One day in 1972, Jeannette Charles was idly turning the pages of her local paper, the Essex Chronicle, when she spotted an advert that was to change her life.
It had been placed by the artist Jane Thornhill, seeking clients for her portrait-painting service, and, stuck for present ideas for her husband’s forthcoming birthday, Jeannette decided he might like a portrait of his wife and booked herself a sitting.
Husband and wife were delighted with the picture, as was Thornhill, who asked if they would mind if she submitted it for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.
So striking was Jeannette’s resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II that when the RA received the picture they assumed it was a portrait of the monarch and contacted Buckingham Palace, whose press secretary informed them that the Queen had not given a sitting and it must have been painted from a photograph.
As the rules of the exhibition stipulated portraits had to be painted from life, Thornhill’s picture was disqualified. However, when she arrived at the gallery to collect her rejected canvas and explained that the portrait was not of the Queen but of a mother of three from Essex, the picture was accepted.
Visitors to the exhibition were astonished by the likeness and the media picked up on the story. A photo of the painting in The Daily Express with the headline “No, she’s NOT the Queen” sparked a feeding frenzy. “My phone didn’t stop ringing,” Charles recalled. “I was inundated with interview requests for newspapers, magazines, television and radio.”
Queen and her namesake band, Roger Taylor, Brian May, John Deacon and Freddie Mercury
GETTY IMAGES
Photographers turned up on her doorstep too, and pictures of her were published around the world. An agent approached her and suggested that her resemblance to the Queen was a surefire money-spinner, although her first job as a royal lookalike was not encouraging. After she was photographed for an advertising poster that showed her reading the London Weekly Advertiser with a corgi at her feet, London Transport promptly banned it for fear of upsetting the monarchy.
Undaunted, she concluded that she needed a second string to her royal simulacrum and took elocution lessons so that she could sound like royalty too. It took “four weeks to perfect being the queen”, she said, and after she had given a first try-out on Russell Harty’s talk show, Spike Milligan recruited her as a regular on his comedy series Q. Even off-screen she recalled that he would always bow and address her as “Your Maj”.
There were appearances on The Sooty Show and The Benny Hill Show and a Christmas Day broadcast with Roland Rat that went out shortly before the Queen’s 3pm address and that showed her lookalike frantically trying to finish writing her speech in time.
A sketch for The Two Ronnies found her putting out the empty milk bottles flanked by two uniformed royal guardsmen but an appearance on The Goodies almost brought her career to an end. Filming a royal swim at the Ruislip lido wearing a gown and tiara over a wetsuit, she failed to warn the TV crew that she could not swim and a half-drowned monarch gasping for air had to be rescued by a lifeguard when she got out of her depth.
Rock bands, including Queen, wanted her for their videos and there were bread and butter appearances opening supermarkets and village fêtes and reigning over prize givings and charity events.
Needless to say America loved her. She appeared on Saturday Night Live and Muhammad Ali asked to have his photograph taken with her. She obliged for the cameras by pretending to deliver a royal right hook to his jaw.
Joan Rivers employed her to rattle her jewellery from the royal box during her shows and Alice Cooper was convinced he was in the presence of genuine royalty when his record company asked her to present the singer with a gold disc in a surprise ceremony after one of his concerts. “He fell on one knee with his head bowed,” she recalled. “I was in full regalia and he was taken in completely.” So too were many others. She was once asked to leave a New York restaurant because a crowd had gathered outside to gawp at its royal customer through the window.
Her resemblance to Her Majesty was uncanny
REX
She even found a lucrative side-hustle travelling at the invitation of foreign governments before the royal entourage on official visits to stand in at dress rehearsals as the protocols were fine-tuned before the real monarch arrived.
Hollywood recruited her to play the Queen in National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985) and in the third Austin Powers film Goldmember (2002), but her most memorable portrayal came in The Naked Gun (1988). When Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling police lieutenant Frank Drebin mistakenly believed the Queen was about to be assassinated, his botched attempted to push her to safety ended with him straddling her suggestively after they had both slid the length of a banqueting table.
When pictures of monarch and protection officer in a seemingly compromising position were splashed all over the papers, Drebin’s boss, played by George Kennedy, deadpanned, “What is journalism coming to … you’re lying on top of the Queen with her legs wrapped around you and they call that news?”
Charles’s recollection of shooting the scene was that she had not been warned what Nielsen was planning. “So the look of shock on my face is entirely genuine,” she said. “I was worried about the audience seeing my knickers.”
As she was a fervent monarchist herself, anyone who criticised the royal family in her presence would receive a stern upbraiding followed by the mock instruction “off with their head”. Invitations that she felt would embarrass her lookalike were indignantly refused. A £10,000 offer from Playboy for her to pose as the Queen in a centrefold was turned down, as was an invitation from Sacha Baron Cohen. “I gave short shrift to his Ali G when he asked me to drop my knickers as I got into a limousine,” she said. “I would never do anything that reflected badly on the monarch.”
She was once asked to play the Queen at an event for a charity of which the Queen Mother was a patron, and decided she ought to seek approval from Clarence House. “Mrs Charles is a delightful lady and we have never had cause to pass judgment on the way she conducts herself,” an equerry replied.
Her husband Ken Charles, who on more than one occasion was asked if he was a royal bodyguard, died in 1997 after a 40-year marriage. She is survived by their three children, David, Peter and Carol, none of whom, she reported, looked remotely like Charles, Anne, Edward or Andrew.
She was born in north London in 1927. Her father was personal chef to Field Marshal Alexander and later a restaurateur and her mother came from a Dutch Jewish family.
She was only 18 months younger than the future Queen and the similarity was evident from an early age: when she walked home from Wembley High School boys would shout “Princess Elizabeth” at her. She had hoped to train as an actress at Rada but her family could not afford the fees and she had to be content with amateur dramatics while working as a typist and as a waitress at her father’s restaurant.
Looking for adventure, she became an au pair in Texas, where she met her English husband who was working in the oilfields as an engineer with British Petroleum. After marrying, they lived for a time in Libya before fleeing in the aftermath of Colonel Gaddafi’s coup d’état and returning to England to settle in the Essex village of Danbury, where she became, in her own words, “an ordinary housewife and mother”.
Whether she ever met her lookalike face to face was something she refused to answer but there was at least one brief semi-encounter when she caught a glimpse of the Queen through the window of her Rolls-Royce. The waving monarch “froze, staring, hand immobile in the air as our eyes met from a distance of a couple of feet”, Charles wrote in her 1986 autobiography The Queen and I. “When you see your doppelganger, the effect is cataclysmic … if the sighting affected her as it affected me, she must have felt shattered.”
Jeannette Charles, royal lookalike and actress, was born on October 15, 1927. She died on June 2, 2024, aged 96
