Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes is a British screenwriter, novelist and actor whose best-known work examines the rules of class and inheritance. Born in Cairo in 1949, he studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Before becoming widely known as a writer, he worked in film and television, including a recurring role as Lord Kilwillie in the BBC series *Monarch of the Glen*.

Fellowes wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s 2001 film *Gosford Park*. Set at an English country-house shooting party in 1932, the film follows both the aristocratic guests and the servants who attend them as a murder investigation unfolds. Its upstairs-and-downstairs structure anticipated the setting of Fellowes’s most successful television creation, *Downton Abbey*. His *Gosford Park* script won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

*Downton Abbey* premiered on ITV in 2010 and ran for six seasons, ending in 2015. It follows the Crawley family and their household staff from the sinking of the *Titanic* in 1912 through the social changes of the 1920s. Fellowes wrote the series and later wrote its feature-film continuations. Among its central figures are Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham; his daughter Mary; and the household’s butler, Charles Carson. The series made an international success of a story rooted in a particular English estate and the people whose livelihoods depended on it.

Fellowes has also written novels. His 2004 debut, *Snobs*, portrays English upper-class society through a marriage that crosses social boundaries. *Belgravia*, published in 2016, begins at a ball held in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo and follows the consequences of a concealed family history. He adapted it for television in 2020. Another television project, *The Gilded Age*, premiered on HBO in 2022. Set in 1880s New York, it centres on tensions between established families and newly wealthy arrivals, including the ambitious Russell family.

His work for the stage includes the book for the musical *Mary Poppins* and the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of *School of Rock*. He also adapted Anthony Trollope’s novel *Doctor Thorne* for a 2016 television miniseries. In 2011, Fellowes was made a life peer as Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and took a seat in the House of Lords. Across screen, stage and fiction, his recurring subject is not simply wealth, but the obligations, exclusions and opportunities created by social rank.