‘Marriage gave me a basis I lacked before…’
I first saw Julian Fellowes at the opening of an exhibition not far from Buckingham Palace. Gesturing discreetly in his direction, the guests kept a respectful distance from him and his wife, creating a circle of clear floor around them in an otherwise crowded room.
When he stood up to make his address, a hushed silence fell on the assembly. And although he might easily have spoken off the cuff, he proceeded to deliver a speech that was witty, well researched, and evidently prepared with this particular event in mind.
As this gathering demonstrated, Fellowes, the author of Downton Abbey, is now a household name. With wall-to-wall coverage in the media: how his creation has broken all records; how he lives in a Grade Ilisted house in Dorset; how he is now a life peer; how his wife Emma is the niece of the 3rd Earl Kitchener and a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent – you would have to be living on another planet not to know a thing or two about this.
But what happened before his meteoric rise to fame and fortune? Google him, and whole stretches of his earlier life are pretty much a blank. This is what interests me; and today, Julian Fellowes is sitting opposite me in a drawing room in central London, having arrived bang on time.
As Fellowes himself has often pointed out, matinée-idol good looks were not among the blessings that the gods saw fit to grant him at birth. Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering why a man who has become the definitive voice on the social mores of the upper classes, whose aesthetic sense and eagle eye for detail are not in question, and who can command the services of any tailor in London, is wearing a blazer with silver buttons and pale cotton trousers that, if not quite flared, have more than a hint of M&S about them. As a topic of conversation, however, this seems unpromising; so we start with his family background.
To quote what Fellowes has said elsewhere with his usual frankness about such matters, his father was ‘probably lower-upper class’; he belonged, in other words, to the minor gentry, which provided the bulk of the officer class that served the Empire – just as generations of the Fellowes family had before him.
Before a bout of TB brought about a change of career, his father was in the diplomatic service, so that Julian was born in Cairo in 1949, the youngest of four sons. Home was a house in Kensington and, later, a largish place in East Sussex.
‘It was a stable childhood,’ he says, ‘a childhood of ponies and birthday cakes; and my parents were very happily married. We were perfectly well off, but there was no real money, and we always thought of ourselves as being rather broke.’
His father was nevertheless able to buy a small island off the west coast of Ireland (‘an Arthur Ransome place’) that took his fancy in the early 1960s and where many summer holidays were subsequently spent.
As a Roman Catholic, the young boy was sent to Ampleforth, and went on to read English at Cambridge, where he had a busy social life and took to the stage. Having been admitted on to the list of the pedigree-conscious Peter Townend (social editor of Tatler), he also did the debs’ season in 1968.
‘In Sussex I had been in the shadow of my brother Rory,’ says Fellowes. ‘He was frightfully handsome and looked very much like Terence Stamp. But a combination of going to Cambridge and being taken up by the season meant that I was in a new field, making my own space – I made lots of friends.’
What gnawed constantly, however, and what perhaps made him more of an observer than a player, was a debilitating diffidence about his own looks. ‘I was very conscious of not being attractive,’ he says, with disarming candour. Granted which, it is difficult to understand his decision to go to drama school after coming down from Cambridge in 1970. What was going through his mind?
‘I have a feeling that somewhere there was a desire to be someone else,’ he says. ‘But it was a reckless and wild choice.’
However, his parents – ‘unusually for people of their sort’ – loved the cinema, so his father was not implacably opposed to the decision, and even funded Fellowes through the two-and-a-half-year course at London’s Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art; ‘though he made it clear that the day I left drama school was the last day he’d give me a penny.’
Fellowes as Lord Kilwillie in Monarch Of The Glen
On graduating from drama school he did a stint of rep in Northampton, and then returned to London in 1975 as a jobbing actor. ‘For more than five years I was in four West End plays more or less back to back, interspersed with TV work,’ he says. ‘I certainly wasn’t struggling.’
Nevertheless, granted the left-wing culture of the time, to which the entire acting fraternity made unquestioning obeisance, there was no way that the plummy-voiced Fellowes would be taken seriously. ‘I didn’t fit into the zeitgeist,’ he says.
Even less zeitgeisty, in theatreland, were the three bodice-rippers that he wrote at this time, all set in 17th- and 18th-century France. The first two were published under the pseudonym Rebecca Greville, but his cover was blown when Fellowes was ‘outed’ by an indignant Barbara Cartland. The third was published under another name; but that was it. ‘I was aware of the fact that I hadn’t really got anything to say,’ he says.
Increasingly aware, too, that he was ‘in the wrong country at the wrong time’, Fellowes decamped to Los Angeles at the end of 1980. Here, the scales fell from his eyes.
‘Like everyone in England, I had been brainwashed to believe that the theatre was everything; but in LA I realised I wasn’t really interested in the theatre; I was interested in the camera.’
Armed with this realisation, he returned to London in 1983. ‘I was much more directed when I got back,’ he says. ‘I went for it.’
Which all sounds very positive. Elsewhere, however, Fellowes has used the words ‘a pathetic figure of derision’ to describe himself during this period. ‘My wobbly time in a way was when I came back from Hollywood, having no status, knowing that the LA option was not there,’ he confesses. ‘I think people were sorry for me and asked me for the weekend to cheer me up.’ There was no shortage of small roles as a supporting actor, but nor was there any real future. Not surprisingly, he had ‘moments of panic, thinking: Is this ever going to turn into something?’
A further element of insecurity was a long-standing affair with a woman who had no intention of leaving her husband.
Then in 1989, he met a girl called Emma Kitchener at a party and knew immediately that this was the woman he wanted to marry. Disregarding her more than evident lack of interest (she refused even to give him her telephone number), he pursued her, and they married the next year.
‘The great change in my professional life was sealed by my marriage,’ he says. ‘It gave me a basis that I had lacked before. I “smelt” different.’
He did indeed get better roles, the best known of which was probably as Lord Kilwillie in the TV series Monarch Of The Glen. With the benefit of hindsight, though, one can see that the ups and downs of his acting career were a diversion from – or at best, a long preparation for – what must surely be regarded as Fellowes’ real métier, the career that would lift him out of obscurity and into something approaching superstardom.
This, of course, was writing. Because all the while, he was scribbling away, producing in the end about 20 scripts, none of which came to anything. Then he wrote the script for Gosford Park, won an Oscar for it in 2002, and not only did he become an established figure overnight, but for the first time he had really serious earning power. And all of a sudden, everything fell into place.
In no time at all, Weidenfeld came knocking at his door to say that they would, after all, like to publish his novel Snobs, which they had previously turned down. That was a bestseller, as was Past Imperfect, which followed in 2008. Then 2009 saw the release of The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, for which he wrote the script. And the year after that saw Fellowes conquer the world with Downton Abbey.
And if he is clearly loving every moment of his triumph, he has earned it, every bit of it; because it has been a long and arduous journey, requiring enormous determination and resilience; and where others would have given up, he did not.
It is tempting, too, to speculate that if he had had the looks he so very much wished for, we probably wouldn’t have heard of him at all…
When he stood up to make his address, a hushed silence fell on the assembly. And although he might easily have spoken off the cuff, he proceeded to deliver a speech that was witty, well researched, and evidently prepared with this particular event in mind.
As this gathering demonstrated, Fellowes, the author of Downton Abbey, is now a household name. With wall-to-wall coverage in the media: how his creation has broken all records; how he lives in a Grade Ilisted house in Dorset; how he is now a life peer; how his wife Emma is the niece of the 3rd Earl Kitchener and a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent – you would have to be living on another planet not to know a thing or two about this.
But what happened before his meteoric rise to fame and fortune? Google him, and whole stretches of his earlier life are pretty much a blank. This is what interests me; and today, Julian Fellowes is sitting opposite me in a drawing room in central London, having arrived bang on time.
As Fellowes himself has often pointed out, matinée-idol good looks were not among the blessings that the gods saw fit to grant him at birth. Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering why a man who has become the definitive voice on the social mores of the upper classes, whose aesthetic sense and eagle eye for detail are not in question, and who can command the services of any tailor in London, is wearing a blazer with silver buttons and pale cotton trousers that, if not quite flared, have more than a hint of M&S about them. As a topic of conversation, however, this seems unpromising; so we start with his family background.
To quote what Fellowes has said elsewhere with his usual frankness about such matters, his father was ‘probably lower-upper class’; he belonged, in other words, to the minor gentry, which provided the bulk of the officer class that served the Empire – just as generations of the Fellowes family had before him.
Before a bout of TB brought about a change of career, his father was in the diplomatic service, so that Julian was born in Cairo in 1949, the youngest of four sons. Home was a house in Kensington and, later, a largish place in East Sussex.
‘It was a stable childhood,’ he says, ‘a childhood of ponies and birthday cakes; and my parents were very happily married. We were perfectly well off, but there was no real money, and we always thought of ourselves as being rather broke.’
His father was nevertheless able to buy a small island off the west coast of Ireland (‘an Arthur Ransome place’) that took his fancy in the early 1960s and where many summer holidays were subsequently spent.
As a Roman Catholic, the young boy was sent to Ampleforth, and went on to read English at Cambridge, where he had a busy social life and took to the stage. Having been admitted on to the list of the pedigree-conscious Peter Townend (social editor of Tatler), he also did the debs’ season in 1968.
‘In Sussex I had been in the shadow of my brother Rory,’ says Fellowes. ‘He was frightfully handsome and looked very much like Terence Stamp. But a combination of going to Cambridge and being taken up by the season meant that I was in a new field, making my own space – I made lots of friends.’
What gnawed constantly, however, and what perhaps made him more of an observer than a player, was a debilitating diffidence about his own looks. ‘I was very conscious of not being attractive,’ he says, with disarming candour. Granted which, it is difficult to understand his decision to go to drama school after coming down from Cambridge in 1970. What was going through his mind?
‘I have a feeling that somewhere there was a desire to be someone else,’ he says. ‘But it was a reckless and wild choice.’
However, his parents – ‘unusually for people of their sort’ – loved the cinema, so his father was not implacably opposed to the decision, and even funded Fellowes through the two-and-a-half-year course at London’s Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art; ‘though he made it clear that the day I left drama school was the last day he’d give me a penny.’
Fellowes as Lord Kilwillie in Monarch Of The GlenOn graduating from drama school he did a stint of rep in Northampton, and then returned to London in 1975 as a jobbing actor. ‘For more than five years I was in four West End plays more or less back to back, interspersed with TV work,’ he says. ‘I certainly wasn’t struggling.’
Nevertheless, granted the left-wing culture of the time, to which the entire acting fraternity made unquestioning obeisance, there was no way that the plummy-voiced Fellowes would be taken seriously. ‘I didn’t fit into the zeitgeist,’ he says.
Even less zeitgeisty, in theatreland, were the three bodice-rippers that he wrote at this time, all set in 17th- and 18th-century France. The first two were published under the pseudonym Rebecca Greville, but his cover was blown when Fellowes was ‘outed’ by an indignant Barbara Cartland. The third was published under another name; but that was it. ‘I was aware of the fact that I hadn’t really got anything to say,’ he says.
Increasingly aware, too, that he was ‘in the wrong country at the wrong time’, Fellowes decamped to Los Angeles at the end of 1980. Here, the scales fell from his eyes.
‘Like everyone in England, I had been brainwashed to believe that the theatre was everything; but in LA I realised I wasn’t really interested in the theatre; I was interested in the camera.’
Armed with this realisation, he returned to London in 1983. ‘I was much more directed when I got back,’ he says. ‘I went for it.’
Which all sounds very positive. Elsewhere, however, Fellowes has used the words ‘a pathetic figure of derision’ to describe himself during this period. ‘My wobbly time in a way was when I came back from Hollywood, having no status, knowing that the LA option was not there,’ he confesses. ‘I think people were sorry for me and asked me for the weekend to cheer me up.’ There was no shortage of small roles as a supporting actor, but nor was there any real future. Not surprisingly, he had ‘moments of panic, thinking: Is this ever going to turn into something?’
A further element of insecurity was a long-standing affair with a woman who had no intention of leaving her husband.
Then in 1989, he met a girl called Emma Kitchener at a party and knew immediately that this was the woman he wanted to marry. Disregarding her more than evident lack of interest (she refused even to give him her telephone number), he pursued her, and they married the next year.
‘The great change in my professional life was sealed by my marriage,’ he says. ‘It gave me a basis that I had lacked before. I “smelt” different.’
He did indeed get better roles, the best known of which was probably as Lord Kilwillie in the TV series Monarch Of The Glen. With the benefit of hindsight, though, one can see that the ups and downs of his acting career were a diversion from – or at best, a long preparation for – what must surely be regarded as Fellowes’ real métier, the career that would lift him out of obscurity and into something approaching superstardom.
This, of course, was writing. Because all the while, he was scribbling away, producing in the end about 20 scripts, none of which came to anything. Then he wrote the script for Gosford Park, won an Oscar for it in 2002, and not only did he become an established figure overnight, but for the first time he had really serious earning power. And all of a sudden, everything fell into place.
In no time at all, Weidenfeld came knocking at his door to say that they would, after all, like to publish his novel Snobs, which they had previously turned down. That was a bestseller, as was Past Imperfect, which followed in 2008. Then 2009 saw the release of The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, for which he wrote the script. And the year after that saw Fellowes conquer the world with Downton Abbey.
And if he is clearly loving every moment of his triumph, he has earned it, every bit of it; because it has been a long and arduous journey, requiring enormous determination and resilience; and where others would have given up, he did not.
It is tempting, too, to speculate that if he had had the looks he so very much wished for, we probably wouldn’t have heard of him at all…