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 does she do?" "She's a producer." Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn't mean much more than "she's a member of the human race.
My own belief is that most people are trying to do their best. It doesn't mean they have no nasty side, or that they don't have a bad temper, or that they have never done anything they feel ashamed of. But fiction operates on people waking up trying to be horrible, and I don't think most people are trying to be horrible.
I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the Old World.
Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.
I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.
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.
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,
We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
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 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.'
One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.
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.
Although 'L.A. Confidential' is a long movie, there's never a moment when you think, 'I'm loving this... but when's dinner?' Each time I see it, I discover something I hadn't noticed before. It has a tremendous skill in developing all the subplots.
What a difference a day makes, ... The Oscar gave me all these opportunities. It's a magic wand.