28 March 2002

Award of an Oscar in Hollywood

JULIAN FELLOWES (B66) won an Oscar at the Award Ceremony in Hollywood on 24 March 2002 for the Best Original Screenplay for ‘Gosford Park’, a film about a murder at an English country house shooting party.  He wrote ‘Gosford Park’ over two years in his Scottish B & B while filming ‘Monarch of the Glen’, the BBC series, or, according to another report, in his flat in Sloane Square. 

At the Oscar ceremony, Julian said,  “Thank you for your tradition of kindness to foreigners such as myself. You really must be the kindest nation in the world.” Besides being previously best known for playing Kilwillie in “Monarch of the Glen”, Julian has played in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, ‘Aristocrats’, and episodes of ‘Sharpe’.

Quoted in The Radio Times [9 March 2002], he said of ‘Gosford Park’: “My brief was to create a film about a thirties’ shooting party at a grand estate. Because I was fortunate enough to be brought up like that, I know certain things about this way of life”. Quoted in The Sunday Post [3 February 2002], he said, “I based many of the 40 characters on people I knew or had known. I named the house ‘Gosford Park’ because I was asked to write the film the week an old friend - Franscesca, Dowager Countess of Gosford (who is 85) - left to live with her daughter in America”.

In a feature article in The Times Magazine [26 January 2002] on ‘Gosford Park’ and on Robert Altman, its produce Julian Fellowes is quoted: “It’s a way of life that’s very near our own, and yet in many ways it’s like the Land of the Pharoahs, which makes it all the more curious”. The article continues: “Any year in this forlorn decade would have sufficed, but the pair [Altman and Fellowes] chose November 1932, the last shooting season before the Reichstag fire, because they didn’t want their study of manners and behaviour to be overshadowed by world events. The film eschews heavy-handed social commentary but, as several servants look to life beyond the downstairs orbit, there is a subtle intimation of the impending social upheaval ushered in by the Second World War”

In an interview with Sheila Johnston in the Daily Telegraph [22 January 2002], Julian Fellowes described the whole process by which he came to write the script for Gosford Park. He was sitting in his flat in the kitchen in January 2000 when the telephone rang - would he be interested in writing a script for Robert Altman ?

According to a page one article in The Times two days after he received his Oscar [27 March 2002], Julian had helped write the speech delivered by the Leader of the Opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, at the Conservative Spring Conference in Harrogate on the very same day as the Oscar ceremony. 

Julian first tried scriptwriting in 1994 for BBC1's ‘Little Lost Fountleroy’. He has now been signed up to write two more Hollywood movies.

Julian Fellowes was on the panel of BBC Question Time on 28 March 2002

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