‘I’m a Queen Camilla lookalike. One woman cried when she met me’
Royal lookalike Jane Mosse, seen here at the Two Brewers pub in Windsor in 2023 - Arthur Edwards/News Group Newspapers Ltd
The Queen is, today, one of the monarchy’s success stories – a beloved figurehead and a rare source of much-needed positive PR for an otherwise beleaguered firm. It is easy to forget that it was not always this way. In certain corners of the internet, Camilla-haters still run rife, the embers of a decades-long public hostility that once burnt far hotter. Aside from the woman herself, nobody can truly know how it feels to be on the receiving end of that ire.
But Jane Mosse has a pretty good idea. “The abuse started almost instantly,” says the 73-year-old Queen Camilla impersonator, of a Facebook page she set up to promote her 2025 book, Being Camilla: Life as a Royal Lookalike. “I’ve never had that on my personal site, but I didn’t get a single compliment. It was all ‘the marriage breaker’, ‘the rottweiler’, stories about Tampax. It was just horrible. I don’t take it personally, obviously. But you do wonder what it’s all about.”
Mosse occupies an unusual vantage point. As a professional lookalike, her work – and how often it comes along – rises and falls with the fortunes of the Royal family and the shifting tides of public sentiment. Having done this since 2011, she has been uniquely placed to chart Camilla’s rehabilitation in real time, and to feel it, quite literally, on her own face.
Mosse (left) says her work as a professional lookalike rises and falls with the fortunes of the Royal family - Jane Mosse/Anwar Hussein Collection/WireImage
“Attitudes to the Queen began to change when Charles was diagnosed with cancer in 2024,” Mosse explains. “She worked her socks off to try and head up the family and to do his jobs as well as her own. People really warmed to her then.”
The first time Mosse was likened to the now-Queen was while visiting a local tea shop in the 1980s, when someone stopped to tell her she looked just like Camilla Parker Bowles. “I’d never heard of her,” she recalls. A few months later, Mosse saw a book with Prince Charles and her apparent doppelgänger on the cover; she was unconvinced by the resemblance (which, by the way, is uncanny even over Zoom).
“But as Camilla came more into the public eye, I started to get more comments,” says Mosse, recalling how passers-by started taking photos of her, or whispering and nudging one another as if they’d just encountered a celebrity.
The first time Mosse (left) was likened to Queen Camilla was while visiting a local tea shop in the 1980s - Jane Mosse / Shutterstock Editorial
Occasionally, they’d curtsey. “That actually happened this morning in the supermarket,” she laughs. “An Irish woman who then said, ‘You were over here recently, weren’t you?’ [Mosse lives in Guernsey] in reference to a 2024 visit from Charles and Camilla. I just put on my Camilla voice and said, ‘One was.’”
It wasn’t until Mosse considered retiring from her work in special education services that she decided to ring a lookalike agency. “I just wanted to know what these people do,” she recalls. They explained it was mostly going to parties and functions as Camilla, dressing and acting the part as closely as possible for diehard royal fans, many of whom are American. Mosse was reticent. “But then I actually took retirement and went: ‘Oh, why not? It could be a bit of fun.’”
The timing was propitious. In 2011, Royal family fandom was at an all-time high. Charles and Camilla had nurtured their public image. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had not yet been interviewed on Newsnight.
And of course, William and Kate were getting married. “One of my first jobs was dancing up the aisle in wedding garb with other royal lookalikes for T-Mobile,” says Mosse of the now-infamous viral ad. “We had to do it all in one take, which was quite an achievement. It’s still a fun watch.”
Other jobs rolled in quickly. Photo shoots with Alison Jackson, known for her subversive work featuring celebrity lookalikes in compromising scenarios, campaigns for Costa, Kleenex, and The Body Shop, and copious meet-and-greets, which tend to happen more frequently around major royal events such as coronations, weddings, and births. Most of the time, these are paid for by companies and involve taking photographs with royal fans while dressed and behaving as Camilla.
“It’s not much fun,” sighs Mosse. “You spend all night shaking hands and having your photo taken; you’ve got to be polite and smiley, and your feet are killing you. I find it all a bit soulless. But it’s nice to put a smile on people’s faces.” And everyone always knows you’re not really Camilla? “Oh yes. But they still act as if I am.”
Despite the fact that Mosse is several inches shorter and a few years younger than Camilla, not everyone makes the distinction. On top of being curtseyed and bowed at, Mosse has also been called “ma’am” by members of the public. “One Chinese lady I met at the Albert Memorial burst into tears because she thought she really had met the real Camilla,” she recalls.
An uncanny resemblance – Mosse (left) replicating Queen Camilla’s 2013 Wimbledon look - Jane Mosse / John Walton/PA Archive
On her way back to the hotel one evening after work, she hailed a black cab in the pouring rain: “I was absolutely soaked to the skin, with my hair in rat tails. The driver looked at me and said, ‘Shouldn’t you have your bodyguard with you?’”
The attention can be overwhelming. “I can’t go out and about in London; it’s too dodgy, really,” Mosse says. Has she ever felt unsafe? “No,” she pauses thoughtfully. “It’s nothing threatening, but if we do walkabouts in Windsor, the crowds can get really intense.”
Outside of specific corners of Facebook, the Queen is rarely in the firing line these days – Mosse says nobody she meets ever mentions Diana – but obviously, the same can’t quite be said for the rest of the Royal family, although nobody mentions Andrew to her, either.
“It is too dangerous for me to travel on public transport because of the #NotMyKing brigade,” she says, referring to the protests that took place before Charles’s Coronation in 2023 that prompted a resurgence in Republicanism.
Mosse says the attention can be overwhelming: ‘If we do walkabouts in Windsor, the crowds can get really intense’ - Jane Mosse
With this in mind, some opportunities are best turned down. Like the time around the Coronation when Mosse was asked to ride through central London in an open carriage with lookalikes of the King, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
“Harry and Meghan were really at the height of their unpopularity, and I was about to take on the role of Queen, so I needed to have a squeaky clean CV for any future work,” explains Mosse. “And I thought this has got the potential to go horribly wrong.” Did they find someone else? She smiles wryly: “They got the previous Camilla out of retirement.”
The most bizarre opportunities are often the most fun. In 2018, Mosse was asked to be in a Bollywood film shot outside Blenheim Palace, which involved hours of singing and dancing with a cast of thousands. “It was a lot more than I bargained for,” she recalls. “At one point, I was asked to stand with my arms along the back of a vintage car, staring ‘coyly’ at a lookalike Charles. That was a bit odd.”
Mosse had a brief appearance in Bollywood film Housefull 4, during a song titled Ek Chumma (which means ‘a kiss’ in English)
There have been more upsetting moments, too. Mosse was once asked to visit a care home as Camilla, and played the part while meeting various elderly residents. “I ended up in a room with a gentleman who was near the end of his life and really did think I was her,” says Mosse. “It was so emotional. Yes, you’re deceiving somebody. But at the same time, you think, if it brought that person joy… it’s a difficult one. But this is the sort of situation that Queen Camilla herself is dealing with all the time, and she does it splendidly.”
The royal lookalike community is tight-knit (“we often go to the pub together after a job”), which can be useful when someone needs tips on where to source certain items. “The Queen Elizabeth II lookalike tipped me off about a jeweller in London called Juliette Designs that did all the jewellery for The Crown, so they do all my jewellery,” says Mosse, who sources most of her Camilla costumes on eBay. “But of course, when I became Queen, I had to up my game, so I’ve spent money on getting various bits right.” The hair, she says, is key: “It has to be flicky, flicky.”
Mosse, pictured with Queen Elizabeth II lookalike Mary Reynolds, says the royal lookalike community is tight-knit - Jane Mosse
Apart from the Coronation, things have been quiet for all the royal lookalikes in recent years; Mosse is much more selective with the jobs she accepts. “There hasn’t been a lot of work,” she says. “If there is anything, it tends to be meet and greets, and it’s often Kate and Wills who are wanted. I’m in the position now where I’ll only do something if it’s going to be really good fun, or if somebody wants to pay me silly money.”
Mosse has never met the Queen, though she has been close, having stood in the crowd during her 2024 state visit to Guernsey; and on a 2012 visit, Charles looked right at her, almost as if he’d seen a ghost. The prospect of an actual meeting with the Queen, though, is daunting.
“I think I’d be stuck for words,” says Mosse. “People say it’s like having a twin that you’ve never actually met. I mean, what do you say? I think she’d take it in good humour, though.”
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