You need look no further than “The Queen” — Helen Mirren’s Oscar-winning turn as Queen Elizabeth — to see how reputations can be burnished. After Princess Diana’s death in 1997, the royals were seen as bloodless ice cubes, and there were questions about the viability of the monarchy. But when the sympathetic movie came out in 2006, the queen’s popularity soared. Peter Morgan, the British screenwriter of “The Queen,” acknowledges he played “a small part” in that.

“When people sobered up from the week after Diana’s death, a lot of them felt pretty silly,” he told me. “The royal family behaved badly, but we behaved worse, millions of people who knew nothing about Diana holding her up as a patron saint.

“The surprise in the movie was, oh, the queen is quite an emotional woman. We connected to her terrible loneliness, a privileged person living in vast houses, a woman who was making mistakes, getting lost, missing steps, getting confused. It was endearing.”

Morgan, who rooted for Hillary against Barack Obama in 2008 and still feels “pretty sure she’d be a great president,” doesn’t think there’s much potential for dramatically revising her image.

“The horse has bolted in terms of original thought,” he said. “You can only further consolidate stuff we already know.”