An interview with Julian Fellowes

Having a film-maker of the calibre of Robert Altman direct your first screenplay sounds like an aspiring scriptwriter's fantasy. But it happened to Julian Fellowes with Gosford Park, Altman's take on English countryhouse life, and the experience was every bit as fulfilling - and gruelling - as you might imagine.

Not only was Fellowes called upon to deliver a complex ensemble piece for around 30 - yes 30 - main characters, juggling 25-odd story lines in the requisite 1930s upstairs or downstairs lingo, he was also required on set throughout the 11-week shoot, up at 6am, fine-tuning and changing lines all day - as well as supervising such matters of between-the-wars etiquette as gloves for the butler (he wouldn't have worn them) - before heading home to embark on rewrites till the early hours.

Fellowes is ebulliently grateful for the chance: "For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban," he explains. "But Bob did everything he could to ensure I was the film's sole writer, rather than the platoon normally credited. For that alone I owe him eight pints of blood."

Altman's act of faith has more than paid off. Gosford Park, whose mostly British cast is one of the starriest ever assembled, opened to hugely enthusiastic reviews in the United States on Boxing Day. In the past few weeks Fellowes has crisscrossed the Atlantic with his extremely stylish wife Emma (great-great niece of Kitchener of Khartoum and lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent) attending award ceremonies - so far he's won Best Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics and the Chicago Film Critics. Offers are pouring in from all sides. He is, as he puts it, "in the grip of a madness, which is a strange sensation having been in showbiz for so long".

So who is Julian Fellowes and how did Altman find him?

Fellowes is a well-established actor who is finally putting to good use his years of typecasting as an upper-class blimp. In the anti-Establishment early-1970s, after an acting course at Webber Douglas, he applied to the RSC, but his posh credentials - Ampleforth and Magdalene College, Cambridge - proved so alarming he didn't even get an audition, while the National Theatre patronisingly stated: "We feel your kind of actor is better off on the other side of the river", meaning drawing-room drama in the West End. (Years later he appeared at the National in Futurists by Dusty Hughes.)

But Fellowes was determined to make it, "and I kept working and turning up in things", playing any number of bishops, nobs, politicians, dons and army officers on stage and in films such as Shadowlands and the James Bond Tomorrow Never Dies. His Duke of Richmond in Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats was particularly fine, and he was recently to be seen on Sunday evenings as Lord Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen. A new series is being shot in April and Fellowes is looking forward to it - "I'm damned if I'm going to give up acting at this stage."

"But even if you're a busy actor," he continues, "you feel underused all the time." Which was why in the early Nineties he started to make family serials for the BBC, working with the director Andrew Morgan. The first, Little Lord Nicholas, sold around the world and was followed by Little Lord Fauntleroy - which went big in America, winning an international Emmy and a Canadian Bamf - then The Prince and the Pauper. However, in 1998, Anna Home, his champion at the BBC, was replaced by Lorraine Heggessey. "And I was out on my ear."

"It was the luckiest thing that could have happened because I started writing feature films," Fellowes explains. "And it was one of those, The Eustace Diamonds, based on Trollope's novel, that brought me into contact with Bob Balaban."

American actor, director and producer Bob Balaban had recently teamed up with veteran director Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player) in his quest to make an English country-house film with a dash of murder mystery thrown in. It was to be an examination of class in a situation where people with different agendas were gathered together. And Altman - who approached the film "as an anthropologist studying a remote tribe" - wanted it to be servant-led. "You never see an 'upstairs' scene without there being a servant in the room," Fellowes points out.

"They'd tried a few people and were casting about when Bob Balaban thought of me. It was my lucky break because I know how country houses work and the upper classes speak. I was sure it wouldn't happen but I thought I'd see how far it would go.

"Because I was working so hard I wasn't really aware of the lucky-break aspect and after filming I went away to act in a BBC drama. Then last summer I saw the first cut in New York and Bob said, 'I think we may have lightning in a bottle.' I woke up and the madness started."