O For Oscar, B For British

New Delhi: Will the Brits take a royal bow at the Oscars this year? It won't be the first time. The Americans at the Academy have long had a soft spot for The Houses of Windsor and Tudor.

Up for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress this year are Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, who play Queen Elizabeth II's mum and dad. If they win, they will have been preceded by Charles Laughton who took home Best Actor for playing the much married monarch in The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1931 and Judi Dench, Best Supporting Actress for playing Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I, in Shakespeare In Love in 1999. In the same year, Cate Blanchett was nominated for Best Actress for playing the same queen as Judi Dench, in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth. She lost to American Gwyneth Paltrow who played the object of the Bard's affections in Shakespeare In Love. Helen Mirren also scored Best Actress for playing the reigning monarch in The Queen in 2007.

And those were just the wins. Helen Mirren is the second British actor to be nominated for playing more than one Royal - her win for playing Elizabeth II followed her Best Supporting Actress nomination for playing Queen Charlotte in The Madness Of King George in 1995. Before Mirren, there was Sir Laurence Olivier, nominated twice for playing Henry V and Richard III before finally winning as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

If The King's Speech deals with speech therapy, so did Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. Playing Eliza Doolittle brought in Best Actress nomination for Wendy Hiller in 1939 and Best Supporting Actor for Stanley Holloway who played papa Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Rex Harrison won Best Actor as the often-exasperating Professor Higgins. Audrey Hepburn was left nominationless, in one of the biggest snubs in the history of the Oscars, because her singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon

Despite the Eliza-Audrey disappointment, My Fair Lady led the English attack in 1965, winning a total of 8 Oscars. Julie Andrews also won Best Actress for playing the very British and very magical Mary Poppins. Peter Ustinov completed the British colonization of The Academy with a Best Supporting Actor win for Topkapi.

British literature has been well read at the Oscars, with Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens being the favourite authors. Will Shakespeare himself, or a partly fictional version of him, was destiny's child at the 1999 awards with Shakespeare in Love taking 7 golden men in one fell swoop - though there was no prize for the man playing The Bard himself. Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Othello have all been filmed and loved by the Academy. Sir Laurence Olivier, usual Shakespearian suspect, was nominated 9 times for Best Actor. Four of these were for playing Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet and Othello. Two more came from paying characters from British literature - Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and Max De Winter in Rebecca.

Jane Austen's Oscar book club has included Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Emma Thompson, the only British actor to have won an award other than for acting, scored both her golden men for literary films. She won Best Actress for Howards End - the film adaption of E M Forster's novel - in 1993 and Best Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility in 1996. Pride and Prejudice was nominated in four categories in 2006, including a Best Actress nod for Keira Knightley, but ended up taking no Oscars back to England.

Charles Dickens, on the other hand, had better luck with Oliver! winning 5 awards in 1969, including Best Picture and Best Director for Briton Carol Reed.

This year, the Brits are represented by The King's Speech hopefuls, among them Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, as well as Welsh Christian Bale, vying with Rush for Best Supporting Actor for The Fighter.

A stiff upper lip at Oscar 2011? Watch this space.