Until its final act, Karin Ainouz’s Firebrand is a phenomenal and frankly overdue retelling of how the final wife of Henry VIII barely escaped her unwanted marriage with her head intact.
The real and unbelievable saga of Catherine Parr, the last of the English king’s six wives, is woefully untold, and when fictionalized, usually as an afterthought to the dramatic executions of wives two and four (Anne Boleyn and her cousin Katherine Howard, respectively), Parr is usually portrayed as a comely enough but middle-aged matron.
In Firebrand, Parr, who was likely 34 years old on the fateful summer her 55-year-old husband almost murdered her, is finally done justice by the slight yet steely Alicia Vikander. Unlike placid prior tellings that gloss over the sheer horror of Henry in his later years, Vikander’s Catherine Parr isn’t just relegated to serving an ailing, corpulent, and…
