anne may not have confirmed whether she’s watched Netflix’s hit drama, The Crown, but she reportedly knows what was said about the process of recreating her hairstyle. Like her mother, the Queen, Princess Anne has maintained an iconic and elegant look for many years. Often seen at important royal engagements, she was found to be the most hard-working royal of 2020 in a recent study. Reports have claimed that she is part of the monarch’s “Firm of Eight” senior royals who will make public appearances together. 

But despite being in the spotlight all her life, Princess Anne is often seen as one of the most down-to-earth of senior royals. She reportedly declined titles for her children Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, and has spoken of the “downsides” to having a title. 

And when it comes to her iconic hairstyle, it seems the Princess Royal takes a practical approach – though this is perhaps not reflected in the time it took to recreate the look on actor Erin Doherty in The Crown. The actor, who played teenage Princess Anne in the series, spoke to Town & Country back in 2019 and referred to the princess’ hair as “its own beast”. 

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“Make-up literally took 10 minutes, but hair – sometimes it would take two hours,” Erin stated. “It’s its own beast. I would sit in the chair, people would come in and go and come in and go, and I sat still in the same place.”

She continued: “But it was so necessary for her character because it felt like her hair and her fashion were the way that she was able to express herself in the confined, controlled environment that she grew up in.”

While this certainly makes getting the Princess Royal’s voluminous hairstyle right sound pretty complicated, Anne later responded to the comments in a wonderfully humorous way. 

Appearing on ITV’s documentary Anne: The Princess Royal at 70 last year, Princess Anne questioned why it would take this long as she spends a fraction of that time on her hair. 

She stated: “Actually I read an article the other day – I don't watch Netflix and The Crown – but the actress was talking about how long it took them to do her hair like I did, and I’m thinking, ‘How could it possibly take that long?’ I mean, it takes me 10 or 15 minutes.”

This time-efficient approach to her hairstyle is no doubt especially important on busy days, though many royal engagements have been undertaken via Zoom in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

Princess Anne is understood to have been spending lockdown with her husband Sir Timothy Laurence at their Gloucestershire home, Gatcombe Park. She is set to become a proud grandmother of five this year when her daughter Zara Tindall gives birth to her third child.