Cultural Depictions of Queen Victoria - Film

Film

On screen, Victoria has been portrayed by:

• Rose Tapley in the silent short The Victoria Cross (1912)
• Louie Henri in the silent film Disraeli (1916)
• Blanche Graham in the silent film Livingstone (1925), the story of David Livingstone
• Julia Faye in the silent film The Yankee Clipper (1927)
• Marion Drada in the silent film Balaclava (1928)
• Margaret Mann in Disraeli (1929)
• Madeleine Ozeray in the German French-language musical La Guerre des valses (1933)
• Hanna Waag in the German film Walzerkrieg (1933)
• Pamela Stanley in David Livingstone (1936) and Marigold (1938), based on the play by Charles Garvice, Allen Harker and F. Prior
• Fay Holden in The White Angel (1936), the story of Florence Nightingale
• Yvette Pienne in the French comedy Pearls of the Crown (1937)
• Viva Tattersall in Souls at Sea (1937)
• Anna Neagle in the biopics Victoria the Great (1937) and Sixty Glorious Years (1938)
• Beryl Mercer in The Little Princess (1939), based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939)
• Fay Compton in The Prime Minister (1941), about Benjamin Disraeli, and Journey to Midnight (1968)
• Evelyn Beresford in Buffalo Bill (1944) and the musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
• Pamela Brown in Alice in Wonderland (1949), in which she also played the Queen of Hearts
• Irene Dunne in The Mudlark (1950), based on the novel by Theodore Bonnet
• Helena Pickard in The Lady with the Lamp (1951), based on the play by Reginald Berkeley about Florence Nightingale
• Muriel Aked in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953)
• Sybil Thorndike in Melba (1953), the story of soprano Nellie Melba
• Romy Schneider in the West German biopic Mädchenjahre einer Königin (1954), which features a highly fictionalised story about Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne and marriage to Prince Albert
• Avis Bunnage in the comedy The Wrong Box (1966)
• Barbara Carroll in the Italian film Zorro alla corte d'Inghilterra (1969), in which Zorro visits the British Court
• Mollie Maureen in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
• Peter Sellers in The Great McGonagall (1974), a comic biopic of William McGonagall
• Susan Field in the spoof The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)
• John Dalby in the musical fantasy Stories from a Flying Trunk (1979)
• Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress
• Debra Beaumont in the Chinese film The Opium War (1997)
• Liz Moscrop in From Hell (2001), based on the graphic novel
• Gemma Jones in Shanghai Knights (2003)
• Tress MacNeille (voice) in the animated short Van Helsing: The London Assignment (2004)
• Kathy Bates in Around the World in 80 Days (2004), based on the novel by Jules Verne
• Emily Blunt in The Young Victoria (2009), with Michaela Brooks playing Victoria as a girl
• Imelda Staunton voices Victoria as the primary antagonist in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012).

She also makes appearances in Around the World in Eighty Days (in which a newspaper detailing Phileas Fogg's progress is taken to the Queen, and what is presumably the royal hand is seen eagerly taking it up), and in the 2004 anime movie Steamboy, inaugurating The Great Exhibition. The 1941 Nazi film Ohm Krüger notoriously portrays her as a whisky-soaked drunk. Her daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, reads a letter from Victoria to London Hospital governors, showing her concern for John Merrick, in the 1980 film The Elephant Man.