Queen Elizabeth IIs most notable meetings
Categories: Historical news
Queen Elizabeth II's most notable meetings
From a string of US presidents to Lady Gaga, Queen Elizabeth II met leading political and artistic personalities from around the globe during her record-breaking time on the throne.
Some were despised dictators, others world-famous guitarists she made polite conversation with. Regardless of the personalities, she always kept her composure.
Here are some of her famous meetings:
West to East
- After her accession in 1952, the queen met all sitting US presidents with the exception of Lyndon B Johnson. That spans 14 heads of state, from Dwight D Eisenhower to Joe Biden.
- During the Cold War, however, her meetings with leaders from the Soviet bloc were few and far between.
- In 1956, Elizabeth received Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was overseeing a political thaw after replacing Joseph Stalin.
- But it would be more than three decades later, in 1989, that Mikhail Gorbachev would be invited for an audience. It came after he launched a policy of "perestroika" (restructuring) which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- The queen was the first British monarch in history to visit Russia, when she was hosted by president Boris Yeltsin in 1994.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin met the queen during a state visit to Britain in 2003.
War and peace
- Mother Teresa and Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai were just two of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates the queen met.
- She had a particularly warm relationship with South Africa's anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, one of the few who called her by her first name.
- But the head of state also received the leaders of some of the world's most repressive regimes.
- They included Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, who paid a state visit to Britain in 1973 and Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 1994.
- Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was invited by the government, and to the queen's reported displeasure, in 1978.
- She is said to have hidden in a bush in the grounds of Buckingham Palace while walking her corgis to avoid talking to him.
Historic handshake
- On June 27, 2012 the British monarch exchanged a historic handshake in Belfast with Martin McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army paramilitary commander who had become number two in the Sinn Fein party, which does not recognise her sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
- It was a gesture that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier amid the bitterness of the deadly conflict in Northern Ireland.
- The IRA had assassinated her relative, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in 1979.
- "Hello, are you well?" McGuinness, by then deputy first minister in the power-sharing government in Belfast, asked the monarch.
- "Thank you very much. I am still alive anyway," she responded.
Artistic encounters
- The monarch also met some of the biggest artists of the 20th and 21st centuries: opera singer Maria Callas; actors Marilyn Monroe,
- Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor and Brigitte Bardot; ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev; and singer Frank Sinatra.
- In her autobiography, British crime writer Agatha Christie wrote that buying a car and dining with the queen at Buckingham Palace had been the two most exciting moments of her life.
- She remembered "her kindness and easiness in talking" and described her as "so small, and slender, in her simple dark red velvet gown with one beautiful jewel".
Bond girl
- Elizabeth also crossed paths with fictional characters.
- In 2012 she took part in a spoof video with James Bond star Daniel Craig in which she appeared to parachute into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
- She met her fictional double, actress Helen Mirren, on several occasions. Mirren won an Oscar for having played the title role in "The Queen" in 2006.
- The real monarch made Mirren a dame in 2003.