Margaret Thatcher has been a gift to drama from the off. She had a cameo in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, as played by Janet Brown, but early incarnations of her were mainly of the fully satirical kind, from Angela Thorne in the theatrical farce Anyone for Denis? in 1981, which moved to television the following year, to Maureen Lip-manin her 1989 TV portrait of her, Send Her Victorious.

For most of Thatcher’s time in office, the actor most associated with her was the impressionist Steve Nallon, who first coaxed his voice into a brutal version of her honeyed, lisping delivery for Spitting Image in 1984. Maggie the puppet was a wild-eyed dictator who wore mannish suits, used urinals and cosied up to Hitler and Reagan. Her most-quoted scene featured her dining out with the Cabinet: Waitress: Would you like to order, sir? Thatcher: Steak, please. Waitress: How would you like it? Thatcher: Raw. Waitress: And what about the vegetables? Thatcher: Oh, they’ll have the same as me. Nallon went on, into the 1990s, to sport wig and giant handbag as Maggie on TV, notably in The New Statesman.

With Thatcher’s ejection from No 10, portrayals of her noticeably sobered up. Sylvia Syms recreated her in the docudrama Thatcher: The Final Days, in 1991, and had another stab at her in a TV dramatisation of the Scott inquiry, Half the Picture, in 1996. In 2002, perhaps the most sympathetic portrait of her as a statesman was screened – Patricia Hodge’s, in Ian Curteis’s The Falklands Play. “Hodge was outstanding,” said Gareth McLean in The Guardian, “delivering a magnetic performance rather than a caricature of Thatcher. She conveyed emotion and contempt with the slightest flicker of her eyes and doled out death stares, the likes of which could freeze fire at 500yd. And she did what you might have thought impossible – she made you feel for the PM. Now that’s what I call acting.”

Satire got its teeth into her again that year, in Guy Jenkin’s TV comedy Jeffrey Archer: The Truth, with Greta Scacchiin the trademark suits; and in 2006, Anna Massey played Thatcher in the TV drama Pinochet in Suburbia.

Our most iconic PM has also been played – gasp – by foreigners: Germany’s Nicole Heesters, in a docudrama about German unification, in 2000; and Canada’s Elizabeth Shepherd, in 2006’s Shades of Black, a TV yarn about the disgraced businessman Conrad Black. Another unusual piece of casting was a stalwart member of the Socialist Workers Party, Kika Markham, who showed the Iron Lady carving a pheromone-heavy swathe through a Tory grandees’ party in the BBC adaptation of The Line of Beauty in 2006.

Next up will be Lindsay Duncan, who, after falling foul of regime change as Servilia in the mini-series Rome, will play the PM in much the same quandary, in a television film covering her final year in office, 1990, by the producers of The Long Walk to Finchley. They promise “a compelling look into what 11 years of power did to her”. Longer term, a BBC film is in the pipeline focusing on the 17 days leading up to the Falklands war.

Commenting on this project, Nallon underlined the problem faced by all who take on impersonating Thatcher: “What they’ve got to distinguish is the voice she has for parliament and the voice she would have had in private. That would be the difficulty – finding that private Mrs Thatcher that, frankly, the cameras never saw.”

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