‘I Don't Want To Be In A Corset Any More'

Phyllis Logan has handed in her keys to Downton Abbey and jetted offto the sun for a brand-new role in a tropical paradise

- Vicki Power

Phyllis Logan is sitting at a picnic table, cooling drink in hand, entranced by her surroundings. Beside her, half hidden in the bushes, a cheeky chipmunk is feasting off peanuts stolen from the bar, while overhead a kingfisher streaks by in a flash of vibrant blue. ‘Look at that lovely colour,’ says Phyllis, watching the bird in delight. ‘I’ve never seen a blue like it.’

She looks rather like a kingfisher herself today, dressed as she is in blue floaty blouse and matching capri pants. In fact, with her long brown hair flowing loose round her shoulders and her happy, relaxed features, she’s unrecognisable as the redoubtable Mrs Hughes from Downton Abbey. Poor old Mrs Hughes – always constrained by a heavy black uniform over a constricting corset, the sombre shade enlivened only by a bunch of keys dangling from a chain around her neck. She seemed permanently weighed down as much by her role as the housekeeper as her drab costume.

‘Yes, Mrs Hughes tended to be a glass half-empty kind of person,’ says Phyllis, 61, who’s played her for six years, and reassuringly, still retains that familiar Paisley accent, ‘Whereas I’m just the opposite – I’m definitely a glass-full woman!’

Impossible, too, to imagine Mrs Hughes transported from the misty Yorkshire countryside to this technicolour, steamy paradise in the Indian Ocean. For we’ve met in Sri Lanka, where Phyllis is filming The