"I still don't know what I did wrong": Susan Sarandon reflects on breaking royal protocol
Susan Sarandon has opened up her brush with royalty, and how she was slammed for "breaking royal protocol".
The 76-year-old actress recalled attending the Royal Windsor Cup at Guards Polo Club with her youngest son in 2018, where she met Queen Elizabeth.
Sarandon said she was given conflicting advice about what to do when she came face-to-face with Her Majesty, as she explains in the documentary Portrait of the Queen.
"[When] I got to to England and my friends were like, 'do not bow, whatever you do don't bow, that is so passe'," Sarandon recalled.
"You know, there's this push and pull about whether and how much respect you're going to give to the royal family and whatever. They said to me 'don't bow. Do not bow' and I thought, 'well, I'm going to be respectful'."
When the day arrived, Sarandon and her son Miles were seated in a different section, where she received a briefing from a royal aide before the Queen arrived for their meeting.
"They said: 'Don't ask her any questions. [If] she talks to you, it's okay but don't ask her anything. And this is what you have to do, you know, bow when she comes'," Sarandon recalls.
"So I'm all stressed out, I think, 'am I going to bow or am I not going to bow?'
"So anyway, the moment came when they finally said: 'Okay, it's your turn to meet the Queen'. And here is what happened - she was sitting down!
"So of course, I had to bend over to shake her hand and so it looked like a curtsy. So, at the end of the day, I kind of did bow and the headlines still said after all of that, that I had gone against protocol somehow. I still don't know what I did wrong."
At the time, the British press condemned the actress for breaking royal protocol by initiating a handshake with the Queen.
Despite the semantics of their meeting, Sarandon said her brief encounter with Her Majesty was perfectly pleasant.
"She was lovely to me," Sarandon says.
"I don't think we had a very long conversation. I think it was kind of just 'Oh, it's so nice to meet you'. And, and I said 'it's so nice to meet you'. And I remembered that you can't ask her anything."
"So that definitely puts a damper on your conversation because she has to be in charge of everything."
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