The Crown season 4 cast and characters: from Emma Corrin to Gillian Anderson

Unlike the last season, season four of The Crown sees the core cast retained. However, a brace of prominent new female characters are set to shake things up.

Princess Diana (Emma Corrin)

Newcomer Emma Corrin steals the show in season four, just as her character Diana Spencer, unwittingly or not, upstaged the royal family for most of the period it covers: 1977-1990. In a fictional first meeting, she catches Charles' eye as a young teenager while he's dating her older sister; we then follow their courtship, including a weekend at Balmoral (“it will go down in history as one of the great Balmoral debuts”) and her struggles with loneliness and bulimia in the lead up to the marriage. In the second half of the season, she grows into her confident public persona, as her marriage begins to disintegrate.

Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson)

The second interloper to face down the Windsors in the Eighties was another woman to capture public imagination, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (the season spans the years of her premiership). Sex Education star Gillian Anderson plays the clipped-voiced shopkeeper's daughter. We see her subjected to the whims of the royals over a disastrous weekend at Balmoral and taking on her own party's grandees, the IRA and the Falklands War.

Dennis Thatcher (Stephen Boxer)

A quieter new addition to the cast comes in the form of Margaret Thatcher's husband, who we see by her side throughout the season. He was a wealthy businessman and decorated war hero.

Mark Thatcher (Freddie Fox)

Freddie Fox takes the role Margaret Thatcher's son, who The Crown portrays as his mother's arrogant and petulant favourite. His disappearance during the 1982 Paris-Dakar rally, when he was lost in the desert for six days, is the subject of a mid-series episode.

Carol Thatcher (Rebecca Humphries)

Rebecca Humphries plays Thatcher's less demonstrative daughter Carol. She is shown as much closer to her father Dennis and as struggling with her mental health.

Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman)

Season four begins in 1977, by which point Elizabeth had been on the throne for 25 years. She was a fully fledged matriarch, presiding over a growing extended family, as her children grew up and coupled off.

The lows: the assassination of her uncle Lord Mountbatten by the IRA; anxiety over the happiness of Charles' marriage and tension with her first female Prime Minister (if Peter Morgan is to be believed). The highs: maintaining a solid, successful marriage of her own and providing a sound foundation for a nation often in crisis.

Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies)

Season four plunges the Duke of Edinburgh into personal crisis, with the assassination of his de facto father Lord Mountbatten. His death deepened the cracks in his already strained relationship with Charles. However, he remains close to Princess Anne, proving a particular support in her tumultuous career as an event rider.

Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter)

After the flowering and then breakdown of her relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, 17 years her junior, in the last season, Margaret enters the late Seventies single and struggling with lung disease and depression. The eighteenth birthday of Prince Edward sees her pushed further from the limelight of senior royalty.

Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor)

In 1977, Charles is looking for a wife: we first see him going on a date with Diana's older sister, Sarah Spencer. As his relationship with the now married Camilla Parker Bowles continues illicitly, she and the rest of his family encourage him to marry young and charming Diana. We see his misgivings and doubts (not least in his neglect of his fiancé in the lead up to the wedding) and then watch the marriage slowly unravel, as Diana takes the spotlight.

Princess Anne (Erin Doherty)

We find Anne struggling with a loss of confidence in her career as professional event rider at the start of season four. It is otherwise a relatively peaceful period for the princess. Her children Peter and Zara were born in 1977 and 1981. She and her husband Mark Phillips divorced in 1990 but the drama only hints at the domestic rupture.

Camilla Parker Bowles  (Emerald Fennell)

Camilla remains at the centre of Charles' life (and, infamously, of his marriage) in season four. It is she who encourages him to marry Diana and she even takes her out to lunch in the weeks leading up to their marriage (although her motivations for doing so are rather unclear). Her second daughter Laura was born in 1978.