A former County Durham shop worker’s royal resemblance has brought international acclaim. She hopes the Queen would be amused, too

“You’re not supposed to see me like this,” she says.

Elizabeth Richard is a royal lookalike, a double life that at 74 still brings good money, world travel, film and television appearances and some funny looks. “I’ve even had my name on dressing room doors,” she says. “I meet real actresses, too.”

IF not quite palatial, her rented basement flat in south London is comfortable and nicely furnished.

If not red carpet, her welcome is warm and friendly.

We eat chocolate digestives, drink “proper” tea, with tea leaves. “It’s not that I’m trying to be the Queen,”

she says, almost defensively. “I’ve just never liked tea bags.”

Her website overflows with double- take photographs and with testimonials; her photograph album shows familiar costumes, practised gestures, a certain smile. There’s even a cover from Match of the Day magazine – “We take the Queen to England v Germany” – another from Private Eye.

She lives in Lambeth, though these days there’s less walking the walk and more talking the talk.

Looking the part has failed to imbue a taste for the high life, or a need for a first estate agent.

If not an annus horribilis, then London life can be awfully hard. All she really wants, the crowning glory, is to be back home in Co Durham.

“Show business is very difficult,”

she says. “There’s so much jealousy, which is sad, so much envy, so much back stabbing. There aren’t many nice people in show business.”

A bit lonely? As the phrase goes, she resembles that remark.

“I only work for the money, so that one day I might be able to buy a place back home. I’d stop tomorrow if I had it. I’ve been mugged quite a few times down here, my apartment has been burgled twice. You can’t even say ‘Hello’ to someone on the bus without them looking at you like you’re mad.

“Playing the Queen can be very stressful, too, the excitement has gone. I’m not a happy bunny at all.”

Her Majesty, she says, is admirable.

“She’s done so much for this country, I’d never do anything to embarrass her and have turned down lots of work because of it. If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, I hope she’d be quite pleased.”

SHE was born Mary Holder in Meadowfield, a former pit village a couple of miles southwest of Durham. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic, an ardent royalist and one of probably precious few Conservatives within hollering distance of a sixfoot seam.

“She loved Winston Churchill, too,” Elizabeth recalls.

“People would ask her how she could be a Conservative when she had nothing. Can you imagine, all those pits and trying to convince people to vote Conservative?”

She attended St Patrick’s primary school in Langley Moor, appeared in the Christmas pantomime – “I think I was the fairy queen” – went on to St Leonard’s in Durham but left at 15 to work for Joe Lynch, an “old fashioned”

draper opposite Durham bus station.

“I worked in a little office with stained glass windows,” she remembers, “a nervous little girl with red hair and freckles. I never dreamed that one day I might be mistaken all the time for the Queen.”

She talks of the Kinema in Meadowfield main street, of the workmen’s club on the corner that she was forbidden ever to enter, of Brandon and Byshottles Co-op. Why Byshottles, she asks. Why, indeed?

Perhaps the strongest reminder of home, however, is that – like so many good Co Durham folk – she spends almost all her time in the little kitchen/diner at the back. The posh front room is for visitors; the front room is where she holds court.

At 21 she moved to Bath – she pronounces it “Barth”, as would Her Majesty – worked mostly in shops, in one of the first Wimpy bars and at a holiday camp on Hayling Island.

“It wasn’t what you’d call Hi-de- Hi,” she says.

It was only when her marriage ended, however, that thoughts turned to what might be termed doubling her money.

“I really did look in a mirror, about 19 years ago, and think that maybe I could do it – same height, everything.

I was in my 50s and thought ‘Oh God, I can never exist on an old age pension.’ Something had to be done.”

She bought a copy of Stage magazine, found an agent, became Elizabeth Richard – ER, for short – because her married name had been Richards and Equity, the actors’ union, already had a Mary Richard.

Early on, she was asked to play Princess Margaret, too. “They said there was a family likeness. It wasn’t bad, sunglasses and all that, but they forgot the cigarettes and cigarette holder, so it didn’t really work.”

There are, of course, a fair few monarchs of the genre, perhaps the best known – the Queen mother, as it were – Jeanette Charles, who’s been a double for 39 years. Some of the other pretenders to the throne haven’t the look at all, says Elizabeth.

– Royalties? “I don’t charge a fortune, but some of them turn out for a pittance.”

London Weekend Television, she says, paid off Ms Charles for a series of Beadle’s About after ER appeared on the scene, but success has come at a price.

HER hair is artificially silver – “if you’ve been a red head, you tend to go salt and pepper” – her accent barely tinged with the Durham coalfield.

“You can normally tell where I’m from when I get excited,” she says.

Her hats are from the Queen’s milliner, her spectacles from the Queen’s optician, her outfits from Harrods and Selfridges and her tiaras, if not quite the crown jewels, around £1,200 a head.

“I’ve a cupboard full of outfits, it’s an expensive business,” she says.

“You have to be a make-up artist, a hairdresser, an alterations hand, a dress designer and an actress. It isn’t easy at all, you spend hours getting ready.

“I’ve a friend who’s a Del Boy lookalike. It’s all right for him. He only needs one outfit.”

Demand for the royal double act peaked during the Queen’s 80th birthday year, and will again during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012.

“You get asked to read all sorts of scripts, some of them quite dirty, disgusting really. I just won’t do it.

Quite early in I wondered if it might be tacky. A friend said that if I were doing Marilyn Monroe it might be, but the Queen could never be tacky.”

THE royal tour has sent her all over the world, perhaps most improbably to film a commercial in Poland for a German firm promoting a Spanish paella. “You can see on the photographs, I was frozen.”

She’s never met the Queen, never likely to – “I once saw her from a distance in Ealing, I’m not the sort to push myself to the front of the crowd” – but did meet a royal equerry on a cruise ship.

“I told him that I’d never do anything untoward. I thought that was quite succinct.”

North-East engagements have included a shopping centre opening at Dalton Park, near Murton, work for the National Railway Museum in York – something to do with choosing corgis – and a surprise personal appearance at Greggs, the Tynesidebased bakery chain, shortly after the chairman had received a knighthood.

“I told them that I had to keep an eye on all my new knights. They wrote and said it was the first time they’d ever seen the chairman lost for words. I get a lot of nice letters like that.”

BACK in her Lambeth flat, she shows a video of an appearance on breakfast television in Barbados, a second of her dancing – pearls, hat and coat immaculate – to the song YMCA. I forget why.

“Did you know it was a gay song?”

she asks. Camp followers, as it were.

For much of the time, especially when she’s talking, the resemblance is remarkable – canny uncanny, as they might say up North. Sometimes the mannerisms display something of Lady Thatcher, too. Double trouble, if ever.

The audience lasts two-and-half hours. She’d hoped that I might have stayed longer, maybe had something to eat, talked about old times and old places.

One day soon, she hopes, the royal train will pull back permanently into Durham. “People think this is a glamorous life, but probably they think that of the Queen as well.”

It’s Tuesday, evening drawing in along the Lambeth Walk. The front page of the Evening Standard is forecasting 18 inches of snow, just like they used to have in Meadowfield. “I wonder if they still do,” says the Queen Other.

“I wonder what it would be like to be home.”

Branch lines

RENOWNED for some of its off-the-wall (shall we say) programmes, Channel 4 may now be going in for the arboreal thing, too.

On the same train homeward from London on Tuesday evening was a lad from the Durham area who’d been down to film a pilot for a six-part series about people who chop down trees. Cutting edge, or what?

It’s not due to go out until 2011 by which time, of course, it could be axed again.

The young lad, at any rate, had grown a bit uneasy about some of the dialogue. “You don’t want all that crap, do you,” he’d said to one of the crew.

“That crap,” said the man from Channel 4, “is exactly what we want.” Unlike the trees, it will doubtless grow on us.