Julian Fellowes is, of course, rather well known for creating a little TV series you might have heard of called Downton Abbey. And that wasn’t his first screen success either, having already won an Oscar for his screenplay for Gosford Park in 2002. Julian has had an eclectic career, appearing on the long-running series Monarch of the Glen and a Bond movie. His accent, his family background, the subjects of class that fascinate him - all of these have sometimes led to people accusing him of being a snob and perhaps assuming that everything has come easy to him. And yet. In the late 90s, despairing of an acting career that wasn’t going so well at that point, Julian wrote a novel called Snobs, a book that looks at the flailing British aristocracy of the late 20th century through the eyes of a sort of outsider. He sent it out - and no one wanted it. In fact, some people said some pretty mean things, Several years later, after the success of Gosford Park, a publisher took it on and it became a bestseller, as did Julian’s two later novels. Just as I was talking about last week with the writer and editor, Phoebe Morgan, sometimes it really is a matter of getting a book on the right desk at the right time.
Believe it or not Julian Fellowes found rejection as hard as the next person, although he is, I think, an optimist at heart. We talk about that, Downton Abbey, his upcoming show The Gilded Age, about how people have always told him every project of his was unlikely to work out and about the difference between putting something in the bin and putting it in a drawer. Here’s Julian.
You can find Julian's books, and those by all my guests, at my online bookshop here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele
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