Who Played It Better, and in Which Role?

Those gowns. That hair. That world-shaping geopolitical intrigue. In “Mary Queen of Scots,” which opens Dec. 7, a pair of Renaissance frenemies returns. Mary Stuart, a queen of Scotland and fleetingly queen consort of France, and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, were rivals for the English throne. (Mary and her Catholic supporters thought so, anyway.) Some early letters suggest a warm relationship — Elizabeth signed one “a dear sister and a faithful friend.” But Elizabeth eventually had Mary imprisoned. When evidence of an assassination plot surfaced, she had her beheaded.

“It’s been a notorious story for centuries,” said Beau Willimon (“House of Cards,” “The Ides of March”), who wrote the script for the most recent film. “You see these two women against the world and because of the politics of the time, ultimately against one another.”

Most versions of the story picture Mary as passionate and heedless, Elizabeth as chilly and calculating. A floozy and a virgin, each studded with pearls. This new movie, which stars Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth, tries to complicate that narrative. In rethinking a familiar story, this “Mary Queen of Scots” is also exploring what stories we still tell about women in power — what a woman can and can’t do, what she can and can’t be.

“The important thing to me was to look at these women who are so iconic and try to work out what that iconography means from our position right now,” Josie Rourke, the film’s director, said. She began to prepare the movie, her first, during the 2016 presidential election when those questions seemed particularly urgent.

For Ronan, who has been attached to the movie for six years, it’s a chance to show Mary as both a ruler and a woman, “filled with doubts and flaws, strengths and virtues.”

Even in its most diminished or reductive form, this queenly twofer has inspired plays, operas and dance dramas, and especially movies and television shows. It even prompted an early use of cinematic special effects, perhaps the first, courtesy of the Edison Laboratory’s 1895 film, “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” and its unconvincing dummy. Here are a few filmed versions that made the cut and a guess at which queen they knelt to.

This handsome RKO film, directed by John Ford and adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s blank verse drama, hit the box office like a dud cannon ball. Katharine Hepburn, helplessly luminous, plays Mary with the clipped consonants, straight-backed posture and limited emotional range of a Boston debutante. Florence Eldridge is a tetchy Elizabeth, jealous of Mary’s beauty and legitimacy. Douglas Walton’s Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband, is coded as queer, while Fredric March’s Earl of Bothwell is an early modern macho man in kilts. Shot in opalescent black-and-white, the movie tries to sculpt Mary along protofeminist, flapperesque lines. “I’m going to live my own life!” she says. “I refuse to marry! I’m going to begin to be myself!” History had other ideas.

Advantage: Mary

This lathery adaptation, directed by Charles Jarrott for producer Hal B. Wallis, stars a blond Vanessa Redgrave as a swoony Mary and Glenda Jackson as a carnivorous Elizabeth. Timothy Dalton, also blond, plays Lord Darnley as a sexually fluid lush; Ian Holm co-stars as a doomed confidant. A mess of galloping horses, billowing nightgowns and blaring bagpipes, the movie earned five Oscar nominations. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film, “an exceptionally loveless, passionless costume drama.” The script, by John Hale, takes some nearly treasonous liberties and engineers a pair of meetings between the women. Its simplistic reading of the queens — Mary is weak and womanly, Elizabeth is stern and unfeminine — is complicated by the force of both actresses.

Advantage: Bagpipes

Low-budget, and relatively low melodrama, this faithful 1971 BBC miniseries again stars Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth. (If the stomacher fits ...) The fourth episode, “Horrible Conspiracies,” centers on an imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots and the revelation of her plots. The two- and three-character scenes are claustrophobic, the acting expansive and chewy. While the script keeps the two women apart, back-to-back scenes emphasize both the stark differences between the queens and the subtler similarities — Elizabeth, while vicious, is reliably shrewd, Vivian Pickles’ Mary is flightier, but also canny and self-aware. “Know that I am a creature of impulse, seldom thinking before I act, driven on by passions,” she tells the spy Gifford. “This is my alchemy and I rejoice in it.”

Advantage: Elizabeth, by a ruff

In the first episode of this blood-soaked, casually misogynistic BBC miniseries, written by Jimmy McGovern, a blond, teenage Mary (Clémence Poésy) arrives in Scotland worryingly out of her depth. Her taste in men? The worst. This Lord Darnley (Paul Nicholls) is a murderous drunk and a rapist. Kevin McKidd’s Earl of Bothwell condescends to her and insults her, but she seems to like it. If most adaptations fan flames between the queens, there are no sparks here. This childishly wily Mary is a very damp match for Catherine McCormack’s pitiless Elizabeth and her aureole of fabulous, if anachronistic, hair. This Elizabeth seems particularly enraged by the contrast between Mary’s fertility and her own childlessness.

Advantage: Elizabeth

In this opulent, Emmy-winning HBO miniseries, Helen Mirren’s glimmering, faceted performance emphasizes both Elizabeth’s majesty and her vulnerability, suggesting her political dominance comes at a personal cost. She contrives a secret meeting with Mary, in part to stave off a war with Spain, in part to rescue a woman she calls “my sister.” In contrast to the usual portrayals, Barbara Flynn’s matronly Mary is as confident and imperious as her cousin, if not nearly as well appareled. Elizabeth, lonely in her power, is conscious of their shared blood and history; she suggests a likeness: “We are both prisoners of the time, you and I.” Mary, under arrest for nearly 19 years, isn’t buying it. “Both prisoners?” she asks. Her death, a death Elizabeth orders, devastates the queen.

Advantage: Mary

In the second part of this lavish historical diptych, directed by Shekhar Kapur, Cate Blanchett’s extravagantly powdered and coifed Elizabeth nimbly navigates an uncertain political landscape. A momentary stumble is Samantha Morton’s brittle, bitchy Mary: “They call her the Virgin Queen,” Mary says of her cousin. “Can it be that no man will have her?” Rawr. Mary’s story is only one strand in a busy brocade that has, as Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times, “almost as many mood shifts and genre notes as the queen has dresses.” Elizabeth concerns herself with Mary’s fate only briefly. Of course they don’t meet. The Spanish Armada is somewhat more pressing. But in sentencing Mary to death (did she also sentence Mary to that mouse ears hairstyle?), Elizabeth recognizes her own mortality. It’s never nice to be reminded that queens are human, too.

Advantage: Elizabeth

Ruff-clutchingly ahistoric, this four-season CW series retold Mary’s story with couture gowns, a folk-rock soundtrack and the occasional supernatural sex scene. The series began with the wide-eyed arrival of a brunette Mary (Adelaide Kane) to the French court and spiraled feverishly from there. Why so much sorcery? Why so many headbands? The second-season finale introduced Rachel Skarsten as Elizabeth, Mary’s foil, a woman who made choices and sacrifices that Mary couldn’t. Before that relationship could deepen, an early cancellation meant the finale had to skip ahead two decades. Despite its history-as-slumber-party vibe, the show sometimes tried for a more complicated portrayal of how women grasp and hold power.

Advantage: Headbands