People PEOPLE Downton Abbey

DID YOU KNOW? EVEN DEVOTED DOWNTONISTAS MAY NOT BE FAMILIAR WITH THESE FUN FACTS MAGGIE SMITH DIDN’T WATCH THE SERIES DURING ITS SIX SEASONS Gillian Anderson was originally offered the part of Cora. Alastair Bruce, Downton Abbey’s historical adviser, made a cameo in each season. Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith) kept a folder on her phone of GIFs to make Maggie Smith laugh, titled “pictures for Maggie.” Smith was especially fond of ones featuring cats. Harry Hadden-Paton, who plays Herbert Pelham, is the godson of Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. There was only one bedroom set for Edith, Mary and Cora—it was redecorated for each character. Elizabeth McGovern (Countess Cora) has a folk-rock band called Sadie and the Hotheads. IT’S A NEW ERA AT DOWNTON ABBEY! CATCH UP WITH THE CRAWLEYS & THEIR DEVOTED STAFF IN NEW PEOPLE INTERVIEWS •…

It was, to be sure, an unlikely megahit. When Downton Abbey first graced U.S. public television screens more than a decade ago, the Masterpiece series seemed tailored for the kind of Anglophilic niche audience that thrills to adaptations of Jane Austen and E. M. Forster (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Executive producer Gareth Neame and creator-writer Julian Fellowes offered up a post-Edwardian England populated by nobles—the Earl and Countess of Grantham, their daughters and his formidable mother; along with their butler, housekeeper, maids, footmen, cooks, et al. It all seemed genteelly out of step while Americans binged on sociopathic antiheroes, rampaging zombies and reality stars. But Downton Abbey became, in 21st-century parlance, a thing. The interwoven narratives, enacted by a spot-on cast, weren’t period pieces but timelessly relatable…

FOR SIX SEASONS, DOWNTON ABBEY enchanted television audiences with its addicting narratives and richly compelling characters. Inside a grand Yorkshire castle, the aristocratic Crawleys and their domestic servants played out personal dramas—love and death, triumph and scandal—amid tumultuous world events that unfolded from 1912 through the Roaring Twenties. Creator-writer Julian Fellowes’s masterpiece vaulted onto the big screen with a wildly successful 2019 feature film—fans couldn’t wait for the sequel, which finally arrived in the spring of 2022. In Downton Abbey: A New Era, the Crawleys are looking to shore up their flagging finances—and so they rent out their home to a silent-movie production company to make a picture. For the duration of the shoot, most of the family—including the Earl and Countess of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) and Lady…

THEY BETTER BE WARNED, the British are coming!” bellows Jim Carter, as semiretired head butler Mr. Carson, to his wife, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), near the beginning of Downton Abbey: A New Era. When series creator Julian Fellowes reteamed with director Simon Curtis in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a second Downton film, they ambitiously set out to send about half of the cast to the Côte d’Azur while the other half remained at home, where the Crawleys’ grand castle morphs into a movie location. Veteran actors Hugh Dancy, Dominic West and Laura Haddock—who play the movie within the movie’s director and stars—were thrilled by the opportunity to join the Downton family—and frankly to be working during COVID at all. “I was at home with the children and…

It may not be an equitable partnership by today’s standards, but the marriage of Cora and Robert Crawley is a paradigm of enduring love. Played by Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern, the couple have navigated cultural differences—she the Cincinnati-born daughter of a Jewish dry-goods magnate, he a stalwart member of the firmly Anglican British upper class. Together they share the occasional eye roll at the tensions of family life, when even a grand home isn’t always big enough to contain the annoyances of drama-queen daughters and problematic mothers-in-law (his mother played by the indomitable Maggie Smith, and hers by Shirley MacLaine, who joined in season 3 as an occasional—and bracingly irreverent—visitor). Over the years Cora and Robert both experience illicit impulses as well as shared griefs, particularly over the death…

AS LADY MARY Talbot (neé Crawley), Michelle Dockery perfects the art of a withering glance, especially when long-suffering sister Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) is within sight. Mary is also cool under pressure and an adept problem solver, with a remarkable ability to move through tragedies, whether scandalously losing her virginity to one Mr. Pamuk, who dies in the act, or losing her husband, Matthew (Dan Stevens), in a car wreck when she’s just given birth. But for all her brisk brilliance, Lady Mary does occasionally show a soft spot; she’s devoted to Matthew, charming with second husband Henry (Matthew Goode) and tender with stately butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter). Says Dockery: “I don’t think I’d change anything about Mary.” The actress shares why this lady of the manor bows to…