The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Counting Down to the End of....Downton Abbey
ifyoucantfixit:
--- Quote from: southendmd on January 15, 2012, 06:09:05 pm ---These boys are too cute!
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW9WZQi4Vpw&feature=related[/youtube]
--- End quote ---
Oh thank you!! That was awesome.
brianr:
They are repeating series 2 here now. I watched for half an hour but it is really too soon to see it again. I did pick up more of Maggie's one liners after reading the review here When I saw the adverts I thought it was for series 3 but I gather that is not showing until the 2nd half of the year.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/8789982/Downton-Abbey-Theres-a-wedding-a-funeral-and-a-sex-scene.-Guess-which-one-Im-in....html
Downton Abbey:
'There’s a wedding, a funeral and a
sex scene. Guess which one I’m in...
Everyone is wondering what will become of Lady Mary.
Actress Michelle Dockery lets us into a few secrets about
playing Downton Abbey ’s leading lady.
By Glenda Cooper
27 Sep 2011 6:30AM BST
Downton Abbey's Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Mary
(Michelle Dockery)
If Matthew Crawley, the middle-class lawyer turned heir to an earldom, had not already been sent to the trenches in the new series of Downton Abbey, then public outcry would seen him dispatched there anyway. For Crawley (Dan Stevens) broke his cousin Lady Mary ’s heart by turning up with a new fiancée, of whom the Dowager Countess sniffily remarked: “I suppose looks aren’t everything.”
“Matthew is happy, and that’s all that matters to Mary,” asserts Michelle Dockery, the actress who plays Lady Mary. “She’s still deeply in love and full of regret, but she has to move on.”
Ah yes, the complicated love life of Lady Mary – the cold and snobbish eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham – has proved one of the biggest draws of Downton. In the first series, the naughty aristocrat managed to smuggle a Turkish diplomat into her bed, where he promptly (and inconveniently) expired.
Now with her on-off entanglement with Matthew clearly off, she is considering a proposal from newspaper magnate Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen) – but with such a scandalous past, is it wise to get involved? Particularly as Matthew’s fiancée Lavinia and Sir Richard have a secret that links them...
No wonder 10 million of us tuned in for the latest instalment of Julian Fellowes’s tale of battles among the bustles, figures which trounced the BBC’s Spooks. The series has not only scooped four Emmys, but has just been named by the Guinness Book of Records as the most critically acclaimed TV show.
Forget the clunking lines (William, the footman, now clearly designated as First World War cannon fodder, says of his desire to get to the battlefield, “I’ll be beggared if it’s over before I get there”) and the coincidences (Matthew and evil footman Thomas bump into each other during a battle that claimed 623,000 casualties on the Allied side alone), the period drama is perfect Sunday night fare: sex, blackmail and wonderful gowns.
Yet the actress who plays Lady Mary says the aristocrat would have had nothing to do with her in real life: “Oh, no – Lady Mary would never have talked to me – I’d have been in service,” says Essex girl Dockery. “In fact, I asked my nan recently if any of our family had been in service, and she reckons they were.”
Dockery’s porcelain-white skin and cut-glass tones would give any Lady a run for their money, but in reality she comes from Chadwell Heath, her father is a former lorry driver turned surveyor and her mother delivers meals on wheels.
Despite having no theatrical bent themselves, her parents encouraged their youngest daughter to pursue acting. “I think my parents knew before I did that I was going to be an actress because I was doing impressions of Margaret Thatcher at the age of four.”
Her A-level drama teacher helped Dockery, now 29, apply for a three-week course at the National Youth Theatre (“I walked in and it was like winning the lottery; I knew this was what I wanted to do”). She then took a year out to save up to go to the Guildhall drama school – jobs included working in a newspaper recruitment office and as an assistant at the NYT. Her big break came in 2008 as Eliza Doolittle in Sir Peter Hall’s production where she won rave reviews and was spotted by a Downton producer.
Dockery muses on the reasons for the show’s success: “It feels like a familiar period drama. But because it’s not a remake, or an adaptation of Austen or Dickens, the audience is seeing these stories for the first time and so they feel it is theirs. And no one knows the ending of an episode, in the way you would if it was an Austen adaptation.”
There was some cynicism whether ITV could pull off a high-production-value drama (each episode cost £1 million). Dockery says that scrupulous attention to detail put paid to that. “We have Alistair Bruce, a historian on set… Even when we’re just in the background of a scene, we’re given dialogue that’s scripted and when we’re not eating we have to put our hands in our lap.
“Julian [Fellowes] gets very annoyed if he watches something back and it’s not correct. One of the footmen wasn’t wearing gloves in one scene and Hugh [Bonneville] was wearing the wrong suit for walking in another, and we had to reshoot.”
The second series runs from 1916-1919 and features scenes from the trenches, while Downton Abbey is being turned into a convalescent home for soldiers. “It wouldn’t feel right if too much time was taken away from the house,” says Dockery. “The abbey itself is like a character.”
Lady Mary herself now has decisions to make. At 26, and “dangerously close to being on the shelf”, she becomes involved with Sir Richard, despite her father declaring that he doesn’t want “a hawker of newspaper scandal” in the house. “[Sir Richard’s] right for her in many ways,” says Dockery. “It’s like a business partnership rather than a romance. They would do well together in society, but Matthew is always there.
The problem is that they have this friendship – they become good friends in the second series.” (In fact, Dockery and Stevens are good friends; they had worked together on the BBC’s The Turn of the Screw. )
Lady Mary also has to get her hands dirty in the war effort. “She has to muck in… she does even end up wearing an apron at one point.” Unthinkable! For one of Downton ’s highlights is the fabulous clothes that Lady Mary wears. Although she is in casual jumper and jeans today, Dockery yearns for more formal times.
“I think we’ve lost our femininity a little,” she says. “It was a wonderful period when you would dress for dinner. Even wearing your Sunday best for church – it’s a shame we’ve lost that.”
In this series, though, Downton’s clothes have become slightly more comfortable – “In two outfits I’m not even wearing a corset!” – a relief to the actress given the 12-hour days and six-day weeks spent filming.
During breaks, Dockery says she would “take out my guitar and sit with Elizabeth [McGovern, who plays the Countess] with our skirts hoicked up playing country music. Otherwise, I hang out with Laura Carmichael and Jessica Brown-Findlay [who play her younger sisters] watching Mad Men on our laptops.”
Singing with McGovern on set blossomed into a collaboration: Dockery is recording backing vocals for McGovern’s band, Sadie and the Hotheads.
An accomplished jazz singer, she’s also working with the famous Ronnie Scott’s club, as well as rehearsing for Joe Wright’s new film, Anna Karenina. Outside work, she lives with her architect boyfriend in fashionable Clerkenwell.
But her main priority is the remaining two weeks of filming at Highclere for the Downton Christmas special, and she’s cautious about what she can reveal. Could the flu pandemic remove inconvenient characters to bring Mary and Matthew together? “Everyone gets caught up in the flu pandemic one way or another.”
Dockery goes on: “So much of the fate of Downton depends on Matthew’s choice of wife. They [Matthew and Mary] are an ideal pairing. The audience will be rooting for them, like the family is. But Mary missed her chance. It’ll be interesting to see how the audience take to Lavinia and Carlisle – maybe they’ll change their minds.”
But what firm details can she give? “There’s a wedding, a funeral and a sex scene. I’m in two – no, wait,” she corrects herself. “I’m in one of those. The thing is, I can see people will think that I am involved in a particular one of those three, but I’m not. People will be really surprised.”
“And I can say that the incident with the Turkish diplomat comes back to haunt Mary in the second series. I can’t tell you why, but it could literally bring down the whole of the Crawley family – it’s huge.”
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/8782648/Downton-Abbey-ITV1-episode-two-review.html
Downton Abbey
ITV1, episode two, review
Serena Davies gets emotional over the second episode of
the new series of ITV1's popular period soap Downton Abbey.
By Serena Davies
25 Sep 2011 10:15PM BST
Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen) and Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) in
episode two of the second series of Downton Abbey
Well it didn’t take long for emotions to run as high as those preposterous spires that jostle for position along the upper reaches of Downton Abbey itself. If it wasn’t the unspoken passion of Lady Mary, it was Anna’s stricken little face after Bates’s abandonment of her, or Edith’s dismay at her fast-thwarted amour for the local farmer.
And that was just the romance, which we got in pre-war Downton too. But now there’s bodily harm to deal with as well. Tonight there was shell shock, a suicide and the execution of Mrs Padmore’s nephew for cowardice. Rarely has a second episode of a long series been so packed with miserable incidents.
The Great War is looking like it’s going to cast a very serious pall indeed over Downton Abbey, as of course it must. And (Julian) Fellowes’s decision to concentrate on those at home rather than the soldiers at the front is proving an excellent one, giving the viewer some genuine insight into the helpless anxiety of those who were left behind.
It was left to the Dowager Countess alone to give us the occasional laugh. Her monopoly of all the decent lines grows only greater, or perhaps Maggie Smith’s performance is soaring to even more impressive heights. “The truth is neither here nor there, it’s the look of the thing that matters,” was my favourite of the night. In joint second came the admonition to Edith over her eagerness to drive: “This is not Toad of Toad Hall!” (Yes, Fellowes has done his research – The Wind in the Willows came out in 1908). And her dismissal of the pedigree of the family her daughter married into: “They were no great threat to the Plantagenets.”
In all it was a wonderful episode, if one requiring hankies. The one small caveat is that Lady Mary’s new beau, the alarmingly bourgeois Sir Richard Carlisle (that’s not a hereditary “Sir”), seems far too soft spoken and inoffensive to be quite the threat to propriety the Dowager Countess and the rest of her family seem to believe him to be. But then Iain Glen, who plays him, is a subtle, clever actor, and can do nasty with the best of them when the moment truly requires it.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8769654/How-Downton-minds-its-manners.html
How Downton
minds its manners
Vicki Power meets Alastair Bruce,
the royal equerry in charge of
historical accuracy and etiquette
on Downton Abbey.
By Vicki Power
16 Sep 2011 7:03PM BST
Downton Abbey: etiquette expert Alastair Bruce.
As Downton Abbey swept us magically back to Edwardian England last year, within its vast fanbase was a small but vocal contingent who took to the internet to decry the drama’s perceived anachronisms. Rather like the moths that Bates strives to keep away from the Earl of Grantham’s suits, they seemed to relish picking holes in it.
So, with a new series starting tomorrow, it’s worth noting that Downton ’s producers actually go to great lengths to ensure that everything from manners to medals are suitably “period”. Their historical adviser, present on set nearly every day, knows more about etiquette – or “protocol” as he prefers to call it – than Mrs Patmore has cooked hot dinners.
He is Alastair Bruce OBE, 51, Queen’s herald, Territorial Army colonel and equerry to Prince Edward. We meet on a rainy day at Highclere Castle during the filming of the new series.
He is dressed as a First World War colonel, since he’s being an extra for the day, for fun. But Bruce’s main job is to keep an eye on everyone else. “Today I’m trying to get the extras playing soldiers – some of whom look like a sack of potatoes in uniform – to stand in a military manner,” says Bruce, in the finely modulated tones of the well bred.
An expert on the British monarchy, heraldry, medals and country house etiquette, Bruce is an impressive repository of information. As Sky News’s commentator at the royal wedding, for example, he broke the story that David Beckham was wearing his OBE on the wrong lapel. “I almost wish I hadn’t done it now,” he says. “I wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass him.”
Bruce’s remit for Downton covers everything from how doors are opened to how a character gets out of a car. In fact, automobile egress remains preoccupation of today’s filming: a general’s entourage is arriving at Downton. “We’re using a vintage Rolls-Royce, and the person who owns the car said that the best way to come out of it is backwards, but you can’t have a general sticking his bum out at the people waiting to greet him,” chuckles Bruce. “Also military people always turn up with their caps on, and if you arrived with a cap you simply could not get out of that car while the roof was on.” So the car’s roof is being removed.
It’s the second change Bruce has requested today. In a dining scene, “the director wanted the food to be brought in the same door the family enters through,” snorts Bruce. “I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think so!’ It has to come in from the servery.”
Table protocol is a particular Bruce bugbear. For example, he never puts Lord and Lady Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) at either end of the dining table: “It’s twaddle that they would sit at the ends.” In fact, they would sit in the middle. “From there you have much more chance to interact and control what’s going on. The ends of the table are more junior positions.”
Then there’s the posture problem. “Most of the younger generation have not been brought up to sit up straight,” says Bruce. “But 100 years ago children would not have been allowed to sit at the dinner table until they had learned to.”
Bruce has also had the shoe brushes changed, spotted the wrong rank on the shoulder of one of Bonneville’s uniforms and asked the same actor to take his hands out of his pockets (an anachronism).
While Bruce says it would be “arrogant” to assume he gets everything right, an hour in his company suggests he firmly believes there is always a correct way of doing things. “I was in the Scots Guards,” he says. “That gave me a desire to deliver the best, because, to them, excellence is the only thing that matters.” Downton ’s authenticity, it seems, is in safe hands.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version