REGAL SMILE

Ali Fazal and Dame Judi Dench were all smiles last night at the premiere of Victoria & Abdul which was staged in London. Dame Judi’s new film charts the relationship between the monarch and Abdul Karim, an Indian man who became her servant and teacher.

DAME JUDI Dench says she owes her film career to Queen Victoria.

Speaking last night at the premiere of her new film Victoria & Abdul, she said she had “no film career to speak of ” before playing the monarch in the 1997 drama Mrs Brown, which gained her the first of her seven Academy Awards nominations.

She said revisiting playing Victoria and working again with Frears – who directed her to an Oscar nomination in Philomena – was “an irresistible proposition”.

York-born Dame Judi’s two films about Victoria both centre on close relationships the widowed monarch struck with men who were her servants.

In Mrs Brown it was Scottish outdoorsman John Brown; in Victoria & Abdul it is Karim (played by Indian actor Ali Fazal), a young man brought to Britain to present the monarch with a gift for her Golden Jubilee in 1887.

The film depicts the queen’s growing fascination with India, then part of the vast British empire. Victoria filled one of her homes with Indian artworks and under Karim’s tutelage even learned Urdu.

The film – based largely on real events – depicts a royal court and British government horrified at the monarch’s growing relationship with an Indian Muslim.

Describing her instant chemistry with Ali, Dame Judi confessed to the Radio Times this week there was “no acting at all required”.

PICTURES: FOCUS FEATURES ROYAL ROLE: Dame Judi Dench in scenes from the film Victoria & Abdul; such was her chemistry with co-star Ali Fazal, she said there was ‘no acting at all required’.