The Iron Lady

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Watch out, looking back. Don't dig too deep—you don't know what you might find..."
Denis Thatcher's ghost, talking to Margaret

The Iron Lady is a 2011 Biopic about Margaret Thatcher starring Meryl Streep in an Oscar-winning performance as the eponymous character. The film uses the framework of Thatcher's dementia to look back on the fragments of her life through her increasingly-feeble grip on reality and memory.

For the trope, see Iron Lady.

Tropes used in The Iron Lady include:
  • Cloudcuckoolander: In her old age, Thatcher is getting a bit loopy. Mostly manifested through Denis (who, we should recall, is in Maggie's head).
  • Did Not Do the Research: Grantham, which is featured for less than five minutes, does not look like a Coronation Street set, and is not populated with people speaking with thick northern accents.
  • Fake Memories: It's implied that what we're seeing is somewhat coloured through Maggie's rosy lenses.
  • Foreshadowing: In the scene where Denis proposes to Margaret, she exclaims, "I donʻt want to end life washing up a teacup!" Sheʻs doing exactly that in the movieʻs final scene.
  • Ghost Memory: Denis.
  • Imaginary Friend: In the present-day segments, Thatcher is accompanied by the delusory figure of her late husband. Jim Broadbent is clearly having the time of his life playing Denis.
  • Important Haircut: As part of Margaret's New Look.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: The fact that Thatcher even has dementia isn't even mentioned, despite being one of the film's most central themes.
  • Selective Memory: Maggie's are definitely slanted in her favor.
  • Straw Character: Numerous complaints that the film didn't do this to Thatcher. Though the film is not really complimentary (even supposedly seen through Thatcher's own rose-tinted goggles), the fact that it had the audacity to portray her as human rather than evil incarnate motivated by sheer hatred of everything good outraged her critics.
  • Unreliable Narrator: There are hints that the flashbacks are an example of this--the film (i.e. Thatcher) conveniently glosses over the negative aspects of her rule. And also, young Denis is a Hollywood heartthrob.
  • The Falklands War: Exactly what it says on the tin.