Julian Fellowes is a British writer, actor and Conservative peer, ennobled in 2011. He is the creator and writer of "Downton Abbey" and "The Gilded Age". He is a son of the landed gentry who studied at Cambridge.
Lord Fellowes proposed to his wife, Emma Kitchener — a relative of Lord Kitchener, the first-world-war military leader — 20 minutes after they met. "A funny little man asked me to marry him," her diary recorded.
By his own account a plain and timid teenager, he reinvented himself on an oil-tanker bound for South America. He then studied at Cambridge and went to drama school, following his father's advice: "If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its living, you might as well do something amusing."
Lord Fellowes acted in prime-time dramas and the West End and wrote for television (and, under a pseudonym, bodice-ripping novels). He won an Oscar in 2002 for writing "Gosford Park", a country-house film. He also published "Snobs", a bestselling novel.
"Downton Abbey" first aired in 2010, chronicling the Crawley clan from 1912 to 1930. It became a global hit spanning six television series and three films, produced with Gareth Neame. Maggie Smith played the dowager countess; Hugh Bonneville played the patriarch.
"The Gilded Age", another multi-series hit, is set in 1880s New York among robber barons and their servants.
Lord Fellowes has been called Britain's supreme chronicler of class and sits in the House of Lords. He is wryly sceptical about the concept, calling it partly natural — "Every society throws up some or other version of class" — and partly "a confidence trick" played on the masses.
Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.