Julian Fellowes

As the curtain comes down on the much-loved Downton Abbey, its creator talks to Eleanor Doughty about stories, shooting, high society and life after the Crawleys

- By Eleanor Doughty

FOR AS LONG as he can remember, Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, has been squirrelling away stories: things people have told him, things he has read in books. “As a writer, you store things up in your pouch and then later on you’re doing a novel or a play and you think ‘actually, that situation is good — maybe if I just make him a woman then it’ll be fine’.” Since 2010 plenty of these nuggets have been found in the six series of his historical television drama Downton Abbey, and the three subsequent films in its franchise. The third and final film, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, will be released in mid-September.

With this the book is now closed on the Downton universe, which has the Crawley family at its centre. Will he miss them? “I will — for some people Downton is the only thing they know that I’ve done.” But it was time to reach a conclusion: “We have taken the Crawleys from the old world in 1912 and brought them to 1930, recognisable to us with its cinemas, motorcars and aeroplanes.” It was always situated in a reality, he adds. “Fiction is largely the rearrangement of truth. I used real names all the way through where they wouldn’t be offended by it. One friend heard his name [on the series] while he was eating his supper and spat it all over his knee.”