A Late Starter Catches Up

How’s this for a story pitch? A bald and avuncular character actor turning 50 comes to the painful conclusion that life has no marvelous surprises in store for him. The actor, a child of an “imperial family” who’s done a bit of writing on the side, will continue to play upper-class snobs on British TV series with the occasional bit in James Bond movies when toffs and/or twits are required.

The actor is living out his days as an obscure, parochial player on the telly, until he gets a call from a celebrated American filmmaker, who asks the actor to write a screenplay for him. The actor’s upper-class background makes him a natural to write a murder-mystery set in a stately English home in the 1930s. The actor writes the screenplay--the first one he’s ever had filmed--and gets nominated for an Academy Award.

It sounds like the kind of movie Frank Capra might have made--and certainly not the kind made by Robert Altman, who in fact did direct the film written by British actor Julian Fellowes: “Gosford Park.” The story does seem to be heading to a Capra-esque ending: The screenplay has won the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay as well as awards from many critics’ groups. Curiously, or perversely, in a stroke the cynical Altman himself would approve of, Fellowes did not win either of the two BAFTA Awards (from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the British equivalent of the Oscars) for which he was nominated.

“I thought I’d win one of them, and I didn’t win either,” Fellowes recollected as he sat poolside in Los Angeles, having lunch in his blue blazer and khaki slacks the day after winning the WGA Award earlier this month. “It was a bit depressing. Although I did hear a wonderful thing from one of the judges afterwards. Nice woman. She came up and said, ‘I suppose you’re a bit disappointed.’ I said, ‘I am a bit, really, but we go on.’ And she said, ‘We felt you had such success with this film, you didn’t need our recognition.’ I said, ‘I think you have to be English to get that, really.’

“Extraordinary. The English don’t reward success. They reward aspiration but not success.”

Fellowes was born in the Anglo-American Hospital on the banks of the Nile in Egypt in 1949. His father was with the British Embassy and the third generation of empire-building Felloweses not to be born in England. Julian returned with his family to England when he was 2.

“The Labor government passed a law in 1948 which said if you’re not born in England and your father’s not born in England, you’re not English. Your mother didn’t figure then. Incredibly, the mother was not a factor until the reign of Mrs. Thatcher. Isn’t that extraordinary? My father was frightfully vague and never did anything about my passport.

“When I was 11, my father was posted to Africa and we had to fly out there for school. When I applied for my passport, they said, ‘Oh, no, you must apply to the Egyptian Embassy. This child is Egyptian.’ In the end, it was sorted out by pulling some strings. I thought, what do people do who have no strings to pull in those situations?”

It was this deep knowledge of the people who pull strings that led Altman to hire Fellowes to write “Gosford Park.”

“Julian’s most responsible for this film happening,” Altman said by phone from his New York office. “He knew what fork to eat with and what side of the cup to throw up on. We had a butler, a housemaid and a cook in their 80s who’d actually been in service at the time [the ‘30s]. But Julian was our main guru.”

“Not everyone can point to a single person and say, ‘That person changed my life,’” Fellowes says. “Robert Altman has changed my life. He did it by taking a chance on someone when every instinct must have been telling him to find someone more experienced.”

Fellowes attended Webber Douglas Drama School in London after three years at Cambridge. He was heeding advice from his father, who told him: “You have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its own living; you might as well do something amusing.” But his father stopped his son’s allowance after drama school. Fortunately, Fellowes found steady work as an actor.

“My big complaint about acting is you’re underused all the time,” Fellowes says. “You’re working flat out perhaps four months of the year, and so many of the parts don’t require anything. When I was in my early 20s at drama school, I wrote three bodice-rippers that were published. After that, I wrote the odd magazine article. Literary reviews. It was always somewhere in my life. The great thing about writing is that you are used, you are stretched.”

Fellowes had been working steadily, but not happily, on stage in London’s West End from 1974 to 1980. “It wasn’t me,” Fellowes says. “I felt I was leading someone else’s life.” At the same time, his mother died after a lengthy bout with cancer. The combination of his unfulfilling theater work and his mother’s death led him to take a job in the U.S., which eventually brought him to Hollywood, where he spent 21/2 years playing such unsatisfactory roles as the chauffeur in “The Rita Hayworth Story” on TV. I kept coming out from under the staircase saying, ‘Don’t worry, Princess, all will be well.’”

So Fellowes returned to London, where he met and married Emma Kitchener (“the last of the Kitcheners” he jokes, referring to her ancestor, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum). The couple has an 11-year-old son. Six years ago, actor-producer Bob Balaban’s father, who had long been a movie exhibitor in Chicago, suggested his son make a movie from Anthony Trollope’s novel “Eustace Diamonds.” Someone recommended Fellowes do the adaptation. (That project remains on hold, Balaban says.)

“Julian saw through the facades of those fusty novels and made them alive, pulsating and fresh,” Balaban says. Without hesitation, he recommended that Fellowes write “Gosford Park,” an idea Balaban and Altman had concocted.

“My brief was that Robert Altman wanted to make a British film,” Fellowes says. “He thought it would be fun to set it in an English house party in the ‘30s, in a house where there was still a certain class thing going on. The film would pay homage to a kind of Agatha Christie genre. But that’s not what it would be about. What it would be about is an examination of certain master inter-class relationships and be sort of servant-led. And we quite early on came up with this device that you never saw the upstairs people unless there was a servant in the room--which a lot of people don’t notice, but anyway it’s there.

“Then it was up to me to come up with whoever, whatever I wanted in the way of the characters and story. And I remembered this scandal I heard my aunt talking about when I was a child. There was a chap called William Whiteley. He was a great multimillionaire, and he used his female employees much as McCordle [the head of the house played by Michael Gambon] does in the film. And in the end, there was this great moment when they came to him and said there was a young man waiting for him downstairs. He went down and the chap said, ‘I am your son,’ and shot him.

“Working from that, there were lots of things I wanted to say about those people. For instance, there are three types of imperfect marriage among the upper classes: one is the woman who marries a man who is totally offensive to her but has so much money that she can live in a way that only her grandmother lived; the other is the woman who makes an absolutely acceptable class-equal marriage but is bored to sobs; and the third is the one who marries for love but runs the risk of not being able to live in the way that is expected of her. And the three sisters represent all three marriages. And in that fictional family on the screen, just as in many nonfictional families on Earth, the one that is represented as the failure is the one happily married to a man who can’t make money.

“And there are other themes that fascinate me,” Fellowes continues. “One of them is the upper classes’ rejection of popular culture. I’ve grown up with that all my life and, having gone into theater and films, I can talk with moderately successful bankers who’ve made no mark in the world at all and who look down on me from a thousand feet--it doesn’t matter that I’m up for an Oscar, it is nothing to them. What I heard last week from one of my relatives: ‘Very good luck with your play!’”

“Julian’s from a different zone,” says actress Emily Watson, who plays the sexy maid Elsie in “Gosford Park.” “Bob Altman wanted Derek Jacobi [who plays a servant] to iron one of the guests’ newspapers in the afternoon. Julian said no, only in the morning.”

Fellowes said that despite his reputation for improvisation, Altman stayed very close to the script when shooting “Gosford Park.” “Because Bob was so determined to make a very specific, accurate picture about this very arcane group, there was very little improvisation.”

“The way those people talk is so specific, and you could hear it the minute the actors left the page. They sounded modern and middle-class and the vocabulary is so different. Maggie Smith did improvise one line which really makes me laugh: ‘Very difficult color, green.’ That was completely Maggie.

“Of course, that was the great privilege of being there to protect the narrative. By his own admission, Bob doesn’t care about narrative. He said the film’s not a whodunit; it’s a who-cares-whodunit.”

While he talks, Fellowes stares in fascination at the bathers around the hotel pool like the transplanted Englishman of Evelyn Waugh’s great satire of Los Angeles, “The Loved One.” He reflects on being a middle-aged overnight success story with both a sense of wonder and detachment.

“I’m 52 years old,” Fellowes says. “I wrote some TV scripts and I’ve written God knows enough unmade film scripts, but this is the first script for a film that got made. I’m an Oscar nominee no matter what happens. And I think an enormous amount of people who think it’s never going to happen are very encouraged by the fact that here is a guy to whom it happened at an age when most people have given up and assume it’s never going to happen.

“It’s extraordinary to be part of these ceremonies that you’re used to flicking through in crumpled magazines in the dentist’s office. And suddenly you’re there and everyone’s saying: ‘Julian, Julian, look this way.’ Not, of course, if Halle Berry’s coming up the carpet behind you.

“I’m not one of the Brits who hates Hollywood,” he continues. “I’ve always had a very good time here. I think the British establishment’s tendency to patronize the film industry has been their downfall. Someone the other day said, ‘You can tell the stage players at the awards because they walk up the stairs properly. Film people find it so hard if they haven’t got marks.’

“Oh, come on! Wake up! They are the ones people dream of now. They are the ones who engage the public’s imagination. If you want to make the public change their mind about something, make a film about it. Don’t waste your time on a play!”

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Charles Dennis is an actor and playwright whose new play, “A High Class Sort of Heel: An Evening With George Sanders,” will be produced this spring.