Blunt advice for critics: Watch History Channel

Emily Blunt has a suggestion for all those sticklers who demand real history in their film biographies.

“Watch the History Channel if you want it literal and historically perfect.”

The star of “The Young Victoria” was reacting to some of the quibbling of British critics about the film, which is enjoying much better reviews in Australia and the United States than it did when it opened in Queen Victoria’s native land. Gripes about this invention (the queen’s husband taking a bullet for her) or that anachronism (“electric lighting, 40 years before it was invented”) dominated reviews in Blunt’s homeland.

“Over here, people accept it as being a love story, allowing themselves to be swept away by it, rather than getting too caught up in the details,” Blunt says. But even those Brits who huffed at the accuracy of the film have praised her. “Blunt deftly judges the mixture of stubbornness and naiveté in Victoria,” enthused Britain’s Daily Express.

Of late, Blunt, 26, has made a specialty of playing Americans -- in “Sunshine Cleaning,” “The Great Buck Howard” and “Dan in Real Life.”

“But you can’t get more British than playing the queen, this queen,” she says. “I learned very little about Victoria in school. We’ve had so many kings and queens that I think the schools find it quite hard to focus on one. I remember my mum talking to me about her and saying that she’d had this terribly successful marriage and that they were very passionate about each other and that he’d died very young.

“The image I had of Victoria was of the old lady, dressed in black, in mourning. I knew nothing about the passion behind it that made her grieve so ferociously for this man, the great love of her life. That’s what I loved about doing the film, discovering that passion with her as she grew to know how, playing that.”

That romance is the focus of “Young Victoria.” The courtly love affair (Rupert Friend plays the young, continental Prince Albert) dominates the film. Blunt plays Victoria first as a put-upon teen ruler in waiting, under the thumb of her mother (Miranda Richardson) and her mother’s closest advisor (Mark Strong).

“She was driven by a desire to get back at her mother by not relinquishing any of the power that was suddenly handed to her. Playing her as a rebellious teenager was a lot of fun. She’s just a girl, living at home, desperate to get away from the curfews, to date who she wanted. I could identify with that.

“I think what the film shows, more than anything, was her steely patience, waiting all those years to become the queen and to get her way once she became queen.”

The “corsets,” as you might guess, “were awful, like a bad day at the gym. But you can’t wear sweat pants under your petticoats, can you?”

The locations, actual palaces and royal homes secured for the film by co-producer Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, were “stunning,” says Blunt. “Your posture turns more arrogant walking those halls. In character, I was utterly impossible to live with all during this shoot, I must say.”

That authenticity helped with the key scene, the clumsy proposal in which the powerful young queen must hint to the powerless prince that she’ll marry him.

“Victoria talked about it in her diaries about how frightening that moment was,” Blunt says. “Her hands were sweating, she was so nervous. She’s trying to conform to what is expected of her, this script she has to follow. But at the same time she’s a nervous teenage girl who’s never been in love before who has no idea how to approach this handsome, dashing man.

“By that proposal moment, she had to know she was in love with him. But she didn’t know how to put that in words that fit that script that the crown she was wearing required.”

Moore writes for the Orlando Sentinel