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
What the Americans want to see is life in their drama. Life of all sorts: hard lives, easy lives, or lives which, like most of ours, are a mixture of the two.
Nothing is harder to dramatize than happiness.
If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.
When you are desperate to get someone who isn't all that interested in you, you lay siege as hard as you can.
To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.
The '20s are a very interesting period to me.
I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.
One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.
We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
Tom and I wanted to make this film before I won the Oscar, but I couldn't get the backing to set it up, and he wasn't considered big enough to play the lead,
There is almost nothing in your house that does not tell something about you.
There isn't much point in the whole 'celebrity' nonsense unless one is prepared to go out on a limb and, one hopes, speak up for some under-represented section of the community.
When you make your first film, there is a hell of a lot to think about, and you've got to have a gut understanding of your material.
Well, you've got to be known for something. The danger of extreme versatility is that you don't spring to mind for anything.