Mrs Brown

“Loyalty without question. Friendship without equal.”

Years after Prince Albert's death, Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) still shuts herself away in black, and her household sends for John Brown (Billy Connolly), a blunt Scottish servant her late husband trusted, in the hope he can coax her outdoors. Her private secretary Henry Ponsonby (Geoffrey Palmer) and the court watch the friendship grow, and the talk starts. John Madden films the royal houses in muted, heavy light, so the grief and the gossip sit in the same rooms.