NOBLE PURSUIT: “Loving Albert (Rupert Friend) was Victoria’s (Emily Blunt) greatest achievement,’ said Blunt.
Victoria’s Real Secret
A new film about Queen Victoria’s abusive childhood and exceptional rise to power reveals the true monarch for the first time, writes Barry Ronge
Movies
Popular history has not been kind to Queen Victoria. The only royal utterance attributed to her is “We are not amused” and she is remembered mainly for being reclusive, obsessively traditional and rather dull.
Real history, however, reminds us that she reigned for 60 years, over the most powerful, rich and vast empire in the history of the England monarchy. She did so with a firm hand and with the love and support of her people.
This elegant, robust biography brushes away the caricatures and tells the story of her dramatic ascent of the throne when she was just 18 years old, and focuses on her idyllic love match to the dashing Prince Albert. It’s a timely and gorgeously told tale that offers a fresh account of Victoria’s dramatic ascent to the throne.
What gives this film the added twist of topicality is that it was the brainchild of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. She shares a producer’s credit on the film, along with the Oscar-winning movie-mogul, Martin Scorsese. It’s an interesting project and it’s not hard to imagine why Fergie became so interested in this story.
She, like the late Princess Diana, was catapulted into the web of protocol and royal ritual when they married the young princes, Andrew and Charles. The two girls constantly overstepped the limits of royal tradition, and both their marriages ended in divorce.
Fergie became fascinated by the complicated early life of Victoria, and the romantic tale of her passionate love for Prince Albert. She gained access to the royal archives and wrote two books on Victoria and Prince Albert. In doing so, she was given unlimited access to Victoria’s diaries at Windsor Castle and that’s where she got the idea for a film.
Fergie passed on all her research to screenwriter Julian Fellowes, who had won an Oscar for writing Gosford Park, and he was highly praised for his scripts for Separate Lies and Vanity Fair.
Fergie was very hands-on during the script phase, but she did not want this film to be construed as her oblique comment about her life in the House of Windsor. “We could
have minimized the history and made a film about a dysfunctional family who just happened to be dukes and duchesses, and kings and queens,” said Fellowes. “But I’m not a believer in modernizing the story too much.
“If you do, you lose the context in which these characters must act and respond. We cannot impose our current perceptions about personal freedom and individual responsibility on characters who lived in a culture totally different from our own. The audience has to understand how limited were the choices open to Victoria. If they don’t recognize that, they will judge all the characters by current attitudes and that would warp the story and its meaning.”
The smart move, said Fellowes, was to find a director who was not awestruck by the weight and density of royal history. “We chose French director Jean Marc Vallee,” said Fellowes, “because his point of view is not steeped in British history. He did not grow up with the ponderous stereotype of Queen Victoria that a British writer might have retained,” said Fellowes.
COURT IN THE ACT: Emily Blunt stars in The Young Victoria.
“Vallee brought a fresh approach and he shoots very emotionally. He had wonderful tactics that were not just pretty, they helped to create the feeling that all eyes were on Victoria, and that she was being watched, all the time, by everyone, and from every single angle. He also shot quickly so that events moved very fast and never felt stuffy or boring.”
The film’s great coup, of course, is the casting of Emily Blunt, one of the most interesting young actresses of this time. She admits that she knew almost nothing about Victyoria. “I had the same clichéd opinion; that she was old, in mourning, sour-faced and repressed,” she said, “and I was amazed by what I found as I started researching the role.”
The story is genuinely dramatic. Victoria was never considered to be a contender to the throne but a bizarre series of deaths and mishaps wiped out all the other direct heirs to the throne of the reigning King William IV. So when Victoria was still a child, her mother, the mercenary, ambitious Duchess of Kent, played in the film by Miranda Richardson, started pushing her daughter into court life.
The ambition of the Duchess of York was not selfless. She was the mistress of an unscrupulous noble-man, Sir John Conroy. They were plotting to ensure that when old King William died, the Duchess of Kent would be appointed Regent until Victoria “came of age”.
“It was a selfish power-grab and Victoria was necessary to their schemes”.
That would have made Sir John Conroy and the Duchess of Kent the virtual rulers of England. It was a nakedly ambitious and selfish power-grab and young Victoria was necessary to their schemes.
The crucial issue was that when Victoria turned 18, she was eligible to ascend the throne and could legitimately reign as Queen of England. Victoria turned 18 years old on May 27 1837. Just one month later, the reigning King William IV died and Victoria was woken at dawn to be told that she was Queen of England, an enormous responsibility for any 18 year old, and a rare thing for a woman in Britain.
Between the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 and Victoria’s ascent to the throne, there had been only one other Queen of England, Queen Anne (1702 – 1714).
Anne’s reign was uneventful, largely because she fell pregnant 18 times during her marriage. She was keen on horses and perhaps the single feature of her royal legacy was that she founded the legendary Ascot race meeting.
England was ruled by just three queens in three centuries. That tradition meant that this 18-year-old girl was up against an arrogant, close-knit, male-dominated government. The powerful men, who managed England at the time, assumed that Victoria would be a pliable, pretty figurehead who would rubber stamp whatever they ordered her to do.
They did not reckon on the fact that Victoria was strong-willed and highly intelligent, and she desperately yearned to be free of her domineering mother.
As Fellowes observed: “If someone had said to me, `Do you know about Queen Victoria?’, I probably would have said, `Yes’, but I soon realized how little I actually knew about her early years. I didn’t realize at all that she had survived all this emotional battering in order to take control of her own life and I was immediately fascinated by that,” he said. “most people don’t know the drama of her succession to the throne, or that she was essentially the victim of an abusive childhood.”
Blunt’s response was similar.
“As I did my research,” she said, “I was amazed by her cruelly isolated childhood. She was never allowed any friends. Anyone who was going to meet her had to be interrogated before they were introduced. She led a secluded life and wasn’t even allowed her own bedroom. She had to sleep in the same room as her mother till she was 18,” said Blunt. “She was never allowed to walk down a staircase on her own. Her hand had to be held by her mother or some devoted servant, for fear that she would fall and die of her wounds.
“Victoria knew that this was not genuine concern for her welfare. It must have been awful, to never have any private space or time, to be always in the company of scheming adults. No wonder she was still playing with dolls when she was 15.
“But when she turned 18, and her mother no longer had any legal control of her life, Victoria made her stubborn burst for freedom. She was finally independent of everyone and wanted to test her strength. It must have been frightening to put a young girl who had lived largely in her imagination, or under the thumb of her grasping mother, in that position.
“The saving grace,” Blunt continued, “was that she fell passionately in love with the handsome Prince Albert, who was a modern thinker, a reformist. He truly loved Victoria and respected that his wife had been crowned queen. Albert was quite happy to be her consort, but he never presumed to act as the king.
“In a sense, loving Albert was Victoria’s greatest achievement. He came in with his very Teutonic ways and tempered some of Victoria’s emotion. They became this very successful couple. But she wouldn’t have been the success she was without him.”
The story of how their romance built an empire makes one of the year’s most elegant movies………
Article transcribed from: SUNDAY TIMES June 28, 2009
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Article by Barry Ronge
