Dominic West, Downton’s Lily and the close-up that’s left his wife ‘devastated’
He’s the 50-year-old star of The Affair and a married father of five. She’s his 31-year-old co-star. As they get VERY close-up in Rome...
He NuzzLeS into her neck, arms wrapped protectively around her. She leans in to let him stroke her hair, gazing into his eyes over an alfresco lunch. As these pictures show, dominic West and Lily James have been getting very affectionate during a trip to rome.
West, 50, and James, 31, have been shooting scenes for forthcoming BBC drama the Pursuit Of Love, based on Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, a decade after they first appeared on stage together in Othello.
But they took a break to the Italian city, where they were staying at the Hotel de La Ville, to enjoy some time off and soak up the sunshine last weekend.
the pair lunched with their friend and agent Angharad Wood, her young daughter and another friend at a downtown restaurant where they drank wine in the sun. At the end of the lunch, West could be seen being very tactile with his young co-star, stroking her hair.
At one point, he leaned in close to the Mamma Mia! actress and appeared to plant a kiss on her cheek. earlier in the day, they had been seen riding around the romantic city on an electric scooter, with West standing behind James with his arms wrapped around her.
the actor, who has four children with his wife, Irish aristocrat Catherine FitzGerald, and one from a former relationship, held on to Miss James as they did a spot of sightseeing in the city including the Spanish Steps and Piazza di Pietra. As they visited a local church, West could be seen resting his hand on the actress’s s lower back.
Quite what West’s wife makes s of her husband’s behaviour is s another matter.
Yesterday, she was s putting on a brave e front, insisting that her er husband’s relationship p with Lily James is purely platonic ic and that the pair are ‘really good od friends’. the landscape gardener, er, who has been married to West st since 2010, denied that there was as any romance between her husband sice. and Miss James despite pictures of them looking very close.
FitzGerald, 49, who had not seen the photos, told the daily Mail the pair are ‘really good friends’ but that ‘they are only friends’. However, a friend of FitzGerald’s who came to console her at the family home near Chippenham, Wiltshire, after the pictures emerged, said that she was ‘shocked, heartbroken and devastated’.
the friend said: ‘ Catherine has been trying to speak with dominic but he’s not answering his phone.
She’s totally shocked because she didn’t know anything was going on. they were very much together, so this is completely out of the blue. She thought they had a good marriage and now it’s probably over. that’s how she feels right now but the two of them need to speak. At the moment, she’s lost for words.’
With his commanding presence and virile energy, West has been cast as a hunky leading man for two decades.
Apparently oblivious to polite convention, he has latterly confessed to sometimes becoming physically aroused when performing in sex scenes. He was certainly in enough of them as the lead in the tV drama the Affair, in which he played a married man who fell in love with a much younger woman. do actresses object to his sexual vigour? It seems not. ‘I think they quite like it. everyone likes to be thought of as attractive,’ he reasoned. At 50, though, West has noticed that his leading man roles are giving way to the challenges of playing a father on screen. In the Mitford adaptation, Ja James plays the lead role Linda r radlett, who scandalises her fa family by dumping her first husband b for a Communist lover, be before leaving him and being the m mistress of a French duke. West, we wearing an impressive set of false m moustaches, plays her father. N Not that he’s ready to see him himself in that role. Asked last ye year how often he had sex, he wo wolfishly replied: ‘Never enough.’ B Boasts about his libido aside, West appeared happy enough with his wife in a local newspaper article printed in June about the difficulties of running Glin Castle, her ancestral seat in Ireland, as a hotel during the pandemic. they posed for pictures with their four children, who are aged between 13 and seven. the family divide their time between three properties: the country retreat in Wiltshire, the castle and a London bolthole in Notting Hill. West has another daughter, Martha, 22, by ex-girlfriend Polly Astor, who is related by marriage to former PM david Cameron.
He has previously admitted to treating Astor badly — at the time they had their baby, he was just tasting fame and success, and wanted to romance other women. ‘I wanted to play the field,’ he said.
WEST is the sixth of seven children born into a staunchly Catholic family in Sheffield and has made a career from playing badly behaved yet attractive men — the only exception being his truly chilling portrait of serial killer Fred West in Appropriate Adult, for which he won a Bafta.
the family money comes from the manufacture of vandal-proof plastic bus shelters.
As a child West was seriously ill with a rare blood disease, HenochSchonlein purpura, which can cause leakage from blood vessels into the skin, joints and kidneys. there was also a serious car crash involving the family which affected
his father and three of his siblings. A year later he went to Eton where he was ‘horribly homesick’.
His ‘show off’ tendencies came to the fore and after a degree in English at Trinity College Dublin, he studied drama at Guildhall.
He was then cast opposite Renee Zellweger in Chicago and Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile.
His big break, though, was his role as Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty in The Wire in 2002.
By this point he was a young father, but he broke up with girlfriend Polly Astor.
In an interview he said: ‘It was terrible because it was all me. I wanted out. I hurt Polly very badly, but at the time I wasn’t ready to settle down. I was two years out of drama school and things were going really well . . . Women were extremely important to me and I wanted to be selfish for a bit longer. I wanted to play the field, I suppose.’
Eventually he moved on to romance fun- loving blonde Catherine FitzGerald, a daughter of the 29th Knight of Glin (a line of Irish Earls, dating back to the 14th century), who grew up in Glin Castle. She inherited it in 2011 when her father died.
The castle, which has 18 bedrooms, has a colourful history. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull notoriously attended a louche party there in the Sixties — with Marianne leaving with a friend of FitzGerald’s father, Lord Rathmore.
FitzGerald and West had a student fling at Trinity College. She went on to marry the 7th Earl of Durham but they divorced and she and Dominic then rekindled their romance. They had three children before they were married in 2010.
In 2018, he recalled when he had been happiest: ‘ Last year. I was with my wife and all my kids in northern California, driving an RV.
I remember thinking that life couldn’t possibly get any better.’
He tells interviewers that the greatest challenges of day-to-day life are getting the children up and out for school in the morning and adds that he can be ‘quite moody. I do wake up under a cloud quite a lot and if I’m not working I’m highly neurotic.’
LILY JAMES, by contrast, has nice-girl charm. At the time that filming started on The Pursuit Of Love, she had just exited a five-year relationship with Doctor Who actor Matt Smith and had been romancing Captain America star Chris Evans. Whatever happened between them, it didn’t last.
Instead she grew close to West. In the absence of any official comment, it’s not clear how close, but the amount of touching, nuzzling and kissing suggests ‘ red- hot romance’ rather than a polite friendship between colleagues.
Of course, the on-set romance is a grand cliche for actors. When filming wrapped ten days ago, James wrote an open note to the cast and crew which ran: ‘ I’m so full of you and the story and life. Life-affirming. During the strangest most difficult times. I’m nostalgic already.’ Single and full of passion for life, she would seem to be ready for a new romance.
In the wake of her split from Smith — which followed ‘upsetting’ rumours concerning him and Claire Foy, his co-star in The Crown and the play Lungs — Lily took herself off to South Africa.
Adding a photo of herself at a cheetah reserve, she captioned it: ‘ National cheetahs’ — which seemed to be a dig at Smith.
A label just as fitting, it would seem, for her latest leading man.