Queen Victoria unexpectedly met the man of her late-life dreams at her Golden Jubilee, in 1887. She was long widowed after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 and bored out of her mind with public appearances. She was also eating more rich desserts than her royal colon could smoothly process at age 68. But she still had an eye for a handsome guy. In the new film “Victoria & Abdul,” the ruler of the British Empire, played by Judi Dench, is seen receiving gifts from her many subjects at a banquet when one young man makes her put down her dessert spoon.
He is Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), the Agra-born son of a clerk who is waiting tables at the extravaganza. After presenting a gift to Victoria, who is also Empress of India, the turbaned Abdul, then 24, bends down and kisses her royal shoe.
That’s one way to get an old lady’s attention.
In no time, the queen invites Abdul to her private rooms at Buckingham Palace, where she asks him to teach her to write and speak Urdu. When she designates him to be her “Munshi” (teacher) and prominently includes him in her entourage, teacups tremble among the scandalized palace staff.
“She’s disobeying order and behaving badly,” Dench tells The Post from Toronto, where the Stephen Frears’ film was being screened at the annual film festival. Strong-minded since ascending the throne in 1837 at the outrageous age of 18, the queen kept her own counsel, even calling her eldest son, Bertie (Eddie Izzard), “hopeless.”
“She didn’t have that relationship of comfort with her children or grandchildren,” says Dench, 82.
With his charm and knowledge of Indian culture, Abdul easily and eagerly filled the void. “He was just able to talk to her,” Dench says. “He was very open and [Victoria] very obviously wanted to know about the Koran.” They remained friends for 14 years, till Victoria’s death in 1901.
While Victoria’s life and times have been chronicled by scholars and filmmakers, almost nothing was known about Abdul. Shrabani Basu, who wrote the book that inspired the film, tracked him from Windsor Castle in London to Pakistan, where Abdul and his wife moved in 1947, after the partition of India and Pakistan, in search of the few bits of correspondence that survived when Bertie assumed the thrown as Edward VII.
“I finally found the family and Karim’s journal in Karachi,” says Basu, who learned about his childhood, found a letter from the queen that he copied into the journal and discovered that he had wanted to return to India, but Victoria had asked him to stay.
The journals also showed his respect for the queen, Basu says, adding that she stood by him when others tried to bring him down.
Fazal, 30, says Abdul’s youth and naivete worked in his favor. “He was learned and poetic enough to have these conversations” with a monarch, so he took full advantage.
As their relationship flourished, the queen brought Abdul’s wife and attendants to live with him in a cottage on the Isle of Wight, her getaway. She also gave him cottages at other royal residences. And she even had him examined by her doctor — with shocking results — when she learned that the Karims were childless, dismissing the fury of the court as prejudice.
“She calls out her family and accuses them of racism. This is something she’s very clear about,” Basu says, having read letters from palace employees.
“This young man from India takes her into a wonderland. It’s like she’s visiting India through Karim.”
At Osborne House, her Isle of Wight getaway, she ordered the construction of the immaculate Durbar Hall, a symbol of the Munshi’s influence with its many Indian motifs.
Dench and Izzard crept into the hall before the production was ready to set up lights and mikes. “Eddie said, ‘Let’s just go and look at it,’ ” Dench says. “A few of the public were there. It was just glorious.”
Dench has played Victoria before, in the 1997 film “Mrs. Brown.” That movie chronicled another romance in the her life, with her Scottish servant John Brown (Billy Connolly). She agreed to play the queen again because, “I hadn’t known about this part of her life. John Brown had died. She was lonely and the general business of being in her 80s was very, very hard for her,” Dench says.
The actress won an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love,” but dismisses criticism that she only plays queens.
“I’ve had 60 years in the business. I’ve played Cleopatra,” she says.
But she does keep an eye out for the best parts. When her friend Maggie Smith suggested in a Radio Times video interview with Mark Lawson that Dench has her “paws” all over the choice Shakespeare roles, the actress bristled.
“That’s disgraceful,” she says. “And not true. I’m grateful to have the work. I don’t like sitting about because I get bored.”