Downton Abbey Movie - Release date 13 September, 2019

Radio Times

Production has wrapped on the film, which is set to star Downton favourites Maggie Smith, Michelle Dockery and Hugh Bonneville – and features a visit from the King and Queen.

Starring: Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Imelda Staunton

MORE HERE

DOWNTON DOUBTS Hugh Bonneville says there’s ‘no sign’ of a Downton Abbey movie ‘just yet’

The Sun
By Elaine McCahill

Hugh said: "Downton movie, we would love it to happen, where there's a will there's a way but there's no sign of it.

"It would be lovely, if we could all pull together and find ourselves in the same part of the globe at the same time then maybe."

It comes after Downton fans were sent into a tizzy last month by a cryptic Facebook post which led them to believe the film's release date could be revealed soon.

Fans have been begging to see their beloved characters on the big screen ever since the show came to an end in 2015

And their wish came true in May when The Sun confirmed that a full length feature film edition was being made.

A new post on the official Facebook page told fans to keep their eyes peeled as they wrote: "Big news is on its way! Check back soon for a special announcement."

The picture, posted on October 3, also read: "Something big is happened at  Downton!"

While many others pondered if it could be an announcement about a new mini series to lead on from the film - however, there has still been no word over what it was teasing.

Read more here: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/4815311/hugh-bonneville-no-moves-downton-abbey-good-morning-britain/

Dowager Countess to outlive Downton Abbey... even though character played by Dame Maggie Smith must be 110 by now

DAILY MAIL
By CHRIS HASTINGS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 18:59 EST, 2 May 2015 | UPDATED: 09:05 EST, 3 May 2015

She is as much a part of Downton Abbey as its Bath Stone walls – and just as imposing. So it is only right that the redoubtable Dowager Countess of Grantham will remain a constant of the ITV show right until the very end.

By some reckoning the formidable Crawley family matriarch, played by Dame Maggie Smith, would be 110 at the time the final series is set. But it seems that even the Grim Reaper is so intimidated by the prospect of her withering putdowns that the character will not be killed off.

Lord Fellowes, the Oscar winning creator of the show confirmed the news, saying: ‘Maggie will never die!’

The disclosure that Violet will survive to the end of the final episode – to air on Christmas Day – will be welcomed by the show’s 120 million fans worldwide.

The Dowager Countess is by far the most popular character and has remained stubbornly alive even though pundits have been predicting her demise ever since the show launched in 2010.

And it has been suggested that the Dowager Countess’s death would be the obvious way of bringing the curtain down on the global franchise.

It would certainly be her time. Downton Abbey’s first series was set in 1912, when the character was already in her dotage. The forthcoming sixth series is set more than a decade later.

And he revealed: ‘All the cast we said goodbye to in series five are all popping up in the final series.
‘It will end on Christmas Day. It will be a two-hour special on Christmas night. I am pleased with the way the whole series is coming on actually.’

He declined to be drawn on specifics about the plots, although fans are hoping that butler Carson and housekeeper Mrs Hughes will finally tie the knot following his proposal in last year’s Christmas Day episode.

Fellowes said he wouldn’t write his new American television series The Gilded Age, set among the high- society families of New York in the late 19th Century, until he had finally completed work on the last scripts for Downton.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3065753/Dowager-Countess-outlive-Downton-Abbey-character-played-Dame-Maggie-Smith-110-now.html#ixzz3Z6RTuJa2 
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Downton Abbey: Behind the scenes of series 5 On location at Highclere Castle for the filming of Downton Abbey

THE TELEGRAPH
By Chloe Fox9:15AM BST 13 Sep 2014



In her temporary tent outside Highclere Castle in Berkshire, Lisa Heathcote, the home economics adviser on Downton Abbey, is peeling countless quail eggs to be served at the cocktail party – a reception being thrown by Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire – that is being filmed inside the house.

Things are going well. The sun is out. Everyone is happy. And then there is a problem. The ice in the cocktail glasses is making too much noise. Is there perhaps any rubber ice that they could use instead?

Inside the Victorian castle the atmosphere is hushed. Candlelight, shimmering beads and elegant grandeur are the order of the day. Above the murmur of polite, cocktail-party conversation, a familiar booming voice announces the arrival of each new guest.

Jim Carter, aka Mr Carson the butler, is the physical embodiment of everything that its estimated global audience of 150 million viewers (100 million of them in China alone) has come to love about Downton Abbey: dignified, reassuring, and not quite knowable.

Downton Abbey is a phenomenon. Not since Brideshead Revisited more than three decades ago has a televised foray into the lives of an aristocratic English family held such sway over its audiences.

When it first aired on ITV, on a Sunday night in September 2010, Downton Abbey – written by Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Robert Altman's Gosford Park – had a consolidated figure of 9.2 million viewers, instantly making it the most successful new drama on any channel.

Here was something that had all the magic ingredients that Sunday night audiences wanted: period escapism, an original storyline – and Dame Maggie Smith. ‘We knew that we had very good scripts and a top-calibre cast,’ the producer Liz Trowbridge says. ‘But we never in our wildest dreams thought that it would be as successful as it has been. Our dream, when we first set out, was to make three series – before, during and after the First World War – to explore the social history of a house and the people who lived in it.

That was all.’ Three series came and went. Ratings remained high. Devotees hung on every plot twist. Would Lady Mary Crawley (Lord Grantham’s eldest daughter, played by Michelle Dockery) end up with her cousin Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens)? Would Lord Grantham kiss the housemaid? Did Bates, Lord Grantham’s loyal valet (Brendan Coyle), murder his wife? And what possessed O’Brien (Lady Cora, Lord Grantham’s wife’s maid, played by Siobhan Finneran) to leave that bar of soap where she did? With the reassuring feel of an adaptation but the content of a soap opera, Downton Abbey was television gold.

So, what can we expect from season five? From spending one day on set, it is frustratingly difficult to glean anything at all (except, perhaps, that there seems to be some tension simmering between Lord and Lady Grantham). Cast and crew, briefed to within an inch of their lives, are tight-lipped.

‘My friends just know not to ask me any more,’ Brendan Coyle says with a smile. ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ says Lily James, who plays the mischievous, fun-loving cousin of the Crawleys, Lady Rose Maclaire.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/11090761/Downton-Abbey-Behind-the-scenes-of-series-5.html

Downton Abbey Recap, Season 4, Episode 2: The Awful Shocker You Never Saw Coming (spoilers)

HUFF POST
Youyoung LeeSenior Editor of Development and Strategy, The Huffington Post
January 12, 2014



Thanks to a three-month U.S. lag time, the third and controversial episode of Season 4's Downton Abbey has already broken the Internet across the pond. And if you've been holding your hands to your ears to avoid spoiler alerts, now you know why. By all means, it should have been a cheerful episode: Downton hosts a party; Mary's new love interest, the dashingly handsome Lord Gillingham, visits; and music blares through the Abbey for the first time, both in the form of a gramophone and a bawdy female opera singer with shades of Anjelica Houston. But new faces also mean new predators at Downton, which has thus far portrayed a rather sugar-coated version of the upstairs-downstairs class dynamic that prevailed in elite British society in the opening decades of the 20th century.

(Warning: the next two paragraphs may be inappropriate for younger readers.)

Anna (Joanne Froggatt) enjoys a mild flirtation with the valet of visiting Gillingham; and at first, Mr. Green appears charismatic, charming, the life of the party, incessantly interested. Of course, Mr. Bates isn't too keen on this Mr. Green person; he pads around the house with a forlorn look on his face, his chipmunk cheeks quivering in rage as he shouts "ANNA!" at the kitchen staff room in an effort to snap her out of it. Perhaps Anna was flattered by the male attention, or perhaps she lost herself in the thrill of playing that weirdly hysterical game of cards; either way, none of it could have prepared us for what was to come next. As opera singer Dame Nelli Melba performs for the household, Anna excuses herself to procure some headache medicine downstairs. Mr. Green, acutely aware of his opportunity, follows her, then violently attacks her and rapes her.

Writer and producer Julian Fellowes thankfully cuts out of the scene early, but not before Mr. Green punches her. Where does poor Anna go from here? Ashamed and battered, she hides in Mrs. Hughes' room, only to make the older head housekeeper promise not to tell Mr. Bates or anyone else in the house about the rape. Even if we buy Anna's reasoning -- that Mr. Bates is a previously tried criminal, and that he would likely get arrested again for attacking Mr. Green -- what was more depressing about this entire situation is the utter lack of places Anna has to go with her information. What rights did lady's maids in the early 1900s have? What job prospects would she have in the future with a rape scandal attached to her name? Anna knows it more than the millennial viewer does: Revealing her rape would scarcely accomplish anything but more scandal. In the worst scene from the episode, Anna is forced to wave goodnight to her sadistic attacker even as she shields her battered face from her worried husband.

Meanwhile, Lord Grantham continues to be an insufferable jerk to everyone around him. His pretentious airs and refusal to acknowledge changing times have almost become the punchline of the show, such as when Cora reprimands her husband for allowing their guest -- a world-class opera singer who has indeed be honored by the King -- to dine alone in her room, because she is "beneath" them class-wise. "Am I the only member of this family that lives in the 20th century?" Cora asks the room. Grantham then blames Mr. Carson for this oversight, Mr. Carson being the only person at Downton who is more classist and old-fashioned than the Lord himself. But at dinner, Lord Grantham can't help but making a snide comment to Dame Nelli Melba as she remarks on the lovely claret wine they are being served, revealing she's a oenophile. "This is going to be a lot less insufferable than I thought," he says, because obviously that's the classy thing to say to a world-class musician you've asked to perform at your house. Dame Melba smiles, because she knows the joke's on the Lord: she has likely been thinking the same thing.


READ MORE HERE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/youyoung-lee/downton-abbey-recap_b_4586128.html

CONFIRMED: Downton Abbey is NOT being cancelled! Take that!

UNREALITY PRIMETIME
January 9th, 2014 by Lisa McGarry.



We let out a little sob of distress when we read reports earlier this week that Downton Abbey is in it’s final throes.

We have already been treated to four series of the hit ITV period drama and just managed to get back on an even keel after the emotional Christmas special so we were properly upset when a so called insider claimed that bosses were planning to bring the programme to a close after the fifth series.

It was claimed that that creator and writer Julian Fellowes wouldn’t be able continue with Downton Abbey whilst working on his new project, The Gilded Age.

However, Executive Producer Gareth Neame has put fans’ minds at rest and insisted that there are currently no plans to cancel Downton and plenty of scope for new episodes.

In a statement he said:

“I can confirm that there are no plans to end the show after the fifth series. ITV commission each series on a year-by-year basis. In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal (published 31.12.13), Julian Fellowes stated that the show would not go on forever (inevitable of course and something both he and I have been on the record for previously). For now ITV have commissioned series five and that is what we are busy preparing.”


READ MORE HERE: http://primetime.unrealitytv.co.uk/confirmed-downton-abbey-cancelled-take/

'Downton Abbey' premiere breaks ratings record

CNN
By Brian Stelter, CNN
updated 9:05 AM EST, Tue January 7, 2014



The "Downton Abbey" phenomenon just keeps getting bigger.

Sunday's season four premiere of the upstairs-downstairs drama on PBS surpassed the comparable ratings for every previous episode. According to Nielsen data, at least 10.2 million viewers tuned in live (or within a few hours via digital video recorders) on Sunday night, up from 7.9 million at the start of season three and 8.2 million at the end of it.

This was more than a "personal best" for "Downton." The season four premiere outperformed every other drama on Sunday night, too. CBS's "The Good Wife," for instance, had 9.2 million viewers; ABC's "Revenge" had 6.7 million. (All these totals will increase once several days of digital video recorder viewership is factored in.)

PBS isn't rated like a traditional network because it doesn't carry traditional commercials.

But even last season's "Downton" premiere was described as one of the highest-rated events in the history of the public broadcasting network; analysts said PBS hadn't seen numbers this high since the premiere of the "Civil War" documentary series in 1990. An apples-to-apples comparison is impossible because of changes in ratings methodology. But the season four premiere affirms that "Downton" is making history for the network.

Season four, of course, debuted several months ago in the United Kingdom. PBS has received no small amount of criticism for its decision to delay the episodes in the United States, and the network's executives are aware that some fans get a sneak peek by finding the episodes illegally on the Internet. But they say the sky-high ratings two seasons in a row are proof that their scheduling strategy is a wise one.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/06/showbiz/tv/downton-abbey-premiere-ratings-record/

Rob James-Collier says it's "easier" kissing a man on Downton Abbey because his wife doesn't get jealous

MIRROR
By Danny Walker
November 1, 2013

Downton Abbey star Rob James-Collier has said it is "easier" playing a gay character in the hit ITV drama, because his wife does not get jealous about his on-screen romances.

The actor, whose character Thomas Barrow works as a servant downstairs, is on The Jonathan Ross Show tomorrow with his co-star, Joanne Froggatt.

He told Ross: "I found it easier. The way I was thinking was that if you kiss a girl you worry about: 1) How big her boyfriend is; 2) Is he in the building watching and is he going to kick the shit out of you?; and 3) What is my missus going to think of it?

"So we went to the BFI for a big unveiling on the cinema screen, and the missus knew (the kiss) was coming, and we were all sitting watching it and I thought 'Nice one, she can't accuse me of anything', and the missus turned to me and said 'You've never kissed me like that'."

Check out all the latest News, Sport & Celeb gossip at Mirror.co.uk http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/downton-abbey-rob-james-collier-says-2662337#ixzz2jP8QHSnL
Follow us: @DailyMirror on Twitter | DailyMirror on Facebook

SPOILERS - ‘Downton Abbey’ season 4, episode 7 preview: More Maggie Smith, Laura Carmichael shockers

CARTER
October 27, 2013

Are we going to see the Dowager Countess die on “Downton Abbey” this season? While there has been previously quotes out there suggesting that there would not be any more major character deaths on the show following what happened with both Matthew and Sybil last year, the preview that aired following tonight’s episode did certainly raise the question as to whether or not this promise was going to remain true.

Violet take ill on next week’s episode, which in turn leads to Maggie Smith’s character deciding that she wants to see Robert shipped away at the time to avoid some of the stress and suffering of it all. We don’t quite know how he would feel about this if he knew, but Violet is going to become so ill at one point that she is bedridden. We don’t believe that Smith is leaving the show, but we will keep watch on it for at least a little while.

Just in case all of this was not enough for this episode, there are also at least a couple more stories that must be addressed:

1. How in the world Edith moves forward. She is seemingly pregnant, after all, but does not know where the baby’s child in Michael Gregson is.

2. What happens next with Anna and Bates. At the very end of the preview you can catch a glimpse of Joanne Froggatt’s character in tears, and that is not much of a good sign at all for those hoping for some sort of glimmer of hope / happiness now that part of the truth is out there.

READ MORE HERE: http://cartermatt.com/92983/downton-abbey-season-4-episode-7-is-violet-going-to-die/