Julian Fellowes
Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, DL (born 17 August 1949), known professionally as Julian Fellowes, is an English actor, novelist, film director, screenwriter, and Conservative peer. He has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and two Emmy Awards as well as nominations for four BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, two Olivier Awards, and a Tony Award.
For the courtier, see Robert Fellowes, Baron Fellowes.
The Lord Fellowes of West Stafford
Fellowes won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the Robert Altman directed murder-mystery Gosford Park (2001). He also wrote the screenplays for Vanity Fair (2004), Separate Lies (2005), The Young Victoria (2009), and The Chaperone (2018). He gained renown as the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning ITV series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and the HBO series The Gilded Age (2022–present). He wrote the books for the Broadway musicals Mary Poppins (2006), and School of Rock (2015).
Early life and education[edit]
Fellowes was born into a family of the British landed gentry in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of four boys, to Peregrine Edward Launcelot Fellowes (1912–1999) and his British wife, Olwen Mary (née Stuart-Jones).[1] His father was a diplomat and Arabist who campaigned to have Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, restored to his throne during World War II.[2] His great-grandfather was John Wrightson, a pioneer in agricultural education and the founder of Downton Agricultural College.[3] Peregrine's uncle was Peregrine Forbes Morant Fellowes (1883–1955), Air Commodore and DSO.
Fellowes has three older brothers: Nicholas Peregrine James, actor; writer David Andrew; and playwright Roderick Oliver.[4] The siblings' childhood home was at Wetherby Place, South Kensington,[5] and afterwards at Chiddingly, East Sussex, where Fellowes lived from August 1959 until November 1988, and where his parents are buried.
The house in Chiddingly, which had been owned by the whodunit writer Clifford Kitchin, was within easy reach of London where his father, who had been a diplomat, worked as an executive for Shell. Part of Fellowes' formative years were also spent in Nigeria, where his father helped run Shell operations during the transition from the colonial era to Nigeria's Independence.[6][7] Fellowes has described him as one "of that last generation of men who lived in a pat of butter without knowing it. My mother put him on a train on Monday mornings and drove up to London in the afternoon. At the flat she'd be waiting in a snappy little cocktail dress with a delicious dinner and drink. Lovely, really."
The friendship his family developed with another family in the village, the Kingsleys, influenced Fellowes. David Kingsley was head of British Lion Films, the company responsible for many Peter Sellers comedies. Sometimes "glamorous figures" would visit the Kingsleys' house. Fellowes said that he thinks he "learnt from David Kingsley that you could actually make a living in the film business."[8]
Fellowes was educated at several private schools in Britain, including Wetherby School, St Philip's School (a Catholic boys school in South Kensington) and Ampleforth College, which his father had preferred over Eton. He read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a member of Footlights. He graduated with a 2:1.[9] He studied further at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.[10]
Career[edit]
1977–1999: Acting career[edit]
Fellowes also wrote several romantic novels in the 1970s, under the pseudonym Rebecca Greville.[11] Other films in which Fellowes has appeared include Full Circle (1977), Priest of Love (1981), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1989, as Noël Coward), Damage (1992), Shadowlands (1993), Jane Eyre (1996), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Regeneration (1997) and Place Vendôme (1998). He has continued his acting career while writing. As an actor, Fellowes began his acting career at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. He has appeared in several West End productions, including Samuel Taylor's A Touch of Spring, Alan Ayckbourn's Joking Apart and a revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter. He appeared at the National Theatre in The Futurists, written by Dusty Hughes.
Fellowes moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and played a number of small roles on television for the next two years, including a role in Tales of the Unexpected. He believed that his breakthrough had come when he was considered to replace Hervé Villechaize as the assistant on the television series Fantasy Island, but the role went to actor Christopher Hewett instead.[12] He was unable to get an audition for the Disney film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985) in Los Angeles, but was offered the role when he was visiting England. When he asked the film's director why he was not able to get an interview in Los Angeles, he was told that they felt the best actors were in Britain.[13]
After this, Fellowes decided to move back to England to further his career, and soon played a leading role in the 1987 TV series Knights of God as Brother Hugo, the "ambitious and ruthless second-in-command" of a futuristic military cult. Subsequently, in 1991 he played Neville Marsham in Danny Boyle's For the Greater Good and Dr. Jobling in the 1994 BBC adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit. Other notable acting roles included the role of Claud Seabrook in the acclaimed 1996 BBC drama serial Our Friends in the North and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in the BBC drama serial Aristocrats. He portrayed George IV as the Prince Regent twice: first in the film The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) and the second in the 1996 adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Regiment, as well as playing Major Dunnett in Sharpe's Rifles. He also played the part of Kilwillie on Monarch of the Glen. He appeared as the leader of the Hullabaloos in the television adaptation of Arthur Ransome's Coot Club, called Swallows and Amazons Forever! (1984).
2001–2009: Gosford Park and Broadway debut[edit]
Fellowes wrote the script for Gosford Park, which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen in 2002.[14] He also won a Writers Guild of America award for it. In late 2005, Fellowes made his directorial début with the film Separate Lies, for which he won the award for Best Directorial Début from the National Board of Review.[15]
He launched a new series on BBC One in 2004, Julian Fellowes Investigates: A Most Mysterious Murder, which he wrote and introduced onscreen. Fellowes's novel Snobs was published in 2004. It focuses on the social nuances of the upper class and concerns the marriage of an upper middle-class girl to a peer. Snobs was a Sunday Times best-seller. In 2009 his novel Past Imperfect was published. Another Sunday Times best-seller, it deals with the débutante season of 1968, comparing the world then to the world of 2008. He was the presenter of Never Mind the Full Stops, a panel game show broadcast on BBC Four from 2006 to 2007. As a writer, he penned the script to the West End musical Mary Poppins (2006), produced by Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Disney, which opened on Broadway in December 2006.
In 2009, Momentum Pictures and Sony Pictures released The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, for which Fellowes wrote the original screenplay. Other screenwriting credits include Vanity Fair, The Tourist and From Time to Time, which he also directed, and which won Best Picture at the Chicago Children's Film Festival, the Youth Jury Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, Best Picture at the Fiuggi Family Festival in Rome, and the Young Jury Award at Cinemagic in Belfast. His greatest commercial success was The Tourist, which grossed US$278 million worldwide, and for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher McQuarrie and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.[16]
Parliament[edit]
On 13 January 2011, Fellowes was elevated to the peerage, being created Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, of West Stafford in the County of Dorset,[33] and on the same day was introduced in the House of Lords,[34] where he sits on the Conservative benches.[35]
Charity and activism[edit]
Fellowes is involved in volunteer work.[36] He is Chairman of the RNIB appeal for Talking Books. He is a vice-president of the Weldmar Hospicecare Trust[37] and Patron of a number of charities: the southwest branch of Age UK, Changing Faces, Living Paintings, the Rainbow Trust Children's Charity, Breast Cancer Haven and the Nursing Memorial Appeal. He also supports other causes, including charities concerned with the care of those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He recently opened the Dorset office of the southwest adoption charity, Families for Children. On 19 May 2022, Fellowes was awarded The Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. Prior Award winners include author Tom Wolfe, Louis Auchincloss, and David McCullough. Author Washington Irving founded the Society in 1835. Fellowes sits on the Appeal Council for the National Memorial Arboretum and is a Patron of Moviola, an initiative aimed at facilitating rural cinema screenings in the West Country.[38] He also sits on the Arts and Media Honours Committee.
Fellowes supported Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum.[39]
Personal life[edit]
Marriage and family[edit]
On 28 April 1990, Fellowes married Emma Joy Kitchener (born 1963), daughter of Charles Kitchener (1920–1982) and a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent. She is also a great-grandniece of Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener.[40] He proposed to her only 20 minutes after meeting her at a party, "having spent 19 minutes getting up the nerve". On 15 October 1998 the Fellowes family changed its surname from Fellowes to Kitchener-Fellowes.[41][42][43]
Fellowes publicly expressed his dissatisfaction that the proposals to change the rules of royal succession were not extended to hereditary peerages, which had they been would have allowed his wife to succeed her uncle as Countess Kitchener in her own right. He said: "I find it ridiculous that, in 2011, a perfectly sentient adult woman has no rights of inheritance whatsoever when it comes to a hereditary title."[44] Instead, the title became extinct on her uncle's death because there were no male heirs.
On 9 May 2012, queen Elizabeth II issued a royal warrant of precedence granting Lady Fellowes the same rank and style as the daughter of an earl, as would have been due to her if her late father had survived his brother and therefore succeeded to the earldom.[45] Fellowes and his wife have one son, Peregrine Charles Morant Kitchener-Fellowes (born 1991).[42]
Fellowes was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Dorset in 2009.[46] He is also lord of the manor of Tattershall in Lincolnshire,[47][48] and president of the Society of Dorset Men. Their main family home is in Dorset.[49]
His wife was story editor for Downton Abbey and works with charities, including the Nursing Memorial Appeal.[43]