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Queen Elizabeth IIs most notable meetings

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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.

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