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Meet the go-to-guy when you need a story about the upper classes
Julian Fellowes knows quite a bit about the higher reaches of the English class system. Cambridge educated, the son of a diplomat named Peregrine, and the father of an 18-year-old son also called Peregrine, Fellowes is married to a woman named Emma, who, by the way, is the great, great-niece of Earl Kitchener and was once the lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent.
After his early career as a successful, but not stellar, actor on the West End and on TV in Monarch of the Glen, Fellowes has found serious success in the past decade as a novelist and screenwriter who can zero in on the foibles of the members of the ruling class and their interactions with those beneath them - for both dramatic and comic effect.
His novels Snobs (2004) and Past Imperfect (2009), the film he directed in 2005 Separate Lies, and of course his screenwriting Oscar for Robert Altman's 2002 Gosford Park have made him the go-to-guy when you need a story about the upstairs and downstairs people trying to keep secrets from each other.
