DOWNTON ABBEY RETURNS WITH DAME MAGGIE SMITH
She may play Downton Abbey’s redoubtable matriarch, but behind the scenes Dame Maggie Smith is mother hen to the newbies and loves to play word games with her co-stars, discovers Juliet Rieden.
As the haughty Dowager Countess of Grantham, Dame Maggie Smith’s stare can silence the lustiest of opponents, while her caustic retorts wither at 20 paces. But I’m pleased to discover that when the cameras stop rolling Dame Maggie is a pussycat, especially to the knee-trembling newcomers to the set of one of the most iconic period dramas of the decade.
There are no special demands from the multiaward-winning veteran actress, no diva turns or trailer one-upmanship. “I don’t think that’s very British,” laughs Downton Abbey’s creator Julian Fellowes, who is himself an Oscar-winner for his 2001 film Gosford Park.
“She’s very nice to the young ones and when they’re starting out, particularly at the beginning of the show, when several of them had very little experience indeed, Maggie was very much the kind of team leader in all that time.”
The 84-year-old British icon is certainly the jewel in Julian Fellowes Downton stately home crown and it’s no surprise that Dame Maggie’s role is central as the TV series jumps to the silver screen. “I’m a huge Dame Maggie fan,” Julian explains. “She’s extraordinary really; a great actress. You say that, you’ve said it all. She has that wonderful thing that great actors do have of being able to play several things at once, and so she can be funny and moving simultaneously. She can go from one situation where she’s very angry or sad and five minutes later you’re rocking with laughter; yet she doesn’t turn into a different person.
“A lesser actor becomes a different person when they’re doing a different kind of story so you have to write for them rather carefully, but Maggie always preserves her central thread of a character and never loses touch with it, so she is very rewarding to write for.”
In the six seasons of Downton since it first launched in 2010, we have seen the aristocratic
Grantham mob grapple with family tragedy as the Titanic sank, the horrors of the First World War, the wild undoing of the Roaring Twenties and the increasing decay of the British class system. “When we finished the show, we thought that was the end. We had a big party at The Ivy [famous London restaurant] and everyone cried and that was the end,” says Julian. “Then as time went on, there was a feeling that people hadn’t quite finished with Downton and gradually that turned into a suggestion that we might make a picture.”
While he pondered a plotline significant enough for movie treatment there was a trickier issue. How to reunite his cast. “That was the big mountain to climb, not because they were reluctant, but they’re all stars now and they all had shows on Broadway and series in Hollywood, films, etc., and we had to find a 12-week period when we could extricate them all from their commitments. That was a logistical nightmare.”
As it turned out, the movie’s ensemble cast features not just the TV show’s favourites but also the crème de la crème of British actresses in their prime. “I always write for older women because women interest me, particularly in period,” says Julian. “Women were living quite circumscribed lives because of the rules of society and when they were intelligent and ambitious they had somehow to work around those rules and make the rules bend so they could get the lives they wanted. That, for me, generates interesting tension.”
Joining regulars Dame Maggie and Penelope Wilton are Imelda Staunton (who in real life is married to Jim Carter, Downton’s butler Carson) and Geraldine James. “They’re all leading figures in our industry and they’ve all been around for a long time, so needless to say we didn’t have to introduce any of them,” says Julian. “They all knew each other very well and enjoyed making the picture.” Oh … and let’s not forget Elizabeth McGovern (Cora, Countess Grantham) who, despite being American, has lived in the UK for so long now she’s considered an honorary Brit. “It’s always been a pretty cheerful set,” adds Julian.
In between takes, the cast members have developed a passion for a word game which can explode into a flurry of competitive action. I ask Julian to explain. “They all get on and they play this terrible game called ‘Bananagrams’ when you have to make words. Don’t ask me how you
play it, I haven’t a clue, but they’re furiously keen at it and it’s a sort of Scrabble but there isn’t a board. You just sort of make words. So it’s all very convivial. There’s no sulking in their tents at all.”
The game involves making words from letter tiles in a linking pattern, very similar to Scrabble, with the winner being the first to use all tiles … and Dame Maggie, I soon discover, is very good indeed!
The storyline of this Downton Abbey, which opens on September 12, also ups the ante somewhat, with the lofty
Granthams trumped in superiority by genuine royalty. Consequently, in Downton the movie there is whole new level of glamour and glittering costumes as a royal frisson shakes up the country tweeds. “I was reading a book about the Fitzwilliam family of Wentworth Woodhouse and there was a description of one of the visits of the King and Queen in the 1920s. I thought, this is a good one because they did tour England very much in the ’20s, after the First World War,” says Julian. “They had the job of re-establishing the monarchy. So many of the great European monarchies had fallen and they had to refit the monarchy at the centre of British life. They did a number of different things to achieve it, but one of them was touring around. They had a strong feeling they ought to be seen physically, that people ought to be aware of their reality, I suppose, and it seemed a good idea.”
So, King George V and Queen Mary visit Downton, have dinner and stay overnight, which creates quite a commotion both upstairs and down. With a third series of Netflix’s TV hit The Crown currently in the edit suite for release later this year and numerous royal biopics in the works, the royal family is a hot topic for drama. But
I ask Julian if he thinks it fair to put
Her Majesty and her family through constant fictional interpretations of their lives, and how accurate any of them are.
“I think it must be a very strange and not altogether pleasant sensation to see the living members of your family represented in a television drama, and they have my sympathy,” says Julian, who as a Lord and husband to Emma Kitchener, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent, is pretty familiar with the royal social set. “I’m sure much of what is dramatised is inaccurate or at least not quite how it happened in real life because even when people tell stories about one to other
“In Downton the movie there’s a new level of glamour.”
people they’re never completely accurate, are they?
“I once had a similar experience. Someone brought a girlfriend down to stay with us [in Julian’s impressive 17th century country pile, Stafford House in Dorset] and she then sold the story of her time with us over the weekend to a newspaper. Bits of it were accurate but there were big chunks that were completely fictitious.
“Where I think the royal family is extremely wise and we should all follow their model is they never complain and they never comment.
I think it’s brilliant. I don’t want to be critical of someone else’s work, but a new TV series coming up is making a great story of the Princess of Wales which I really think is very tough on the princes and I wish them well and I wish they didn’t have to go through it. It’s also very tough on Prince Charles. He’s an older man and to some extent he’s used to the buffeting. But they are both still pretty young and this is their mother.
“I think when they’re dead and gone it’s fair enough because they are public figures and they were very much figures of their own time. But I feel that it’s very intrusive when it’s about real people who are still with us.” Julian is talking about The Crown. In upcoming series three Camilla Shand [who became the Duchess of Cornwall] joins the storylines, while for series four an actress has already been cast to play Lady Diana Spencer.
Julian used his own family as inspiration for Downton. “Lord Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville, is sort of based on my father, although my father was cleverer than Robert is, but they have a similar kind of moral viewpoint. They’re both decent coves without ever really questioning why they are where they are. That, I think, is drawn from life, but there is a kind of amalgam with other characters. I had a series of aunts and cousins who were like great aunts when I was young and they’ve all been kind of rolled up into one and made into Violet Grantham [Dame Maggie Smith].”
As we move into 1927 there is a bit of a changing of the guard. “Lady Mary is now really running Downton more than her father,” says Julian. The change in Mary was quite a shock for actress Michelle Dockery who loved seeing her character grapple with her legacy over the past nine years. “Mary was this young, spoiled, irritable teenager who didn’t really want this responsibility,” she explained at a cast interview. “It’s surprised me over the years to know that eventually Mary did succumb to this role that
she was destined to always play … I thought she’d be this rebel.”
The film is packed with storylines that take some of our favourite characters into quite dark territory, and without plot spoiling there is sadness amid the glamour. “I think Downton is always sunshine and showers,” says Julian.
When he first created Downton, Julian says he had no sense how globally popular it would be but says the heart of his drama has been – and always will be – the characters. “They’re all kind of decent people. There are some you like more than others but they’re all trying to do their best whether they’re in the family or the servants or the village. I think there’s a lot of negative narrative in television and film, and maybe people like to rest from that and watch a show where they basically like pretty well everyone.”
Downton Abbey opens in cinemas on September 12.