The first time I watched the film Orlando, Tilda Swinton was an unknown actor to me, and half way through the movie, when she stands and reveals that they were not an effete nobleman, but a glorious woman, naked in a humid bath-house, my world tilted.
I mention this because for years I’ve known that it’s a convention for beloved personalities to have a catchphrase, and I’ve been in the wilderness searching for such a thing for some time now. That was until I listened to an episode of “You’re Dead to Me”, a most excellent podcast about history.
Thanks to Greg Jenner, and guests Dr Jane Goldman and comedian Sui Ruffell, I learned that the phrase “The Queen had come” was orgasmically inserted the printed text of Orlando by the original author Virginia Woolf. Around the same time I learned that copyright for her text had expired. As a long time gender bender myself, I knew I had come across my catchphrase. Slightly modified, but this is the source.