Kuningatar Margot

A slice of family life: sisters, husbands, children, history, secrets, jealousies. Margot and her teen son, Claude, travel from Manhattan to her family's Long Island home, occupied by sister Pauline, Pauline's daughter, and Malcolm, the slacker Pauline will marry outdoors that week under a tree neighbors want removed. Backbiting marks family discussion, particularly between the sisters and in Margot's cutting remarks to Claude. Pauline tells Margot a secret that Margot promptly tells Claude. Margot dislikes Malcolm and undermines him. She also has marital problems and a lover nearby. People are cruel, inside and outside their families. Is there a refuge for Margot or for Pauline?

Margot Fonteyn has inspired generations of ballerinas. She was beautiful, brilliant, talented and never put a foot wrong on stage. Her late flowering partnering with a much younger man, Rudolf Nureyev, created the most dazzling ballet partnership in history. And yet behind the scenes, as Darcey Bussell discovers, Margot's life was marked by tragedy and disappointment. She barely knew her father and was dominated by her well-meaning, yet fiercely ambitious, mother. She couldn't find love and never had children. And when she finally did marry, to a man she loved from afar for many years, he turned out to be very different from what she expected: a hero to his people, but not always to his wife.

She is beautiful, she is Catholic, she is the King's sister, her name is Marguerite de Valois. Her brother has nicknamed her Margot. Henri de Navarre is Protestant and said to be ill-mannered, unshaven and to smell garlic and sweat. They are wed by force. It is a political manoeuvre: they need to reconcile the French, torn apart by religious wars. Six days after the marriage at the Notre Dame Cathedral is the Saint Bartholomew day. In the middle of this night of horror, a young man wounded by several sword injuries, frantically knocks on Margot's door; La Môle because he is protestant must die like all the others. Margot hides him, nurses him and grows to love him. That night everything is thrown into confusion.

Sie galt als einflussreichste Frau der DDR, machte als Ministerin Karriere und verteidigt bis heute im chilenischen Exil Mauer und Stacheldraht: Margot Honecker. Doch wer ist sie wirklich?

At the age of forty Dame Margot Fonteyn is considered to be past her best as a prima ballerina and Ninette de Valois is reducing her roles at the Royal Ballet.

At the age of forty Dame Margot Fonteyn is considered to be past her best as a prima ballerina and Ninette de Valois is reducing her roles at the Royal Ballet. Then the exciting young Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, a recent defector to the West, comes into her life and her bed and revitalizes her career.

The night of August 24, 1572, is known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In France a religious war is raging. In order to impose peace a forced wedding is arranged between Margot de Valois, sister of the immature Catholic King Charles IX, and the Hugenot King Henri of Navarre. Catherine of Medici maintains her behind-the-scenes power by ordering assaults, poisonings, and instigations to incest.