More Than 'The Iron Lady': Margaret Thatcher, Cultural Icon "The lady's not for turning," Margaret Thatcher famously said in an early speech. But almost from the moment she moved into 10 Downing Street in 1979, Mrs. Thatcher, who died on Monday at 87, was most definitely for filming, recording, and generally excoriating by British artists and writers who saw a rich target in her stiff-necked conservative politics and stiffer coiffure. From the beginning, some of the toughest depictions came from musicians. Opposition to her free-market ideology infused albums like Gang of Four's 1979 "Entertainment!" and, in the same year, the Clash EP "Cost of Living," the cover of which Joe Strummer reportedly wanted to include a collage featuring Mrs. Thatcher's face and a swastika. Robyn Hitchcock, in the song "Brenda's Iron Sledge" (1981), imagined Thatcher's Britain as a surreal dog-sled ride to hell. The Beat's "Stand Down Margaret" (1980) called on her to resign. In 1985 Billy Bragg, Paul Weller, Kirsty McColl and other musicians founded Red Wedge, a collective aimed at forcing her to do just that. When that effort failed, some turned to dark fantasies. In "Margaret on the Guillotine" (1988), Morrissey trilled "People like you/Make me feel so tired/ When will you die?" Elvis Costello, in "Tramp the Dirt Down" (1989), promised "When they finally put you in the ground/I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down." Literary depictions were hardly kinder. The Thatcher-era ethos was skewered in novels like Martin Amis's "Money," Jonathan Coe's "What a Carve-Up!" and Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" (where she was mocked as "Mrs. Torture"). Other writers took more direct aim at the lady herself. Angela Carter once mocked her "braying tones" as reminiscent "not of real toffs but Wodehouse aunts." In Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel, "The Line of Beauty," she shows up at an upper-class country-house party "looking like a country and western singer." Sometimes she hit back. In his memoir, "Hitch 22," Christopher Hitchens (who once called himself "sexually but not politically" attracted to her) gleefully recalled the time he invited her to spank him with her parliamentary-order papers after a fight about Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. "As she walked away," Mr. Hitchens noted, "she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words "Naughty boy!" " On screen Mrs. Thatcher has been given a mocking cameo in the James Bond film "For Your Eyes Only" (1981), repeated drubbings on the satirical television show "Spitting Image," a Michael Palin send-up on "Saturday Night Live," and the full Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady," whose grudgingly admiring tenor recalled Francois Mitterrand's remark: "She has the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." Onstage Mrs. Thatcher's presence was felt in the West End as early as 1981, when she and her husband, Denis, once spent an awkward evening at the farce "Anyone for Denis?" She received acid portrayals in plays by Alan Ayckbourn, David Hare and Peter Morgan, whose new play, "The Audience," about Queen Elizabeth II's meetings with her prime ministers, has drawn some criticism for its depiction of Mrs. Thatcher as a combative, racial-epithet-slinging vulgarian at frequent odds with the queen. ("What is it about the left that it attracts so many contemptible, vicious and anti-social people these days?" Lord Tebbit, one of her former cabinet ministers, said to The Telegraph.) The news of her death hardly seems to be softening the portrayals. Tonight's performance of "Billy Elliot," according to a press representative, will include the usual rendition of "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher," which includes the verse "We'll all celebrate/"Cause it's one day closer to your death." And James Graham, the author of "This House," onstage at the Olivier Theater in London, said on Twitter that he would not be making any changes for tonight's performance of the play - a drama about the House of Commons set during the economic hard times of the 1970s that ends, forbodingly, with Mrs. Thatcher's election. As usual, in the play's closing moments, actors playing 30 members of Parliament who served with her "or against her" will be seated onstage, Mr. Graham noted. "What is theater for," he said, "if not for nights like tonight?" An earlier version of this post misquoted a description from Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty." In the novel Mrs. Thatcher is described as looking like a "country and western singer," not a "country house singer."