Perhaps even Queen Victoria would be amused. At the emotional climax of a new film about our longest-reigning monarch, the studious Prince Albert is transformed into an action hero when he dives across his bride to take an assassin's bullet meant for her.

His selfless act of heroism seals one of the greatest of all royal romances, or at least it would if it had actually happened.

The Young Victoria, which had its world premiere in Leicester Square in London last night, numbers Martin Scorsese among its producers (along with Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York) and Prince Albert's deed has as much in common with Goodfellas or The Departed as anything in the history books.

The film purports to educate its audience about Queen Victoria's neglected early years, portraying her as headstrong, passionate and playful.

Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning scriptwriter of Gosford Park, who was picked by Scorsese to write The Young Victoria, is unrepentant about embroidering the facts. Prince Albert was never wounded but, according to Fellowes, he could have been. The scene was based, he said, on an incident in Hyde Park on June 10, 1840, when the couple were fired on by a man called Edward Oxford.

“They were coming down Constitution Hill and Prince Albert saw the gunman, pushed the Queen into the well of the carriage and covered her body with his own. The gun either jammed or misfired but I felt that in a film that might look comic. By wounding Albert we get a better sense of his bravery.

“I don't feel it's a big departure, just a way of heightening the moment for the cinema. It's not like when people suggest that the Americans found the machine that cracked the Enigma code [as in the 2000 film U-571], which simply isn't true.” Fellowes believes that the Prince's gesture proved to be a turning point in their marriage.

In the film, which stars the British actors Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend as the infatuated first cousins, it is presented as the moment that the Queen learns the true depth of Albert's love for her.

The shooting also lends a welcome whiff of danger to what is essentially a story about stuffy 19th-century court life - just the thing to broaden its potential cinema audience. The revolving bullet emerging in slow motion from the gun certainly looks great in the trailers.

“If I have made people realise that Victoria was not just a dumpy little woman in black with a handkerchief on her head then I've done something worthwhile,” Fellowes said.

Piers Brendon, a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and an expert on the British Empire and the Royal Family, said that the invented wounding was very dubious and reflected the Hollywood values of the present day.

However, Nick James, editor of the film magazine Sight & Sound, said that nobody sensible would expect a lavishly packaged costume drama like The Young Victoria to offer the last word in rigorous historical accuracy. “If it did then in the case of Queen Victoria I suggest they would fall asleep in the cinema,” he said.

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