Julian Fellowes
Julian Fellowes
Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and Deputy Lieutenant,is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, and a Conservative peer of the House of Lords. Fellowes is primarily known as the author of several Sunday Times best-seller novels; for the screenplay for the film Gosford Park, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2002; and as the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning British television series Downton Abbey...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth7 August 1949
CityCairo, Egypt
You never know people, do you? You can work with 'em for twenty years; you don't know 'em at all.
I think it's always a challenge to adapt something from one medium to another - a novel into a film or a play into a movie or whatever.
Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.
Sometimes you watch one of your favorite shows from 20 years ago and you think, 'I'm loving this, but golly, it's going at the speed of a snail.'
The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
The movies are funny, in one way, because you think of everyone being as beautiful as the dawn, but that isn't true.
My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.
The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: 'A funny little man asked me to marry him.'
When people are feeling insecure about their jobs and there are cuts to be made, it's hard to put up an argument that the film industry needs funding.
What's difficult for American audiences is that they're used to a system here where you can get an actor for five years or even seven, and that is signed for at the audition. Whereas in England, no agent will give you an actor for more than three years.
What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.
You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.
Harsh reality is always better than false hope.
If you're in the movie or in television, your failures are very public, and so are your successes. You weigh them up against each other, really.