No tears for Frears
British director Stephen Frears has directed Dame Judi Dench five times since an episode of BBC2 Playhouse in 1981. Back then she was just Judi, having been named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1988.
Frears says it was “pretty easy” to work with the 82-year-old in his latest film, the witty historical biopic Victoria & Abdul, about the friendship between Queen Victoria and a young Indian clerk. He then amends that to “easypeasy.”
“She gets better and better, and wiser and wiser as a woman,” says the director, in Toronto for the film’s Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s all to do with her as a person. I mean, she’s a brilliant actress, but she herself becomes just more and more interesting, and she’s clearly very happy at the moment.”
Dench famously played Victoria once before, in the 1997 film Mrs. Brown, about the Queen’s close friendship with a servant named John Brown. That lasted from the mid-1860s — her husband had died in 1861 — until Brown’s death in 1883.
Only recently has it become known that Victoria then grew close to a clerk named Abdul Karim, played in the movie by Indian actor Ali Fazal. They met in 1887 during her golden jubilee, when he was just 24, and remained close until her death in 1902.
“She needed consolation,” Frears says of Victoria. “She was clearly very unhappy. And the two people she chose — a working-class Scotsman and this boy from the other side of the world — ” he chuckles. “Quite original choices.”
Despite directing this film and 2006’s The Queen, which resulted in an Oscar for Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Elizabeth II, Frears doesn’t hide his own republican leanings. “I don’t actually approve of it,” he says of the monarchy. “I think it’s all quite ridiculous. One of the things I like about this film is how ridiculous the court was, how ridiculous empire was. The whole thing was sort of idiotic. And (Victoria) was a prisoner of it all.”
But for Frears, the story outweighed any personal politics. “It was a very very good script,” he says of the screenplay by Lee Hall. “It’s like a soufflé, this script, this story that nobody knew.” And he said he’d direct only if Dench played the queen. “Perhaps I’m being unfair or narrow-minded, but I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it.”