Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes is an English novelist, screenwriter, actor and producer best known for creating the period drama Downton Abbey. He began his career as an actor before gaining international recognition for writing Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His other historical screen projects include The Young Victoria, Titanic, Belgravia and The Gilded Age. Across these works, Fellowes frequently examines class, inheritance, marriage, social ambition and the changing relationship between aristocratic families and their servants.

Fellowes has also written several novels, including Snobs, Past Imperfect and Belgravia. Belgravia is his most clearly historical novel, beginning during the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels shortly before the Battle of Waterloo and following the consequences of a secret relationship across several decades of nineteenth-century London society. Although Snobs is contemporary, Past Imperfect moves between modern Britain and the aristocratic social world of the late 1960s, using a disputed inheritance to explore memory, legitimacy and the decline of an older ruling class.