A PBS documentary, a companion PBS Web site, a novel, a biography and a major motion picture recall the last queen of France and examine the many myths surrounding her life. Award- winning filmmaker Grubin's MARIE ANTOINETTE debuts Monday, September 25 from 9 to 11 pm on PBS.

At pbs.org/marieantoinette, a companion Web site to the PBS broadcast explores the French revolution through the eyes of Marie Antoinette. The site covers the opulence of the French court, the squalid prison cell where the queen spent her last days, a tour of the palace of Versailles, the underpinnings of the French Revolution, and scrutinizes Marie Antoinette's closest friends and sworn enemies.


Additional media projects examining the life of Marie Antoinette, both fiction and non, include "Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette," by Sena Jeter Naslund (Harper Collins, October 2006); "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution" by Caroline Weber (Henry Holt, October 2006); and Sofia Coppola's much anticipated feature film Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst leading a notable cast, is scheduled for a theatrical release in October 2006.


MARIE ANTOINETTE, narrated by Blair Brown, weaves together re-enactments, photographs, moving images, the queen's own words, portraits, paintings and archival material. Interviews with historians and authors explore the ironies of her tragic fate. Included in the film are Lady Antonia Fraser, noted Marie Antoinette biographer; Simon Schama, acclaimed historian ("Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution") and The New Yorker's art and culture critic.


Marie Antoinette was an ordinary human being whose destiny was to be married to the King of France at the most crucial moment in France's history. The revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille found the queen a ready target for all that was wrong with France. But out of it, she did forge a completely different character. "Tribulation," she said, "first makes you realize who you are."