<\/p>\n
Julian Fellowes, a British actor-turned-writer-producer (and actual Lord), has a best original screenplay Oscar on his shelf for the 2001 murder mystery Gosford Park. The film was a hit in Hollywood and beyond, with the likes of Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Richard E. Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas dazzling in the countryside-set whodunnit.<\/p>\n
It was here, 25 years ago, Fellowes befriended beloved English actress Maggie Smith. \u201cShe saved my bacon a few times,\u201d Fellowes recalls to The Hollywood Reporter about the late legend of stage and screen. He references a particular line of Smith\u2019s that director Robert Altman wasn\u2019t quite sure worked. Fellowes had deemed it one of his best, but soon found it speeding toward the chopping block. Until Smith stepped in and told Altman: \u201cI think I can make it work, Bob.\u201d The line made the final cut.<\/p>\n
More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Fellowes is giggling as he remembers the moment, a story so indicative of Smith\u2019s charm, while reflecting on his award-winning period behemoth Downton Abbey. He wrote all six seasons of the ITV and PBS show from 2010 and 2015, and subsequently adapted it for the big screen in the three movies that came after: Downton Abbey (2019), Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, in theaters now.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we all felt that if there was a third film, we wanted it to be haunted by Maggie,\u201d Fellowes continues about dedicating the third instalment to her (the movie ends on a lingering shot of Violet\u2019s portrait looming over the main foyer). \u201cThere is a theme of Maggie going through the film, and then at the end, you see her when Mary is having all her flashbacks. I like that. She was an iconic figure\u2026 And that\u2019s another reason to finish.\u201d He describes Smith as \u201cvery faithful\u201d to the script: \u201cShe doesn\u2019t change [it] at all, and she\u2019s got this gift where she can be very funny and five minutes later, make you cry. Not everyone has that.\u201d<\/p>\n In the latest film, the Crawleys are once again trying to catch up with a rapidly-changing world, one that is increasingly tiring of grand families like theirs. Mary (Michelle Dockery) is rediscovering her place in society after a scandal-producing divorce while Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) and Robert (Hugh Bonneville) are facing another financial crisis. Allen Leech, Laura Carmichael, Harry Hadden-Paton, Jim Carter, Penelope Wilton, Phyllis Logan, Raquel Cassidy, Brendan Coyle, Joanne Froggatt, Robert James-Collier, Sophie McShera, Lesley Nicol, Kevin Doyle all return, as well as Dominic West, Paul Giamatti and newcomer Alessandro Nivola.<\/p>\n \u201cWe always knew where we were heading,\u201d says Fellowes about ending the franchise as he did, with Mary in full charge of Downton and her parents in the Dower House. \u201cI\u2019m not a fan of talcum powder hair and wobbly stick acting. To go on, we would be pushing our luck a bit and eventually be facing the Second World War.\u201d<\/p>\n The 76-year-old says that to return to Downton would mean coming back \u201cin a different time with different thinking, much later on in the century.\u201d He added: \u201cPlus, I think the actors had had enough \u2014\u00a0in the nicest way, there were a lot of good friendships and we\u2019ll always meet as members of the Downton club\u2026 But I also feel that, in life, you must know when to let go of things, whether it\u2019s professional or romantic or anything else. There is a moment when you think, \u2018It\u2019s time to bring this to an end.\u2019 And I felt that about the show.\u201d<\/p>\n Fellowes said he\u2019s particularly thankful that Americans love Downton Abbey as they have. The show was relatively neglected by the British Academy \u2014\u00a0it never won a major competitive BAFTA \u2014 but saw monumental success across the pond, with 15 Emmys and 3 Golden Globes. \u201cAmerica made it a lovely experience,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople are just as entitled to dislike what you\u2019ve made as they are entitled to like it. And I sometimes may have to remind myself of that a bit. But I felt a bit sad that in the country of origin, we couldn\u2019t celebrate its success a bit more. So I was very grateful to the Americans for celebrating it as much as they did.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Downton Abbey is widely considered British television\u2019s favorite period drama, and its popularity here in the U.K. cannot be overstated. Fellowes believes the secret sauce to be the show\u2019s warmth and optimism. \u201cPeople often ask me why I think the show was so popular, but I think one of the main reasons was that we liked Mrs. Patmore and we liked Violet Grantham.\u201d<\/p>\n He continues: \u201cIf the show had been made in the \u201950s, the family would have been gracious and charming and all the servants would have been comedic. If the same show were made in the \u201990s, all the servants would have been victims, and the family would have been mendacious and cruel and unkind, but we didn\u2019t go for either of those. We felt, consciously, that this was a group of people trying to do the best with what they\u2019d been given.\u201d<\/p>\n While Fellowes says he has no favorite characters, he singles out Smith and Dockery for being entirely unbothered by how likeable their characters were. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t care less if they had a storyline where they were behaving badly or they were unsympathetic,\u201d he smiles. \u201cYou\u2019d be amazed by the number of quite grown-up actors who get into a tizzy if they have to be unsympathetic for five seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n Three plot points jump out to Fellowes as his favorites from across the entire series and subsequent films. The first is Sybil\u2019s death in season three: \u201cJessica [Brown Findlay] had always said, right from the beginning, \u2018I\u2019m doing three years then I\u2019m leaving.\u2019 There was nothing unpleasant involved,\u201d he begins. But seeing Leech, as Sybil\u2019s partner Tom Branson, improvise a line akin to \u201cStay with me,\u201d had Fellowes in tears: \u201cMy wife and I were watching it. I was crying. She said to me, \u2018You wrote it! What did you think was going to happen?’\u201d<\/p>\n He also enjoyed Edith\u2019s jilting in episode three, as well as a scene between a grieving Mary (shortly after Matthew\u2019s shock death) and Violet. \u201cMy father, because my mother had died, he\u2019d gone into a terrible slough of despond,\u201d Fellowes explains. \u201cHe started to give in to everything. I took him to Florida for Christmas. I said to him: \u2018You have to make this decision, do you want to live or do you want to die?\u2019 and I put that into the show \u2014\u00a0again, you give this material to actors like Maggie and Michelle, and they surprise and delight you with what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n The screenwriting legend has learned to \u201cnever say never\u201d in showbiz, but he seems to have closed the stately doors on Downton for good. Now, it\u2019s all systems go on the recently-confirmed season four of HBO\u2019s The Gilded Age. \u201cIt\u2019s harder than Downton. It\u2019s a hard world,\u201d he smiles about the New York City-set drama with Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector,\u00a0Cynthia Nixon and\u00a0Christine Baranski. \u201cThese are men and women on the make \u2014\u00a0so it has a different feeling, a different smell. But I think that\u2019s good for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is in theaters now.<\/p>\n Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Julian Fellowes, a British actor-turned-writer-producer (and actual Lord), has a best original screenplay Oscar on his shelf for the 2001 murder mystery Gosford Park. The film was a hit in Hollywood and beyond, with the likes of Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Richard E. Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas dazzling in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2025238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[372794,22860,334473,363711,356227,363538,31190,370773],"class_list":["post-2025237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-charles-dance","tag-hollywood","tag-julian-fellowes","tag-maggie-smith","tag-michelle-dockery","tag-robert-altman","tag-the-hollywood-reporter","tag-violet-crawley"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Julian-Fellowes-Reflects-on-15-Years-Captaining-\u2018Downton-Abbey-Dedicating.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2025238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}