“The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939) breaks down its emotional core through a series of intimate palace scenes that reveal the forbidden romance at the heart of this historical drama, yet none stands more memorably than the late-night confrontation in Elizabeth’s private chambers where the aging monarch must choose between love and the demands of empire. The film’s most striking moments occur not in grand throne room spectacles but in smaller, character-driven exchanges—particularly the scenes where Bette Davis’s Elizabeth confronts Errol Flynn’s Essex about his ambitions and their impossible future together. These sequences work because they force both characters to strip away courtly pretense and reveal the vulnerability beneath their public masks, a tonal shift that Davis executes with remarkable force of will.
The 106-minute film, directed by Michael Curtiz and released by Warner Bros. in November 1939, stages these pivotal moments across Elizabeth’s private quarters and secluded gardens, deliberately intimate sets that emphasize psychological tension over historical pageantry. The memorable scenes are memorable precisely because they isolate the central conflict—a woman who cannot afford to be a woman—and make that dilemma visible through dialogue, glances, and the spatial distance the director maintains between his two leads.
Table of Contents
- Which Scenes Define Elizabeth and Essex’s Relationship Arc?
- How Technicolor and Costume Design Shaped the Visual Storytelling
- How Historical Inaccuracy Complicates the Private Moments
- Bette Davis’s Performance and the Art of Aging Makeup in Intimate Scenes
- The Chemistry Problem Between Davis and Flynn
- Production Design and the Creation of Private Spaces
- The Academy Award Recognition and Technical Innovation
Which Scenes Define Elizabeth and Essex’s Relationship Arc?
The progression of private scenes between Elizabeth and Essex traces an emotional descent from playful seduction to desperation to final, irreversible rupture. Early scenes show the queen allowing Essex into her chambers at night, a breach of protocol so severe that it alone would doom both characters if discovered. Davis plays these moments with genuine pleasure—a woman experiencing rare freedom from the weight of the crown—but the camera and Curtiz’s direction ensure that every laugh contains an undercurrent of danger. The tone shifts noticeably when Essex’s political ambitions surface; scenes that began as intimate become argumentative, with Elizabeth forced to articulate why her personal happiness must always subordinate to her duty as monarch.
A particularly effective sequence shows Essex demanding that Elizabeth choose him openly, effectively asking her to abdicate or diminish her authority. Davis responds not with anger but with a kind of exhausted resignation, playing a woman who has already made this calculation a thousand times before. The scene carries weight because both actors understand they are playing the moment when attraction collides with reality, and neither romance nor political compromise is possible. By contrast, scenes involving Olivia de Havilland’s Penelope Gray (Essex’s actual historical love interest) feel secondary, a romantic subplot that the film acknowledges but never fully develops.
How Technicolor and Costume Design Shaped the Visual Storytelling
This was Bette Davis’s first film shot in Technicolor, and the production crew faced an immediate technical problem: how to photograph an aging Queen Elizabeth while keeping the film visually compelling. Cinematographer Sol Polito received an academy Award nomination for his solution—using the new fast Technicolor negative to light Davis’s face in ways that emphasized her eyes against the red wig while carefully managing the harshness of color photography on aging makeup. The technical achievement matters because it directly affected how the most intimate scenes between Elizabeth and Essex were shot; the lighting had to be flattering enough to keep Davis watchable as a lead, yet specific enough to telegraph her character’s age and fatigue.
Variety praised the costumes as a “stunning feast for the eyes,” and this visual richness becomes a narrative tool in the private scenes. Elizabeth’s costumes grow progressively more austere and armor-like as the film proceeds; early intimate scenes show her in jeweled robes that suggest openness and vulnerability, while later confrontations dress her in heavier, more metallic garments that literally reinforce her authority. The production was meticulous about this progression, signaling through costume what the dialogue cannot always express directly. However, this same visual magnificence creates a limitation: the elaborate gowns and makeup sometimes overwhelm the actors, making smaller emotional moments feel overshadowed by production design rather than anchored by performance.
How Historical Inaccuracy Complicates the Private Moments
The film makes a critical decision that fundamentally shapes every scene between Elizabeth and Essex: it casts two actors of approximately the same age (Davis and Flynn were both around 30-31 years old) in roles where the real historical figures had a 30+ year age gap. The actual Elizabeth I was 63 when Essex was in his late twenties, and they were never lovers. This casting choice creates a paradox that hangs over every intimate scene—the film wants viewers to accept a genuine romantic connection, yet the historical reality contradicts this possibility entirely. This tension becomes visible in the private scenes themselves.
When Elizabeth and Essex share tender moments, the film treats them as legitimate emotional exchanges between adults who might realistically be peers. But this softens the actual tragedy of their historical relationship, which was never romantic but rather a political exploitation of an aging woman by an ambitious young man. The film’s private scenes work dramatically because they are convincing as romance, but they fundamentally misrepresent history in a way that changes the moral and emotional stakes of every moment. A viewer watching the 1939 version accepts a love story; a history student knows that the real Elizabeth was protecting her authority from a fortune-seeker.
Bette Davis’s Performance and the Art of Aging Makeup in Intimate Scenes
Davis carries these private moments through sheer force of personality and acting discipline. Critics noted that she managed to blend vulnerability with commanding authority, a balance that lesser performers would struggle to maintain in scenes requiring both tenderness and imperious dismissal of her lover. The aging makeup—which was extensive for 1939 standards—could easily have become distracting, yet Davis uses it to reinforce character rather than fight against it. In scenes where Elizabeth must show her age catching up with her, the makeup becomes an expression of exhaustion rather than a cosmetic problem.
One practical challenge that becomes apparent in viewing these scenes is that the makeup restricts facial mobility to some degree, yet Davis compensates by relying more on her eyes and voice. The opening intimate scenes give her more freedom to move expressively, but by the final confrontation scenes, both the makeup and the emotional weight of the character force her into a more controlled, almost sculptural performance. This is not a limitation she overcomes so much as an artistic constraint she transforms into an asset. The stiffness becomes regal authority; the makeup becomes the visible cost of power.
The Chemistry Problem Between Davis and Flynn
The critical reception noted something that becomes apparent in the private scenes: Errol Flynn received what Frank S. Nugent diplomatically called a less enthusiastic reception than Davis, while Variety was harsher, and subsequent film histories have not been kind to his performance. The private scenes between Elizabeth and Essex depend entirely on believable chemistry between the two leads, yet Flynn often seems to be playing a version of his swashbuckling action-hero persona dressed in Elizabethan costume. When Davis is in scene with him, she acts circles around him, making the imbalance in their screen presence almost painfully visible.
This creates a genuine limitation in how the private scenes can function dramatically. Davis is required to project mature romantic and political sophistication; Flynn is required to project ambition, charm, and emotional depth. In their intimate scenes together, the gap in their abilities becomes the subtext of the scene itself—you begin to believe that Elizabeth’s doubts about Essex are not merely political but rooted in his fundamental inability to match her as an intellectual and emotional equal. Whether this was intentional on Curtiz’s part or a happy accident of mismatched casting is debatable, but it does deepen the tragedy of the ending: Elizabeth could never truly be with Essex because he is simply not capable of being the partner she needs.
Production Design and the Creation of Private Spaces
The sets depicting Elizabeth’s private chambers and secluded garden areas were designed specifically to feel separate from the public court, a spatial strategy that makes these scenes register differently from the throne room sequences. The interiors are intimate and cluttered with personal objects—mirrors, jewels, cosmetics—that humanize the Queen and remind viewers that even monarchs inhabit private domestic spaces. The garden scenes use natural lighting and softer compositions to suggest that when Elizabeth is away from formal protocol, she becomes someone different, more human and more vulnerable.
This production choice has a practical effect on how the intimate scenes read: they feel genuinely private because the design makes them feel secret. When Essex steals into Elizabeth’s chambers, the audience understands the breach of protocol not through exposition but through the visual language of intrusion into a sanctum. The production design supports the actors’ performances by making every private scene feel like a transgression against the formal, public world that surrounds the palace.
The Academy Award Recognition and Technical Innovation
The film received five Academy Award nominations including Best Cinematography (Color), Best Art Direction, Best Music, Best Sound, and Best Effects. The cinematography nomination specifically recognized Sol Polito’s work on lighting these intimate scenes, a technical achievement that directly supported the emotional content of the private moments between the two leads.
The nomination acknowledged that photographing Davis’s performance in Technicolor, with aging makeup and elaborate costume, while maintaining dramatic intimacy required extraordinary technical skill—it was not simply about making things look beautiful, but about serving the narrative through photographic choices. The use of the new fast Technicolor negative was a genuine technological advance that allowed for more flexible lighting and faster shooting, which mattered for scenes requiring subtlety and emotional nuance. Without this technical innovation, the private scenes between Elizabeth and Essex might have required the flat, theatrical lighting typical of earlier Technicolor films, which would have undermined the psychological realism the film attempts to build.
