Michelle Dockery (Pic: Sven Arnstein)














Michelle Dockery (Pic: Sven Arnstein)

She plays the cold and calculating aristocrat’s daughter in ITV1’s Sunday night ratings powerhouse Downton Abbey, but Michelle Dockery is nothing like her snooty alter ego.  While Lady Mary Crawley was born into a pampered life of privilege and wealth, Essex girl Michelle comes from infinitely humbler beginnings.

And unlike the scheming Lady Mary, who has been locked in bitter rivalry with her younger sister Edith, the 29-year-old actress remains steadfastly loyal to her roots. But despite their huge differences, these two characters do share one personality trait – Michelle, who is currently filming Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley and Jude Law, always knew that she wanted to perform – even if it didn’t necessarily go to plan.

She recalled: “At the age of eight I auditioned for The Sound of Music and made it through to the third round, where we all stood in a row like the Von Trapp family and had to sing.
“I belted out my line with real confidence and I could see the casting director and the other adults were impressed by my singing voice. Then we were asked to give our names. The children before me were all enunciating perfectly.

“When I was asked what experience I had, I replied, ‘Well, I’ve done lots of shows round Essex but I ain’t done nuffink up the West End’. I instantly suspected I’d blown it. And I had.”
Of course, there’s no sign of that distinctive Essex twang in the drawing room at Downton Abbey – drama school and 11 years of living in London have put paid to that – but it was certainly a lesson learned.

And since that early blip, Michelle has enjoyed an impressive career – both on stage and television – including an award-winning portrayal of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, and in BBC1’s The Turn of the Screw.

For most of us, however, she’s best known as snobby Lady Mary in the lavish costume drama, which is pulling in more than 11 million viewers and has won four Emmys.  It’s a role which has catapulted Michelle into the big league.  She was featured in the August edition of Vogue (along with her on-screen sisters) and she’s more in demand than ever.

Not that she has much spare time. She’s filming Anna Karenina “somewhere in Europe” at the moment then, on Monday, she’s back at Berkshire’s Highclere Castle, where Downton is set, to start work on the Christmas special.

She is endearingly grateful for the opportunity to work alongside a stellar cast, including Hugh Bonneville and Dame Maggie Smith, her on-screen grandmother.  “It’s a wonderful feeling to be part of such a phenomenon,” she says.  “I love playing Mary; she’s absolutely fascinating. She seems cynical and calculating, but in truth she’s indecisive and troubled, which makes her complicated and human and, as a result, hugely rewarding to play.”  If Lady Mary is a member of the idle rich, then the contrast with Michelle couldn’t be more pronounced.

The daughter of an Irish truck driver turned surveyor and a mother who delivers meals on wheels, she grew up in the unremarkable suburb of Chadwell Heath in Essex.

“Oh, no – Lady Mary would never have talked to me – I would have been in service,” she says.
“In fact, I asked my nan recently if any of our family had been in service and she reckons they were.”
The youngest of three girls – her eldest sister Jo, 33, is also an actress – Michelle had her first taste of acting at the tender, young age of five.

“I think my parents knew before I did that I was going to be an actress because I was doing impressions of Margaret Thatcher at the age of four,” she has said. A year later, she was attending the Finch Stage School, then based at the bottom of her street in St Chad’s church hall.
“My mum and dad didn’t have any involvement in the arts themselves but thought that the school would help to build my confidence.

“It was such a fantastic place and the teachers were brilliant and very inspirational. I owe a lot to that school,” says Michelle, who also gained two A-levels while a pupil at the Chadwell Heath Foundation School.

“I went to stage school three times a week in the evenings – singing, ballet, tap, modern and acting – and I loved it.”

She remained there for more than 10 years, often working after-school and weekend jobs to pay her way, including a stint as a waitress in a pie and mash shop. Her dad insisted she and her two sisters work for their pocket money and the cash helped pay for drama lessons.  “I knew very young, early on that that was what I wanted to do. I wasn’t an academic. I hated maths and science at school. I couldn’t concentrate,” she recalls.

“The only things I was interested in were English, drama and music, although I was never quite disciplined enough to really go for it with music.  “I knew it was the arts that I wanted to do.”
But it was a three-week stint at the National Youth Theatre that really went on to cement her ambition to become an actress.  “I walked in and it was like winning the lottery; I knew this was what I wanted to do,” she said.

She took a year off to save up – working in a newspaper recruitment office – to fund her way through a three-year degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. On graduation, Michelle joined the prestigious National Theatre on London’s South Bank.

“I spent 18 months there, doing what was very much like an apprenticeship. I started as an understudy and worked my way up. It was a great place to learn and I got to act with some amazing people, like Sir Michael Gambon, Michael Sheen and Lesley Manville,” she says.

She made her professional debut in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials but, in 2008, she landed the plum role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, during which she was seen by a Downton producer.
She was praised by the critics and earned herself a Best Newcomer award, but almost immediately afterwards was slated for her performance as Ophelia to John Simm’s Hamlet at the Sheffield Crucible.

“One review was so awful that I thought it was indelibly etched on my soul, but now I can’t actually recall a word – I’ve erased it from my memory in an act of self-preservation,” she said.
But that all seems in the distant past with the huge success she is enjoying (you know you’ve made it when you’ve got several blogs – including one called F*** Yeah Michelle Dockery – dedicated to you).

Away from the cameras, Michelle isn’t giving much away – “I really don’t like talking about my personal life too much” – but she lives with her architect boyfriend of two years in a studio flat in Clerkenwell, East London.  Her best friend is mum-of-two Simone Coombs, 30, who she met at school when she was five. The pair can get through nine cups of tea during a mammoth gossip session.

“The whole acting game can sometimes be a bit false and you meet a lot of people in it for the fame – so there’s nothing I love more than going back to Essex and seeing Simone,” she has said.
“It brings me straight back down to earth and ensures that I never become lost in the celebrity side of things.

“I know that whatever happens we’ll grow old and grey together – and spend many a happy hour reminiscing about the boys we used to fancy as kids. I can’t wait.”
While Lady Mary and Lady Edith have been at loggerheads, Michelle’s relationships with her own sisters are more aptly illustrated by her on-screen interaction with youngest sibling Sybil, played by Jessica Brown Findlay.

“Mary’s relationship with Sybil is exactly like the relationship I have with my own older sister,” she explained.  “In the second series, Mary becomes quite protective of Sybil, almost to the point that she becomes annoying and that’s so true of elder sisters, telling the younger one what to do, at least in my own personal experience.”
Refreshingly down-to-earth Michelle has revealed how the whole cast occasionally bursts into a rendition of the Petula Clark hit Downtown – and it’s clear it’s things like that which make her utterly dedicated to her trade.

“That’s why I love acting, because you tap into parts of yourself that you wouldn’t necessarily need to in real life. I’m quite surprised at how out of control I can be on stage, because actually I find I like to be in control in life. It’s quite freeing, really.”

Acting is all she has ever wanted to do and her global success hasn’t changed a thing.
“I just want a really varied career and to keep going,” she said.
“This is it until I can’t walk any more or until I start forgetting my lines.”
And, unlike Lady Mary, it looks as if Michelle Dockery is going to get exactly what she wants.