Themes: Crowned Heads, Rise To Power, Foibles of Marriage
Release Year: 2001
Country: UK
Run Time: 200 minutes
Plot
While 18-year-old Victoria (Victoria Hamilton) struggles to escape the rule of her domineering mother (Penelope Wilton), King William IV dies and the teenager assumes the throne as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and empress of India. With the help of sympathetic advisers and her lady-in-waiting, Baroness Lehzen (Diana Rigg), Victoria asserts herself, relocating her mother's living quarters and dismissing her mother's overbearing supporter, Sir John Conroy (Patrick Malahide). She then reluctantly agrees to invite her first cousin, Albert (Jonathan Firth), prince-consort of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Germany, to the royal household as a possible match for her. Remembering him from childhood, she thinks him a bore. But when grown-up Albert arrives, Victoria falls madly in love with him. After they marry, Victoria must counter troublemaking political schemers on the one hand while attempting to assuage a disenchanted Albert on the other. The problem is that he has nothing to do. He is merely an ornament, albeit a cherished one. He cannot even command a servant to clean a fireplace. However, when the administration of the queen's friend and adviser Prime Minister Melbourne (Nigel Hawthorne) collapses, Albert becomes Victoria's partner in government as well as in marriage. In time, she realizes that her husband is really a co-ruler: "A king," she says, "in everything but name." Together, they reign over their empire -- and their brood of nine children. It is Albert's task to supervise the country's Great Exhibition of 1851 to promote British pride, commerce, and industry. But his untiring efforts to make the exhibit a success take their toll on him, and he falls ill. However, he tenaciously clings to life -- and Victoria -- and lives another decade before typhoid fever claims him in 1862, leaving behind a distraught Victoria and a monarchy he helped rescue. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide
Review
After presenting highly acclaimed adaptations of fictional works such as Pride and Prejudice and Lorna Doone, A&E debuted this docudrama in 2001 -- and again earned favorable reviews. The production centers on the romance and marriage of the last of the English Hanover monarchs, Victoria (1819-1901), Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and empress of India, and her first cousin, Albert (1819-1861), prince-consort of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in Germany. The script skillfully intertwines the main plot, the love affair of Victoria and Albert, with subplots about political and familial discord that threaten to undermine Victoria's ability to choose a husband and rule independently. Victoria Hamilton and Jonathan Firth are delightful as Victoria and Albert. Portraying the royal couple as reserved and dignified but with minds of their own, they animate the film with memorable scenes, in particular one in which they play a lively piano duet and another in which diffident Victoria proposes to diffident Albert. Peter Ustinov is superb as crotchety King William IV, who dotes on his appealing niece and heir presumptive, Victoria, and vilifies her overbearing shrew of a mother (Penelope Wilton). The dinner scene, in which attendants carry the ailing king through a receiving line, serves up an épée de combat of verbal thrusts and parries that foretell hard times ahead for young Victoria. Then the king has the decency to die to allow Victoria to assume the throne, discover herself, and work against her nefarious mother and the scheming Sir John Conroy (Patrick Malahide). The plot thickens into a robust soup when, after the wedding, Albert discovers he has no purpose, no duties, and throws a royal tantrum while Victoria's protective lady-in-waiting, Baroness Lehzen (Diana Rigg), smiles wryly. Nigel Hawthorne is wonderful as the queen's sympathetic prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who coaxes common sense and giggles from the young queen, and David Suchet is equally engaging as young Victoria's mentor, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, M.D. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide
