Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford (born 17 August 1949), known professionally as Julian Fellowes, is an English actor, novelist, writer, producer, film director, and Conservative peer. He has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and two Emmy Awards as well as nominations for four BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, two Olivier Awards, and a Tony Award.
Fellowes won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the murder mystery film Gosford Park (2001). He gained renown as the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning ITV television series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and the HBO series The Gilded Age (2022–present). He also wrote books for stage musicals, including Mary Poppins (2004) and School of Rock (2015).
Fellowes was born in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of four boys, to Peregrine Edward Launcelot Fellowes (1912–1999) and his British wife, Olwen Mary (née Stuart-Jones). His father was a diplomat and Arabist who campaigned to have Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, restored to his throne during World War II. His great-grandfather was John Wrightson, a pioneer in agricultural education and the founder of Downton Agricultural College. Peregrine's uncle was Peregrine Forbes Morant Fellowes (1883–1955), Air Commodore and DSO.
Fellowes has three older brothers: actor Nicholas Peregrine James; writer David Andrew; and playwright Roderick Oliver. The siblings' childhood home was at Wetherby Place, South Kensington, and afterwards at Chiddingly, East Sussex, where Fellowes lived from August 1959 until November 1988, and where his parents are buried.
The house in Chiddingly, which had been owned by the whodunit writer C. H. B. Kitchin, was within easy reach of London where his father, who had been a diplomat, worked as an executive for Shell. Part of Fellowes' formative years were also spent in Nigeria, where his father helped run Shell operations during the transition from the colonial era to Nigeria's Independence. Fellowes has described him as one "of that last generation of men who lived in a pat of butter without knowing it. My mother put him on a train on Monday mornings and drove up to London in the afternoon. At the flat she'd be waiting in a snappy little cocktail dress with a delicious dinner and drink. Lovely, really."
The friendship his family developed with another family in the village, the Kingsleys, influenced Fellowes. David Kingsley was head of British Lion Films, the company responsible for many Peter Sellers comedies. Sometimes "glamorous figures" would visit the Kingsleys' house. Fellowes said that he thinks he "learnt from David Kingsley that you could actually make a living in the film business."
Fellowes was educated at several private schools in Britain, including Wetherby School, St Philip's School (a Catholic boys school in South Kensington) and Ampleforth College, which his father had attended. He read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a member of Footlights. He graduated with a 2:1. He studied further at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In July 1973, The Stage gave a good review to the performance of Fellowes and Osmund Bullock as the Larrabee brothers in Sabrina Fair, a Webber Douglas end-of-term play.
1977–1999: Acting and novelist career
As an actor, Fellowes began his acting career at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. He has appeared in several West End productions, including Samuel Taylor's A Touch of Spring, Alan Ayckbourn's Joking Apart and a revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter. He appeared at the National Theatre in The Futurists, written by Dusty Hughes. Fellowes wrote several romantic novels in the 1970s, under the pseudonym Rebecca Greville. He has continued his acting career while writing.
Fellowes moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and played a number of small roles on television for the next two years, including a role in Tales of the Unexpected. He believed that his breakthrough had come when he was considered to replace Hervé Villechaize as the assistant on the television series Fantasy Island, but the role went to actor Christopher Hewett instead. He was unable to get an audition for the Disney film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985) in Los Angeles, but was offered the role when he was visiting England. When he asked the film's director why he was not able to get an interview in Los Angeles, he was told that they felt the best actors were in Britain.
After this, Fellowes decided to move back to England to further his career, and soon played a leading role in the 1987 TV series Knights of God as Brother Hugo, the "ambitious and ruthless second-in-command" of a futuristic military cult. Subsequently, in 1991 he played Neville Marsham in Danny Boyle's For the Greater Good and Dr. Jobling in the 1994 BBC adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit. Other notable acting roles included the role of Claud Seabrook in the acclaimed 1996 BBC drama serial Our Friends in the North and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in the BBC drama serial Aristocrats. He portrayed George IV as the Prince Regent twice: first in the film The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) and the second in the 1996 adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Regiment, as well as playing Major Dunnett in Sharpe's Rifles and the Prince Regent in Sharpe's Regiment. He also played the part of Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen. He appeared as the leader of the Hullabaloos in the television adaptation of Arthur Ransome's Coot Club, called Swallows and Amazons Forever! (1984).
2001–2009: Gosford Park and Broadway debut
Fellowes wrote the script for Gosford Park, which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen in 2002. He also won a Writers Guild of America award for it. In late 2005, Fellowes made his directorial debut with the film Separate Lies, for which he won the National Board of Review Award for Best Directorial Debut.
He launched a new series on BBC One in 2004, Julian Fellowes Investigates: A Most Mysterious Murder, which he wrote and introduced onscreen. Fellowes's novel Snobs was published in 2004. It focuses on the social nuances of the upper class and concerns the marriage of an upper middle-class girl to a peer. Snobs was a Sunday Times best-seller. In 2009 his novel Past Imperfect was published. Another Sunday Times best-seller, it deals with the débutante season of 1968, comparing the world then to the world of 2008. He was the presenter of Never Mind the Full Stops, a panel game show broadcast on BBC Four from 2006 to 2007. As a writer, he penned the script to the West End musical Mary Poppins (2004), produced by Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Disney, which opened on Broadway in November 2006.
In 2009, Momentum Pictures and Sony Pictures released The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, for which Fellowes wrote the original screenplay. Other screenwriting credits include Vanity Fair, The Tourist and From Time to Time, which he also directed, and which won Best Picture at the Chicago Children's Film Festival, the Youth Jury Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, Best Picture at the Fiuggi Family Festival in Rome, and the Young Jury Award at Cinemagic in Belfast. His greatest commercial success was The Tourist, which grossed US$278 million worldwide, and for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher McQuarrie and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
He created the hugely successful and critically acclaimed period drama Downton Abbey for ITV1 in 2010. The series starred a large ensemble cast which included Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Dan Stevens, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Penelope Wilton, and Maggie Smith. Fellowes won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series as well as a Broadcasting Press Guild award for writing Downton Abbey. He also received nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award. He wrote two follow-up films Downton Abbey (2019) and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) both of which were released theatrically and were well received commercially and critically.