As I read the various drafts of Julian Fellowes’ pilot script for Downton Abbey, it was not lost on me that his new invention of the dowager countess (as yet uncast) bore some similarity to Lady Trentham in Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park.
That movie was a precursor to Downton in many different ways. My original pitch to Fellowes had been to expand on the premise of Gosford and reconceive it as a weekly episodic show. When it looked as though ITV were actually going to greenlight the series, our attention turned to casting.
Almost the entire cast came in to audition before being offered the part, but there was no question of asking Maggie to come and meet or deliver some lines for us – that would have been impertinent and inappropriate.
The role of Violet Grantham was certainly not designed for Maggie – she had never done a long-running episodic TV series, so I had little prospect of being able to get her. But once on the page, it did become very clear that it was her, and we had to try our best to secure her. For reasons I cannot quite remember, she agreed.
I think, like me, she knew Fellowes was the best illustrator of this rarefied world and that they could do good work together. In the end, her contribution to Downton Abbey is immeasurable and the show would not have been the huge global hit it became without her.
At the read-through, she greeted me warmly, because this was not our first time at the rodeo. By complete coincidence, I had gone to school with her sons, Chris and Toby. Chris and I were contemporaries, Toby a couple of years younger. Chris and I started work together at the Chichester Festival theatre the day after we left school. We did our best to build sets for the then studio theatre – a marquee. Those sets all fell apart. But it was a start, and we loved it.
We loved her performance because she found the truth of the character and was never ashamed to deliver those barbed lines, in spite of how archaic or antediluvian they may have sounded. Of many aphorisms and “zingers”, everyone recalls the rather brilliant “What is a weekend”, yet she brought the house down with less-remembered bons mots such as her rejections of Lady Sybil’s claim that she was political: “No. She isn’t until she is married, then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.”
She wasn’t remotely like Violet – other than being a woman who was devoted to her family. But she understood Violet. When you work on a script, a character is merely words on a page and just an idea, a template for what it could be. Only once we saw the scenes she played to perfection could we see one of our greatest screen characters come to life.
A favourite scene? When the dowager arrives at the abbey on hearing the news of her granddaughter’s death. As always, she had the steely presence, but for once there was a chink in the armour as she put her arm on the wall to stabilise herself, knowing that she might in fact break at any moment.
She famously did not suffer fools. In an earlier film in the 1990s, I made the mistake of scheduling a very light first day without dialogue. On the second morning, she strolled past me, muttering entirely for my benefit: “All they’ve got me doing on this show is walking up and down bloody corridors.” She could be an intimidating presence for everyone, yet I can attest that the entire cast and crew of Downton, across six seasons and two movies, was honoured to work with this hugely consequential star of stage and screen.
She was particularly close to the actors who played the other members of the family. But I always detected the admiration for the other actors in the company she held in high esteem, such as Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan. Most of all, I remember her huge generosity and affection for the three young actors who played her granddaughters. She loved all her scenes with Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Jessica Brown Findlay, revelling in seeing them take flight at an earlier stage of their careers.
The last Downton film involved the death of the dowager countess and will now be particularly poignant for her Downton friends and family. I am so pleased we conceived of a proper ending for such a remarkable screen character. When she left the set for the final time, the cast and crew lined up outside the abbey and applauded her as she was swept away into her car, privileged to have witnessed this brilliant screen character brought to life by this supremely talented, yet private person.