We are not amused

Emily Blunt was determined to get the part of Queen Victoria and there is a strong chemistry with Rupert Friend (Prince Albert). Photo / Supplied by Roadshow

With his tweed jacket and tweedier accent you might imagine Julian Fellowes to be a typically buttoned-up Brit.

Yet the effusive Oscar-winning screenwriter (for Gosford Park) and sometime actor possesses such a wry wit and is such a great raconteur that he makes everything seem fascinating.

Our subject today is Queen Victoria, about whose early life little is known. "We know about the grief, we know about the widowhood and we know about her 40 years as a fat woman with a handkerchief on her head in Scotland," Fellowes muses, "but what we don't know about is the marriage and the love."

Fellowes, 60, who has long been fascinated with Britain's longest-reigning monarch, has written the screenplay for The Young Victoria, a very British film directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, a Canadian recruited to give the story a modern edge.

The project came about after Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson had written two coffee table books on Victoria and enlisted Graham King and Martin Scorsese as producers.

Initially Fellowes was hired to tell of the romance between the young Queen (Emily Blunt) and Prince Albert (Rupert Friend), yet he wanted to broaden it out, and to relate how Victoria's achievements were all the more remarkable because of her horrid upbringing, when she was shielded by her overbearing mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) in Kensington Palace.

"She was virtually under house arrest," recounts Fellowes. "Her mother didn't let her do anything, and John Conroy [her mum's accountant and possible lover] was manipulating both of them. Yet following the death of King William [Jim Broadbent] and becoming queen shortly after her 18th birthday, she moved into Buckingham Palace and shoved her mum into another apartment. This shows the kind of independent spirit and strength she had. It was extraordinary how she took the reins from day one."

Certainly her sudden ascent to become one of the most famous women in the world is something that's interesting for the current moment. "We tend to think that celebrity solves everything", Fellowes says. "But it was easier to cope with then, because as a culture they had more of a concept of self-discipline."

Since she was already the Queen of England, Victoria's courtship with her first cousin, the German-speaking Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was a very formal affair. In fact much of it was conducted via letters, and this is one of the few occasions where Fellowes tampered with history by having them meet.

"When I brought him over for the coronation in 1838 I didn't feel it was changing events." Most controversially, in another scene Fellowes had Albert being shot as he protected the pregnant Queen, when in fact the assassin missed.

"I wanted to emphasise Albert's great bravery and the importance of that moment," he explains, "because almost immediately Victoria had the desks put together and they truly became a team."

A great believer in heightening the drama, Fellowes revels in the fact that once she married Albert, Victoria proved lusty in the boudoir.

"She was a great believer in," he pauses, "I hesitate to say sex, because it's misquotable, as she believed in morals very much, she believed in marriage and that happy marriages were based on good physical relationships. She became quite ill after having her ninth child, Beatrice, and when her doctor said, 'No pregnancy for a year', and she said nothing, he asked her, 'Do you understand?' To which she replied, 'Perfectly doctor, no more fun in bed!' That was who she was."

Victoria had been married almost 22 years when Albert died at the age of 41.

"She thought she was in the middle of a very happy, successful marriage and suddenly he was dead from typhoid in 10 days," explains Fellowes. In a letter to her eldest daughter, the German Crown Princess [also named Victoria] she wrote : 'I can manage the days, oh but the nights, oh the nights!"'

Victoria was devastated.

"Prince Albert wasn't just her husband and lover, he was her best friend, her adviser, her help-meet, her brother, her sister, her everything.

"She lost him 25 years before she expected and she went into retirement for about seven years to recover, though she still kept a handle on things."

For 39 years Victoria wore black in honour of her husband until her own death in 1901. But of course there was another man. In her coffin, as per her own instructions, she was laid to rest holding a lock of Albert's hair and his picture in one hand, while in the other she had the picture and lock of hair of John Brown, her manservant and possibly her lover in her later years.

While that's another story and of course another movie, Mrs Brown, starring Judi Dench, Fellowes has his own take on this.

"Had they married as has been speculated - the diaries of her doctor's daughter state that they did - then they were indeed lovers.

"However, if they didn't marry, Victoria would never have allowed that to happen. That was the code to which she had always adhered and she wasn't about to change."

As for the casting of Blunt, Fellowes says the British actress captures Victoria's mix of vulnerability and strength.

"Emily was determined to get the part and she was absolutely right.

"She and Rupert may be surrounded by heavyweight actors - Richardson, Broadbent and Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne - but it's their movie, it's their love story and I think they've got a terrific chemistry between them. You really feel they are in love with each other."

Blunt also captures a sense of the woman who achieved so much, says Fellowes. Still, it does seem strange that this is also the woman who would usher in prudish Victorian England, and interestingly it all began after Albert's death.

"She believed that the undisciplined hedonism of the 18th century had plunged western Europe into chaos," Fellowes explains.

"So she generated a re-moralisation of society which by the 1870s had become stiff and formalised. But she was not a stiff or formal person herself. She was quite a free thinker.

"Prince Albert was an intellectual and a lot of his friends were scientists and inventors. He was interested in social reform, working-class housing and general innovation. He was not afraid of the future.

"Queen Victoria also loved gadgetry. She wanted to try the telephone as soon as it was invented, she was one of the first people to ride on a train, she was interested in electricity.

"She wanted the monarchy to be part of a forward-thinking society. She was in many ways a modern woman."

LOWDOWN

Who: Julian Fellowes, English screenwriter
What: The Young Victoria, movie about the 19th century monarch's ascent to the throne and marriage to Prince Albert, starring Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend.
When: Opens at cinemas September 3. It was extraordinary how [Victoria] took the reins from day one.