Helen Mirren is a truly regal actress. She did such a convincing job of portraying Elizabeths I and II that she won Golden Globes for both performances. Yet the real message of these awards — and others, such as the Oscars, still to come — is that Americans love the Queen.

As Ms. Mirren was the first to concede on Monday night (and she did it most graciously), the real star of “The Queen” was the eponymous octogenarian who has reigned over Great Britain and the Commonwealth for almost 55 years. That is longer than any of her predecessors except for Queen Victoria, to whom she bears some resemblance, and the hapless George III, to whom she bears none at all. Part of the secret of the Queen’s appeal is that, though she has lived her whole life in the public eye, she is a very private person. To her, privacy is not just a fancy name for publicity. The whole fascination of a film that purports to show the royal family at home — watching the TV to find out what is really going on back in London, for instance — is that nobody knows what the Queen is really like.

The movie, which depicts the aftermath of Diana’s death, shows that Elizabeth II does not belong to the modern world of celebrity and — unlike her daughter-in-law — has no wish to do so. Yet by defying Hollywood’s equivalent of the law of gravity, she has made herself one of the most recognizable people on the planet. What is more, her popularity is not ephemeral, but has endured for half a century.

Why? In a word, the Queen believes in doing one’s duty. In her moral code, duty is not just a word. It really means something — indeed everything, for duty is owed to God as well as man. The film brings out very well how a frugal wartime upbringing, including training as a mechanic, molded the young Elizabeth’s character. Abdication — her uncle’s ignominious fate — would be a dereliction of duty.

It is part of this mindset that she doesn’t complain. Once, in 1992, she used the phrase “annus horribilis” to describe a year in which three of her children’s marriages collapsed and her favorite home, Windsor Castle, caught fire and nearly burnt down. But the misfortunes of life are to be borne cheerfully. Death holds no terrors for such a stoic, though I am told that she was a much kinder and more attentive grandmother to the bereaved princes than appears from “The Queen,” which deliberately excluded the boys from the script.

Who could ask for a better head of state? It seems that the French, too, were impressed by the young Elizabeth II. So much so that in 1956 the then prime minister, Guy Mollet, secretly asked his British counterpart, Anthony Eden, whether a union of the two countries might be possible. When this was politely refused, he tried again: could France join the Commonwealth? There would, declared the prime minister, be “no difficulty over France accepting the headship [of state] of Her Majesty.”

The very idea is now dismissed as “preposterous” by Henri Soutou, a French historian from the Sorbonne, after the documents came to light. “If this had been suggested more recently, Mollet might have found himself in court.”

Yet Mr. Soutou has evidently forgotten that English monarchs did once rule over large tracts of France. From the time of Edward III in the 14th century, all English monarchs styled themselves “King (or Queen) of France.” They dropped the claim only two centuries ago — soon after the French themselves had guillotined Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. (Until the 1960s, the French considered decapitation the most civilized form of execution. Now they call the Iraqis barbaric. … )

It is easy now to dismiss the notion of a restoration of the House of Windsor in France as the idle pipedream of an Anglophile prime minister who hailed from Calais, the last piece of France to be surrendered by the English. Instead, the French did what they usually do: a coup d’état installed General de Gaulle as president with almost dictatorial powers. But who has run the Fifth Republic since the general? A succession of presidents, each more corrupt than the last, have led France into an economic, social, and strategic cul de sac. The largest Jewish community in Europe now despairs of its future in a France that makes common cause with Islamist regimes and where Muslim “youths” have taken over the suburbs.

This week, a man emerged to lead the Gaullists who offers the French their last best chance of a rapprochement with the English-speaking peoples. Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian father and a Jewish mother, is the only French politician to support Israel. In the presidential election this April, he faces Ségolène Royal, the glamorous but deeply conventional candidate of the left-wing establishment. “Sarko” versus “Ségo” will be a close-run contest.

She looks queenly enough and so is her name. But to put Ségolène Royale into the Elysée Palace would be like installing Helen Mirren in Buckingham Palace. It is not enough to act the part, if your only policy is fiddling while Paris burns. It is Mr. Sarkozy who genuinely offers a chance to resume the dialogue with les Anglo-Saxons that was broken off by de Gaulle. And on that dialogue depends the destiny of France.