Vicky Krieps Liberates an Empress in Corsage

"It's me sticking my tongue to the industry of movies." – Vicky Krieps on liberating Empress Elisabeth Eugenie from the strictures of old stories in Corsage - (courtesy of Felix Vratny / An IFC Films Release)

There's an inherent enigmatic romance to monarchy. Forever in the public eye but outside of daily life, royalty become figures of deliberate mystique. Study the case of Empress Elisabeth Eugenie of Austria, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the young beauty who suddenly started hiding her face. The myth of the empress has overwritten the truth, and much of the posthumous history still reads like palace gossip.

So Corsage, the new fictionalized biopic of Elisabeth's final years, could be seen as an attempt to tell Elisabeth's story – but that's an idea that actress Vicky Krieps quickly rejects. "There's no such thing as her story," Krieps said. "It rewrites itself, and it depends on who's writing about her at what time."

The film is a passion project for Krieps, who both plays Elisabeth and executive produced Corsage. She was fascinated with the woman behind the history and found traces of her voice in "her diaries or her little poems that she was writing, or her little escapes, going on long journeys." But, she added, "This is not my homework." Rather than embrace the prickly, subjective nature of historical accuracy, she amplified that voice, making Sissi (as Elisabeth was commonly known) an agent of chaos, suddenly doing cartwheels or sticking out her tongue. "It's me sticking my tongue to the industry of movies," Krieps said. "That's not how you're supposed to play a historical character [but] it was me going, 'Well, if I want this character to get free, then I have to get free as well.'"

Krieps is far from the first actor to play Elisabeth: There have been multiple stage plays, ballets, TV series, and films, but the most popular may remain Ernst Marischka's 1950s Sissi trilogy starring Romy Schneider as a highly romanticized version of the young empress. Those films made Schneider an international star, but soon became as constraining as those corsets that bound the young empress to her famous 16-inch waist. Krieps said, "She was trying to play more complex characters, more difficult characters, more ugly characters, but they always tried to put her back into the beautiful woman, the beautiful perfect girl, and it crushed her soul."

After her own breakout performance in Phantom Thread, Krieps said she "knew what it tasted like" to be confined and defined by one role. "I could feel the public eye and people going, 'Oh, this is the girl from Phantom Thread, this is her.'" To quash such pigeonholing, she selected projects diverse in tone and country of origin, from M. Night Shyamalan's Old to the French-language Hold Me Tight, even a brief cameo in Emily Atef's 2018 biopic of Schneider, 3 Days in Quiberon, all to avoid the typecasting that so often afflicts women in film. "We can talk about Marilyn Monroe, we can talk about Jane Fonda, we can talk about so many women who have been put in a corset and been asked to look good and be nice and shut up." Moreover, she found Sissi to be "exemplary for women of the time. I think of my grandmothers, and how many of them were never really able to express themselves, or say, 'I don't want this,' or say, 'Stop this.'"

So Krieps did not simply use her performance in Corsage as a rebuttal to Schneider's version, but instead acted in concert with Schneider's own experiences as much as those of the empress. "Sometimes, to get strength and get energy, I would close my eyes, and internally I had Romy Schneider in one hand and Elisabeth in the other, and I would say, 'OK, now we go play.'"

Corsage opens in cinemas on Jan. 6. Read our review.