As the much-loved series comes to an end with a final film, we talk to some of its stars about their fondest memories.
On September 26, 2010, the first episode of Downton Abbey was broadcast. The Daily Telegraph critic Ceri Radford advised viewers to sign up immediately: “Last night’s opening episode of Downton Abbey was a sumptuous, instantly riveting glimpse of a world – and family – on the verge of profound change.”
Over six series and 52 episodes, Downton went on to chalk up record ratings, win countless awards and, of course, live on in a run of three follow-up movies, the last of which is released last week.
Before the release of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, Telegraph reporters spoke to the cast about the untold behind-the-scenes anecdotes and stories from 15 years of Downton.
The beginning
The origins of Downton Abbey lie in Gosford Park. Robert Altman’s 2001 murder mystery about an English country house and its upstairs/downstairs shenanigans won an Academy Award for its screenwriter, one Julian Fellowes. The TV producer Gareth Neame, once a BBC executive, now with his own production company, Carnival, saw Gosford Park and gave Fellowes a call.
“We had a dinner one evening and I said, ‘Could I ever persuade you to go back to the territory of Gosford Park but to spin it off as an episodic television series? To go to a country house but do it as a precinct drama, à la The West Wing?’” Neame recalls.
Fellowes liked the idea and settled down to write a script (with elite aristo feedback from his wife, Lady Emma Kitchener-Fellowes). He moved the story to 1912 and set it in a country house that he originally called Downton Manor (a nod to the Downton Agricultural College in Wiltshire, which had been launched by his great-grandfather), then Downton Park and finally Downton Abbey.
“There was a brief moment of panic that everyone would think it was about monks. We felt that if they saw one trailer they would be reassured,” he says.
Neame took the script to Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television at the time. Fincham said that the last thing in the world the channel wanted was another Upstairs, Downstairs, but when he read the script he was persuaded to take a punt. Downton, with its large cast, lavish costumes and top-tier locations, would probably clock in at £1 million ($2.3m) an episode. It was, as Neame put it, “a very risky thing for them [ITV] to commit to”. But that risk paid off.
Casting the show
Casting decisions came down to casting director Jill Trevellick. TV and film casting tends to have a domino effect – get one big name and the others will follow. Downton’s first coup was to get Dame Maggie Smith on board early. She had starred in Gosford Park (as a vicious, though impoverished, countess), where she’d had many of the best, funniest lines, and so when Fellowes suggested she might play the Dowager Countess – and be given most of the waspish ripostes, such as “What is a weekend?” – Smith signed up.
Trevellick saw many unknown actors as well. Laura Carmichael was working as a doctor’s receptionist when she was offered the role of Lady Edith: “I was doing theatre and small bits here and there, but this was my first real TV audition, so it was a big deal to go in and meet Jill,” she says. “I had accepted a job at the time to go and do Twelfth Night on a tour, and she went, ‘Don’t, don’t take that yet – Hugh Bonneville is in this, so is Maggie Smith, it’s a big show.’”
Lily James – who was only 23 when she started her role as Lady Rose MacClare – recalls how nervous she was at the start of filming. When she asked Smith if she’d done okay in a scene, she received a blank stare in response, and then a simultaneously withering and self-deprecating: “Oh I don’t know, do I?” James laughs. “What a legend.
Matthew Goode, who played Henry Talbot in seven episodes, confirms that Smith was great company: “I only did a couple of episodes with Maggie, but I remember when we were filming the wedding [Henry marries Lady Mary in series six] we got slightly drunk in the afternoon – we’d pretty much finished – and there was an ex-Concorde pilot throwing rosé wine at us for some reason, and we were saying, ‘Come on, Maggie, live a little!’ And at the end of the afternoon she said, ‘I think that’s my favourite day I’ve ever had filming.’”
Finding a location
Highclere Castle was the first house the Downton team came to recce in the summer of 2009, and Fellowes has said that he wrote the series with the Grade I-listed country house, built in 1679, in mind.
Fellowes’ wife, Emma, happened to be friends with its owner, Lady Carnarvon, which helped as well, but the house also had several practical factors in its favour. It was relatively close to London, it was not open to the public all the time, there was no public footpath near the house (not that this stopped long-lensed paparazzi once the series went stratospheric) and the geography of the interior worked well for television.
For Joanne Froggatt, who played the lady’s maid Anna Bates, it was one of her most vivid memories from filming. “My first day was at the house, and the approach to the castle is magnificent – you can’t see it at first, the driveway goes down, and then up a little hill – and as you come up the brow of the hill, the house sort of lifts, almost elevates in front of you. It’s the strangest thing, very magical.”
Filming was not without friction, however. Lady Carnarvon had not expected Downton’s extraordinarily large crew – around 120 people would arrive each day for a 7am start, hulking lighting rigs and camera dollies all round the Carnarvons’ ancestral home. Lady Carnarvon recalls one exchange with a crew member and a rogue scaffolding pole: “I said, ‘Excuse me… you nearly hit the painting!’ He said, ‘All right, love. Van Gogh, is it?’ I said, ‘No, it’s a van Dyck!’”
The “downstairs” scenes were shot at Ealing Studios. Kevin Doyle (Downton’s footman, Mr Molesley) recalls: “Filming ‘downstairs’ was much more relaxed, because you can move walls and you can scuff walls; there’s no million-pound paintings on the wall,” he says, “So you’re not having to worry about that. But ‘upstairs’ had to be much more careful, and as a result everything takes longer. You can’t take drinks inside or sit on the chairs, there are conditions to filming. So it’s a very different experience, but the payoff is the grandeur of that extraordinary building.”
The cast found ways to entertain themselves between takes. Carmichael remembers: “We played a lot of [the word game] Bananagrams, and Maggie [Smith] was always at that. We had a whole table set up at the beginning of the day to keep us in a good mood.” Dockery adds: “And lots of wink murder in the dining room scenes, which would go on forever, so we had to entertain ourselves. That was another one that Maggie was really good at.”
Learning the etiquette
Even the best actors need to be told what to do sometimes. For guidance, Downton Abbey employed the historian Alastair Bruce, who quickly became known as “The Oracle” on set for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the period, its mores and its punctilios. (Bruce was deemed so vital to the series’ success that he has a cameo role in all six seasons.)
It was Bruce who oversaw everything from the place settings (cutlery an inch from the table’s edge, please) to walking speeds.“We wouldn’t hold our hands in front of our crotches, or kiss, or leave food on our plates because of scarcity and having gone through the war,” says Raquel Cassidy (who played lady’s maid Phyllis Baxter). For Froggatt, who was lady’s maid to Lady Mary: “[Bruce] came up with some beautiful ideas. Once, he said to me, ‘Well, we’re supposed to be in winter now, so a lovely thing to do would be to lay [Lady Mary’s] dressing gown over a rail at the fire so you’d warm her dressing gown for her.’ And I was like, wow. I never would have thought of these details that he added to the show, they were really, really incredible.”
He is a particular stickler for how men should carry themselves (“We’re all hunched forwards these days thanks to phones; a man’s neck should be touching the back of his collar at all times”) and how women should curtsy. (“A slight bend of the knees is not a curtsy. A curtsy is when you drop one foot way back and you go right down so that your bottom is almost touching the back of your leg.”) With Bruce’s assistance, Downton was primed and ready to film. It just needed somewhere to go.
Dressing the part
The post-Edwardian aristocracy did not speak like us, and neither did they dress like us. Downton Abbey’s depiction of a bygone era required its cast to look both credible as well as wonderful. (For some viewers the costumes, feasting on the elegance and opulence of the era, were as enticing as the storylines.)
The task fell to costume designers Susannah Buxton, Rosalin Ebbutt and, latterly, Caroline McCall and Anna Mary Scott Robbins. And it was some task: each series of Downton Abbey required around 300 costumes, some of which were original garments that needed to be repaired and adapted for the cast. Others were made from scratch using contemporary or vintage fabrics and trims sourced from vintage shops and fairs. Many garments were also hired from specialist theatrical costumiers.
All of Hugh Bonneville’s three-piece suits, for example, were tailored for him. Each of the principal women in the cast required up to 40 individual pieces throughout the series, including items such as Cora Crawley’s chiffon evening dress with silver bugle beading in series six that was almost a century old.
And you can’t really wash something that delicate. “We do stink, as they don’t wash our costumes,” Sophie McShera (who played the assistant cook Daisy Mason) said at the time. “They have these weird patches, which are sewn into the armpits and which they wash separately.”
When it came to creating the perfect hairstyles, Downton always had a whole trailer of wigs ready to go, but as the series got more successful – and especially when it graduated to film budgets – “We were able to have bespoke wigs made for all our leading ladies, and toupees for some male actors,” says Anne Oldham, Downton’s long-time hair and make-up designer.
The critics respond
It was in the US where Downton-mania really took hold. In the summer of 2011 the drama was nominated for five Primetime Emmys, winning four, and the Downton cast found themselves being flown across the Atlantic for chat shows, awards nights and the whole media carousel.
“One moment where we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore was when the third series came out in America,” says Jim Carter, who played Mr Carson, the butler. “The British ambassador had invited us to his residence in Washington and he thanked us as a whole for making his job so much easier, because Downton sold the idea of Britain abroad. Then, at 10 o’clock at night we were whisked into blacked-out cars and taken for a private tour of the White House. Because it was Michelle Obama’s favourite programme. We had Marines saluting us!”
It wasn’t just the First Lady who wanted to get involved. Famous fans also included Jamie Lee Curtis, Shakira, Matt Damon, Woody Harrelson, Salma Hayek, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Anjelica Huston, Kim Cattrall, Jimmy Fallon, Kim Kardashian, Julianne Moore, John Legend, Martha Stewart… and the show even got the honour of being parodied in sketches on the US satirical comedy series Saturday Night Live. “Mick Jagger came over to us at the Met Ball, at the after party, and introduced himself,” remembers Dockery. “He came over and said, ‘Hello, I’m Mick’. And we were like, ‘We know!’” Everyone wanted a piece of it.
“The English are so spirited but so repressed. It’s bizarre. But I love Downton Abbey. I would kill for a role,” said Hayek (she didn’t get one).
Some stars were more lucky. Paul Giamatti, Shirley MacLaine and none other than George Clooney (who appeared as the “Marquis of Hollywood” in a spoof mini-episode for charity in 2014) all bagged roles.
“We always had a bit of that – big Hollywood actors saying, ‘Can I come and work?’” says Fellowes. “You had to ration it. The thing about guest stars is they bring so much baggage that they rather dilute the Downton-ness of the whole thing.”
Downton’s legacy
What was this “Downton-ness” that the world fell for? Downton Abbey took a much-loved British genre – mainstream historical drama – and gave it a complete overhaul for the 21st century. From a commercial point of view, it also proved that a British series could have the same reach globally as the biggest and best American shows.
In so doing it paved the way for dramas such as The Crown, Bridgerton and The Gilded Age (also written by Fellowes). And the show waved the flag for British culture, tourism and exports in a way that goes beyond a mere television programme – just look at the films that followed, the Downton merchandise at the Highclere Castle shop and the forthcoming Bonhams auction of memorabilia (you can bag Lady Sybil’s “harem” pants from series one for £5000 [$11,380] if you’re quick).
Executive producer Liz Trubridge sums it all up rather nicely: “One of the things that Downton has done is explode the myth that period drama has to be highbrow or in the literary genre. What people liked about Downton was that A, there’s a large cast giving you lots of characters to like or hate; B, there are beautiful costumes, lovely sets and scenery; and C, there are stories that, in spite of being set nearly 100 years ago, are so relevant now. There is something quite comforting about that – seeing characters you have come to love going through the same c--p that you are.”