Boudica, the Iceni queen who led an insurrection against the Roman colonisers in first-century Britain, is one of the great feminist icons from ancient history, but there are surprisingly few cinematic representations of her.
There was a British TV show from 1978 called Warrior Queen that had the great Siân Phillips daubed in woad, a just-OK film from 2003 also called Warrior Queen that starred Alex Kingston, and a smattering of others in various languages, mostly for TV. And, of course, there’s the utterly iconic segment in Horrible Histories where Queen B (Martha Howe-Douglas) sings a grungy ditty about how her bloody campaign. (“Bow man, yeoman, smash the Roman foe man / All say ‘Yah / It’s Boudic-a!’”). But all that still leaves room for a great feature film about the toughest, most heroic gal to come out of Norfolk, up there with Edith Cavell and Delia Smith.
