👑 Henry VIII's Women: 🌹12 Beautiful Actresses Who Played All the Other Women Henry Also Loved

The Tudor women Henry VIII loved, and the beautiful actresses who played them. Mary Boleyn, Bessie Blount, Madge Shelton and more, from The Other Boleyn Girl and The Tudors to Wolf Hall and The Spanish Princess, then and now.

Some of them were handed to him by their own families. One gave him the son no queen ever could. One was chosen by Anne Boleyn herself, who believed a cousin would be easier to control. And one, a sixteen-year-old widow, is remembered for the only word Henry VIII never expected to hear.

Mary Boleyn lived to see her sister crowned and beheaded, and was banished from court for marrying a man she actually loved. Bessie Blount bore Henry a son he made a duke, a boy who came close to being named heir to England. Madge Shelton served her cousin's ambition. Anne Stafford was caught out in 1510, the first scandal of the reign, and paid for it with her place at court.

Twelve actresses have brought these women to the screen across more than fifty years, from Valerie Gearon opposite Richard Burton in 1969 to Hannah Steele in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light in 2024. Scarlett Johansson played Mary Boleyn at twenty-three. Natascha McElhone had played her five years earlier for the BBC. Perdita Weeks was only twenty-one.

Here they all are, as they were and as they are now.

Video Index:
00:00 Natascha McElhone
00:18 Ruta Gedmintas
00:38 Scarlett Johansson
00:58 Tessa Bonham Jones
01:18 Charity Wakefield
01:38 Laura Jane Laughlin
01:58 Valerie Gearon
02:18 Hannah Steele
02:38 Chloe Harris
02:58 Charlotte Salt
03:18 Perdita Weeks
03:38 Sonya Cassidy
03:58 Outro: Henry's Queens

A note on Lady Ursula Misseldon: she was invented for The Tudors, most likely modelled on Anne Bassett or Mary Shelton. Everyone else here is a real woman.

Which one do you remember best? Tell us in the comments.

Music composed with Suno AI.

A note on AI: The photographs in this video are genuine archive images. AI tools have been used to enhance them, restoring