Don't Panic! Lighten Up!
Footage of the exchange is included in a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary that was filmed as Queen Elizabeth II prepared for her 80th birthday and during her recent visit to the United States.
Snippets of "A Year With the Queen," which captures the working life of the royal family, were released Wednesday.
Queen Elizabeth II is shown walking into a room in Buckingham Palace _ which is cluttered with camera equipment _ wearing her crown and her Order of the Garter robes.
Leibovitz tells her: "I think it will look better without the crown because the Garter robe is so ..."
Before she can finish saying "extraordinary," the queen gives her an icy stare and replies: "Less dressy. What do you think this is?" and points to what she is wearing.
Cameras follow the queen as she storms off, an official lifting the large train of her blue velvet cape off the floor, as she tells her lady-in-waiting: "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough dressing like this, thank you very much."
Four official portraits of the queen were eventually released by Leibovitz.
The photographer, famous for her work for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair magazines, is known for making unusual requests of her subjects. She had Kate Winslet repeatedly dunked in a tank of water and snapped Clint Eastwood after he had been tied up with ropes.
Other images include a naked John Lennon cuddling a clothed Yoko Ono and Demi Moore, naked and heavily pregnant.
BBC cameras were given unprecedented access to the royal family _ and the queen's beloved corgis _ at home and abroad for the documentary.
Reader Comments
As has now been revealed, the BBC has been forced to apologise due to its manipulation of footage. The so-called "Queen storming out" shot was in fact filmed BEFORE the photo-shoot footage, and the dialogue you hear from the Queen was taken from the latter shot and inserted into the former, giving the false impression that she was "storming out". Typical example of the media's manipulative editing techniques.
One wonders why the BBC - or whoever was specifically behind this - might wish to embarrass the queen this way? What's the point?
Leibovitz is so enamored with herself that she couldn't even imagine telling a Queen to remove her crown as being inappropriate or thoughtless - basically a colossal clash of egos in a room far too small for it - what else was Her Highness to do but leave?