Fashionable ‘House’ : A&E; AIRS BRITISH HIT FROM THE WOMEN BEHIND ‘UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS’

Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins have woven their storytelling magic again.

Two decades ago, the well-respected British actresses created the memorable Emmy-winning series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which chronicled the lives of the wealthy Bellamy family and their staff from the turn of the century through the late 1920s.

Marsh also starred in the series, which aired on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre,” as the endearing Cockney maid, Rose.

“I had done ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ partly so I could play Rose,” said Marsh, who had $15 to her name when she and Atkins sold “Upstairs, Downstairs” to London Weekend Television.

The Marsh-Atkins team seems to have struck gold again with the serialized drama “The House of Eliott.” The first 12 episodes aired on the BBC last fall and was such a huge hit that a new season is in production.

“House of Eliott” makes its U.S. premiere Sunday on cable’s Arts and Entertainment, which co-produced the series. Though Marsh and Atkins don’t appear in the series (“there was nothing for us”), Marsh introduces each installment.

The lavishly produced drama is set in London in 1920 and tells the story of the beautiful Eliott sisters, Beatrice (Stella Gonet) and Evangeline (Louise Lombard). Their lives are forever changed when their father, a well-respected doctor, dies. Uneducated, untrained and sheltered from the real world, the two sisters discover their father, a widower, had a secret life for decades and left them nearly penniless. Both sisters, though, have a natural flair for designing and making clothes and soon find work in wealthy fashion establishments.

Marsh said that after the success of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” neither producers from England nor the U.S. clamored for them to create another series.

“I think there was slightly a sense we were actors and that was that,” she said. “It was another string to our bow. We have had other ideas. We’ve talked and written things but we never really pushed anything very much until this. In the last year or so, we both have become more and more keen on writing. We really wanted this to succeed.”

Researching the 1920s was easy, Marsh said, because the decade was within living memory. “My mother was a young woman in the ‘20s,” Marsh said. “There are a lot of diaries and novels about that time.”

The two also are intrigued with the fashion world. “I’m especially interested in clothes from every point of view,” Marsh said. “I think people who dress badly are very interesting. If you are going to cover yourself for warmth and decency, you might as well cover yourself interestingly or well.”

Clothing, she said, changed the lives of women during the decade. “Five years before, women were wearing corsets and long dresses,” she said. “They had to wear those things that flattened their bosom, but otherwise they were very free. The clothes changed almost overnight. It’s very interesting from a fashion point of view, but also very interesting from a sociological point of view.”

“House of Eliott” illustrates women were far from liberated in the ‘20s. “They were controlled by men,” she said. “You will see throughout the series over and over again, however clever and talented (the sisters) are, it is always the men who make life difficult for them.”

Most women of that era were not educated. “In a well-born family, the sons would have been educated,” Marsh said. “The girls simply would have been treated appallingly. I know a woman who is my age who had very little education for the same reason. To this day, if you got an upper-middle class family with two girls and one boy and only enough money to educate one, they wouldn’t educate the girls. (The Eliotts’) father gave no thought he would die leaving nothing, with his daughters not equipped to do anything at all.”

In short, the ‘20s were anything but roaring in England. “The miners’ strike was over, but the miners were going back to work with less money, not more,” she said.

What Marsh found intriguing are the parallels between contemporary England and the England of 70 years ago. “Unemployment is really very bad in England now,” she said. “It was appalling then. There were three million people out of work in 1922. It was an extraordinary time, the contrast between the very, very rich and the poor. It was nauseating.”

Just as in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Marsh made sure “House of Eliott” served up social commentary. “I always fight for what I see as political content,” she said. “I don’t think we have got the right to make a flippant story about women in frocks without showing the other side of the coin.”

“The House of Eliott” premieres Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m. on A rts & Entertainment.