updated: 26/04/2006
Victoria (1819—1901) was the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 (not satisfied with that she also took the title of empress of India in 1877) until her death in 1901. Her reign lasted more than sixty-three years. The Victorian age is looked back on variously with nostalgia for Britain’s lost greatness and with revulsion for its hypocritical morality.
She was the first British monarch to be captured in photographs (usually as a stern and dumpy old woman) creating an expectation of how she will look that both the actress and the makeup artist must address. The result has been that, over a period of some 60 years, a series of actresses of various ages have been transformed into the remarkably similar on-screen appearance of the elderly Queen Victoria.