“I feel as if I’m in A Star Is Born,” Julian Fellowes confessed uneasily when he finally made it to the Oscar podium to collect his reward for Gosford Park—the category being Best Original Screenplay of 2002—“and any moment Norman Maine will come up and whack me in the mouth.”

No such misfortune. In fact, only good fortune has followed Fellowes since then, and all sorts of different doors have opened to him.

“They were all opened by that award, to be honest,” he admits with spade-calling, straight-from-the-shoulder directness. “The wonderful thing about King Oscar is he makes all things possible, although a lot of the time you do keep thinking, ‘Moi’?”

In the six years since his Oscar win, Fellowes’ life—and profession—have changed drastically. At the time he did his liberating, prize-winning work, he was in Scotland toiling in front of the cameras on what is generally regarded as his best-known outing in 30 years of acting—Kilwillie, a Scottish laird in the BBC series “Monarch of the Glen.” Even after the Oscar, he returned to the role to finish off Season Four.

Save for his intros to a couple of documentary series and a three-season game-show, Fellowes is rarely seen anymore—but he is heard quite a lot as a writer: two novels (Snobs and the just-out Past Imperfect), the book for a musical that hit big on the West End and Broadway (Mary Poppins) and a couple of screen adaptations he directed (Separate Lies and the December-due From Time to Time). Period pieces, from 2004’s Vanity Fair to the embryonic Emma and Nelson, are a specialty for him.


The Young Victoria, helmed by the French-Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée and released by new distrib Apparition, is Fellowes’ latest stately carriage ride through lace-doily English life. It may not be The Adventures of Vicki, Teen Queen—even with the sparky, spicy, spiky Emily Blunt in charge of the title role—but it’s a refreshing touch-up to our mental portraiture of Queen Victoria, forever lodged in our mind’s eye as a dumpy, frumpy, frowning dowager in widow’s weeds with a hanky on her head. But it seems—before all that historical dust set in and settled—she was a headstrong, passionate young woman who came charging out of the regal starting-gate at age 18 and ruled Britain longer than any other monarch.

“So far,” Fellowes qualifies. “The present queen has a pretty good shot at topping that. Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901—64 years. Elizabeth has to get to 2016.”

Someone with lingering “important connections,” once of that royal family—Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, Duchess of York—is this film’s true catalyst. “She had the original idea of making a film about Victoria and Albert when they were young,” Fellowes says, giving the Duchess her due. “Her point was everyone knew about the widow, but nobody knew about the wife. All we knew was her endless grief after his death, but nobody knew anything about the love. I think that was a wonderful point, actually. Really, from her bringing the idea to Graham King, that’s how it all started.”

Graham King is a producing partner of Martin Scorsese, and, via that one degree of separation, Scorsese wound up improbably sharing producing credit with “Fergie.”

“I got the telephone call from Graham’s office, asking if it was something that I might be interested in doing,” Fellowes remembers. “I was very keen to do it because I had developed, five years before, a real interest in her young life, which nobody knew about. I knew there was a film in it, so I flew to New York and met Scorsese on the set of The Departed, which was rather thrilling. Then we all decided to go forward.”

But first, the focus of the film needed fine-tuning. Instead of strictly following the love story of Victoria and her Germanic first cousin, Albert (Rupert Friend), Fellowes argued successfully and convincingly that the story should begin before her reign.

It seems Victoria grew up a prisoner of protocol, not even permitted to walk up and down stairs without a maid holding her hand. This was the oppressive doing of her overweening mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), herself under the spell of an ambitious politician, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). Both of them browbeat Victoria to set up a Regency to rule for her, but she resisted, and, when she attained her majority at 18—then the throne after the death of her uncle, William IV (Jim Broadbent)—she gave them the royal gate, her mother more gradually.



Naturally, such a backstory would make a girl weary of political animals, and that could explain why her charming but cunning chief adviser, Lord Melbourne, entered the picture as “the other man” (even when cast younger than was actually the case with Paul Bettany). She had already lost her heart to the dashingly handsome Albert.

Their entire courtship, from his initial visit to Kensington Palace in 1836 to the arranged-marriage proposal in 1839, consisted entirely of long-distance correspondence—not the most felicitous means of cinematic communication.

Consequently, Fellowes took it upon himself to sneak Albert into Victoria’s coronation. “There is a moment in filmmaking where you have to realize you are making a movie and you just feel you cannot have a character opening one more envelope,” he admits. “Since a lot of princes did come over for the coronation, that seemed to be a legitimate reason for Albert to come over as well. What we did was turn their letters into dialogue. When they have a conversation about housing and reform—all of that is in his letters to her. Prince Albert’s interest in the working man, his attempts to improve drainage and sewage—that was quite pronounced, and, of course, all of this was a tremendous eye-opener for Victoria. It was something new for her, not just giving a shilling to a poor beggar by the side of the street. This was somebody who was really thinking about improving society.”

Creating a major love story out of one visit and three years of letters would tax most screenwriters, but Fellowes is the fellow who proposed marriage 20 minutes after he met his wife-to-be, and they have been together 20 years—the same as Victoria and Albert. “It took 19 minutes to get my nerve up,” he allows. “It’s the only psychic moment in my life. I was introduced to her, and I knew I was going to marry her.”

Emma Joy Kitchener Fellowes is a Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Michael of Kent and great-great-niece of the first Earl Kitchener. Fellowes himself is of royal (film) stock, having played—twice on TV—George IV, “once in The Scarlet Pimpernel with Anthony Andrews and then later in the ‘Sharpe’s Regiment’ series. That’s not the mad King George that Nigel Hawthorne played—it’s his son, the one that Rupert Everett played in the movie.” Fellowes has also had a taste of military power—serving as Minister of Defense to Pierce Brosnan’s 007 in Tomorrow Never Dies—but his bid for Hollywood’s attention as an actor in the early ’80s got him no farther than runner-up replacement for Tattoo on “Fantasy Island.” “Hervé Villechaize was leaving the series, and they were looking for someone to fill that slot,” he recalls. “I did about 15 tests, and I came in second [to Christopher Hewett]. Of course, at the time, I was terribly disappointed—but now, perhaps, I’m rather relieved that this didn’t happen.”

Fellowes’ sharp column right into a whole new profession—at the not-so-tender age of 53!—is all the more remarkable when one considers that this is all based on a screenplay that has never been filmed: The Eustace Diamonds, an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel for Bob Balaban. The actor-turning-producer was also working with director Robert Altman on another film and suddenly thought Fellowes would be a fine fit for the material at hand—an English country estate complicated by a corpse on the premises—so “he rang me and said, ‘Would you be interested in writing a film for Robert Altman?’ Obviously, I would be, so I then rushed out and got myself every Altman movie that the video store had, and I gave myself a sort of two-day ‘Altman fest.’ At the end of it, I realized that the structure would have to be this multi-arch, multi-storied, multi-narrative kind of framework.

“But I felt Altman’s best movies—for me, The Player—are the ones that are resolved, where there is a completion of the story. Some of his films are never resolved, but some are, and I strove to have a film that was, if you like, complete. Then I got on the telephone with him and Bob, and I was asked to send in some character sketches, some ideas for these different characters. Oddly enough, quite a lot of them ended up in the final film—you know, the drunken butler who was a conscientious objector.

“Then I was commissioned to write the first draft, which I did. This all started in January of 2000, and finally in July I sent it in. And then they asked me to fly out to California to work with Altman for a few days, and that was the first moment that I really began to wonder if it could happen because, up to that point, I just thought, ‘This seems too much like the plot of a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical.’”

And Fellowes has been actively screenwriting from that point on. Most of it is done in the tranquil, rolling green hills of North England—“Thomas Hardy Country”—where director John Schlesinger filmed 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

“We have a house down in Dorchester—that’s absolutely in the middle of Hardy Country—and we go quite often to the house which was Julie Christie’s house in the film. Some friends of ours live there, and we go there for dinner and lunch often.”

If there have been any royal rumblings over The Young Victoria, they have yet to penetrate his township. “I simply don’t know if any of the royals have seen the film. I’m sure, if they want to, they have. But I wouldn’t know about that because they are always very careful never to either condemn or endorse anything. I don’t think they would be offended. I think it’s a very sweet story about two people who were rather marvelously right for their job. They were two sides of the same coin. I think some people—if they choose their partner really well—become more than they would have been without that partner, and I think those two were that. I think Prince Albert learned from his wife. She was much better at people than he was. She was a much more instinctive, much more passionate person than he was, but he was tremendously meticulous, very responsible, tremendously moral, tremendously interested in the whole kind of missionary aspect of monarchy. And, together, their qualities combined, and they really were an immensely powerful pair.

“Victoria was a very, very successful queen. When she inherited the throne, it wasn’t particularly popular, and by the end of the reign, she had come to embody Britain. Every now and then, heredity selection gets it right, and it certainly did in her case.”