Latest news with #JulianFellowes
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Season Three Of ‘The Gilded Age' Is Rife With Power Shifts Among Society's Elite
Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector star in "The Gilded Age" as Bertha and George Russell. Photograph by Barbara Nitke/HBO 'I think thematically the whole season [is] about who's in charge; who is in charge in society, who's in charge of marriages, who has the power. I think the power shift is relevant to all the stories and all the characters,' says Sonya Warfield, the co-writer and executive producer, about the new season of The Gilded Age . Set in the United Stated during the 1880s, the series follows several families navigating the social landscape of a city undergoing rapid change, rife with conflict between old and new money. The Gilded Age explores themes of social mobility, wealth, class, and the changing American society during a time of immense industrial growth. The series stars Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski, Louisa Jacobson, Taissa Farmiga, and Denee Benton. Along with Warfield, Julian Fellowes is the creator, the executive producer, and the co-writer of The Gilded Age. Coon and Spector play Bertha and George Russell who are very concerned with the trajectory of their daughter, Gladys (played by Farmiga), hoping to marry her off to an appropriate suitor, which Fellowes says is accurate for the time period. However, he points out that, 'Marian is resistant to the idea of simply settling down. She wants her life to be something. She wants to do something that adds up to more than getting dressed for the opera or not being late for dinner. But in that society, it was very difficult for women who weren't content to simply run the house and run the children and say, 'Have you had a good day dear.' That was not enough for them.' He adds, of Gladys' story, much of which centers around her reluctance to adhere to the will of her parents, 'I think that one of the key moments of growing up, for all of us, is when you realize you don't have to follow your parents' prejudices. You've loved them, and that's great, but I [think this] is also what young people have gone through always. It's not disloyal, it's just an acceptance that you are a different person from your parents.' Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski star in "The Gilded Age" as Ada Brook and Agnes Van Rhijn. Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO Bertha's drive to secure what she sees as the ideal future for her daughter causes issues in her relationship with George, Spector explains, saying, 'The rift that develops between them is not a minor one. They see the situation of Gladys' marriage in a fundamentally different way. And so, yeah, they're pulling with all of the might of their separate identities in opposite directions.' Coon jumps in to say that, 'George can't really understand the stakes for a woman. The woman's purview is very different. He doesn't understand our instinct for survival, which is, in this case, through marriage, so there really is a huge lack of psychological understanding between them that's quite sad.' As for what's happening with sisters Agnes and Ada, played by Baranski and Nixon, respectively, Nixon, pipes in to reveal — just a bit — saying that things won't be 'status quo' by any means for the pair. "It is really fun to put these characters in different situations, [because] it's not interesting to watch the same character do the same thing over and over again. It's fun to take them and put them in a wildly different situation and watch them flounder and scramble and try and fake it until they make it.' Playing Peggy Scott, Agnes' secretary, and often confidante, Denee Benton, feels that her storyline, which features a look at Black society at the time, is helping people to understand the past in an unique way. Jordan Donica and Denée Benton star as Dr. William Kirland and Peggy Scott in "The Gilded Age." Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO 'I think that Julian planting the seed of this Black elite world in our show and it getting to blossom into this garden with all of us watering it is just astounding to me. I'm learning history and I feel like I'm getting to embody something really important and I want to know more and more.' While The Gilded Age features wealthy characters and problems that might seem outdated, this isn't exactly the case, says Warfield, '[These] are universal themes for human beings, whether it's love, death, marriage, all of that. And so, even though those people were around in the 1880s, those are still the themes that we live out today.' Season three of 'The Gilded Age' premieres Sunday, June 22nd at 9 e/p on HBO Max. The series is also available for streaming on the HBO Max app.
Wall Street Journal
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Gilded Age' Season 3 Review: HBO's Still-Thin Soap About the Rich
When Mark Twain coined the term 'The Gilded Age,' it wasn't a compliment, regardless of what the HBO series tries to imply. It was meant to acknowledge the corruption under the surface gloss of the robber-baron era of the late 1800s and, aptly, there's a flimsy gold-plating applied to the eight episodes of the new season. How bad? Susan Sontag once defined 'camp' as 'failed seriousness.' The third season of 'The Gilded Age' is failed camp. Julian Fellowes, the show's creator and writer (with Sonja Warfield) has been doing his 'Gilded Age' thing for, well, ages. 'Gosford Park,' the Robert Altman-directed film of 2001, won Mr. Fellowes an Oscar, but was itself inspired by 'Upstairs, Downstairs.' He parlayed the same concept into 'Downton Abbey,' and when that epic ended—has it ever?—he paddled it across the pond and moored it at East 61st Street and Central Park. It seems audiences need and want the Fellowes brand of vicarious wealth luxuriating in soap. But if they feel they're being pandered to, they are.
Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Ben Bolt obituary, director behind Downton Abbey and Doc Martin
When Ben Bolt was sent the script for a television drama about an aristocratic family and their domestic servants in post-Edwardian England, his every instinct told him that it was a winner. As a director whose credits spanned the Atlantic and ranged from The Sweeney and Bergerac to Hill Street Blues and LA Law, he thrived on the challenge of taking a great story from page to screen — and as he read Julian Fellowes's outline for the first series of what was to become Downton Abbey, he almost purred with pleasure. The script had been sent to him by his old friend Gareth Neame, the executive producer on the project and with whom he made the 1998 thriller Getting Hurt as part of the BBC's Obsessions series. Would he be interested in directing a few episodes? At the time he was working on the fifth series of Doc Martin, the ITV comedy drama starring Martin Clunes, but the question was a no-brainer. Bolt went on to direct two of the first three episodes of Downton Abbey, setting up one of the most successful TV dramas of the 21st century. That first series won half a dozen Emmy awards, a Golden Globe and a brace of Baftas and included perhaps the most famous line of all in Downton Abbey's 52 episodes, when Maggie Smith as the dowager countess Violet Crawley demanded to know: 'What is a weekend?' Almost as memorable was her comment that 'No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else's house' after a Turkish diplomat suffered a heart attack while staying at the Abbey. The great dame, of course, was already famous for her portrayal of another dowager countess, Lady Bracknell, and her delivery of the famous 'handbag' line had entered theatrical legend. 'If there's an old bat to play, it'll be me,' she said when Downton Abbey launched in 2010. Tailor-made as the matriarch of the Crawley family, she perhaps needed little coaching, yet she worked assiduously with Bolt on getting exactly the right nuance of aristocratic battiness into her lines and characterisation. Bolt's dedication to his craft was a watchword and 'going the extra mile' as a director was not optional but mandatory. Whatever the amount of effort required, the only criterion was that the work had to be the best quality and if one more take was needed to get it exactly right, it would be done whatever the clock and the budget said. 'However hairy things got, everyone on set knew Ben would protect the integrity of the work,' one of the actors who worked with him noted. Yet at the same time he was the opposite of a stentorian martinet and coaxed the best out of cast and crew alike with a gentle charm and good humour. 'He always made the job fun, even when we were inevitably running over to get that one last take,' another of his actors recalled. When his wife Jo (née Ross), an actress, predeceased him in 2023, he was bereft without his life partner. He is survived by their daughter, Molly Bolt, a film producer with House Productions. She remembered as a young girl being embarrassed by his terrible singing when he was walking her to school. Before she married, he took singing lessons because he didn't want to embarrass her by singing out of tune in church on her wedding day. It was another example of him 'going the extra mile'. In turn, during the cancer that beset him during his final two years, she accompanied him to every appointment with his doctors and consultant. Devoted to his family, he was thrilled by the arrival of his first grandson, Leo, six months before he died. Away from the film set, he loved messing around on sail boats and was an enthusiastic tennis player. The actor Simon Williams, his long-term opponent and partner on court, recalled that he managed to be 'competitive and comedic at the same time' and when he played a poor shot would let out a frustrated cry of 'Ben-e-diiiict!' The record number of 'Benedicts' in a set was said to be only six, which suggested that his smashes and lobs found their mark more often than they missed. Benedict Lawrence Bolt was born in 1952, the son of Jo (née Roberts), a novelist, and Robert Bolt, in Butleigh, Somerset, where his father, who would go on to write the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons, was teaching at Millfield School. His parents divorced when he was ten and his father married the actress Sarah Miles. It meant he saw less of him than he would have wished but they retained a close relationship. After Robert suffered a stroke, he lived for a time with his son and daughter-in-law and when he died in 1995, he bequeathed the responsibility for protecting his work to him in his will. Educated at Brockenhurst Grammar School, Bolt went on to the Courtauld Institute of Art but left without completing his studies. He continued to draw all his life but he had caught the film bug while accompanying his father on sets as a boy, and keen to launch a career in the industry, he enrolled at the National Film School. In later life he returned to the school as a lecturer and is remembered by former students as a mentor with a bottomless well of encouragement and advice. His breakthrough as a freelance TV director came in the mid-1970s when he took charge of episodes of the ITV dramas Van der Valk and The Sweeney, and Target for the BBC. By the mid-1980s he had been headhunted by the American networks. He had flown to Los Angeles for a meeting out of little more than curiosity but when he was offered Hill Street Blues he stayed for the best part of a decade, setting up home in the Hollywood Hills. On his return to Britain in the 1990s he directed the acclaimed TV mini-series Scarlet and Black starring Ewan McGregor and Rachel Weisz as well as his wife, and Wilderness starring Gemma Jones as a librarian-cum-werewolf. There were also a number of made-for-TV films including a splendid adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw with Colin Firth. One of his greatest successes came with the long-running Doc Martin, shot on location in the Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac, and which he directed from its launch in 2003 over five seasons until 2011, drawing a viewing audience of more than ten million. He also turned his hand to writing scripts for episodes of the comedy drama, something friends and family urged him to do more. The shadow of a screenwriting father with a brace of Oscars to his name perhaps made him more reticent than he need have been. The final project he was involved in was the currently touring version of his father's play A Man for All Seasons, starring Martin Shaw as Thomas More and which is due to arrive in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre in August. Bolt acted as a consultant, attending read-throughs and rehearsals and with his daughter attended a performance at the Oxford Playhouse three months before he died. Ben Bolt, director and screenwriter, was born on May 9, 1952. He died of leukaemia on May 10, 2025, aged 73
Perth Now
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Lord Julian Fellowes 'doing alright' despite mobility issues
Lord Julian Fellowes is "doing alright", despite his mobility issues. The Downton Abbey creator previously revealed he had been using a wheelchair due to spinal stenosis - a narrowing of the spinal canal that can put pressure on the spinal cord - but he insisted his condition hasn't stopped him from being able to work or get on with his life. He told Deadline: 'I've got these mobility issues, and I use a wheelchair rather more than I would like, but that's not the same as feeling ill. 'I think you can stand anything like that as long as you feel okay, and that's the position I'm in now. I have to use a wheelchair because my spine doesn't work as it used to. But in terms of feeling okay and getting on with things and working and all that stuff, I'm fine. "There are many people much worse off than I am.' The 75-year-old writer explained in January that he had undergone surgery for spinal stenosis for a second time, but hadn't recovered as well as he had hoped to because he is much older now than when he had his first operation. He told the Daily Mail newspaper's Eden Confidential column: "It's true that I do spend too much time in a wheelchair these days. "About 40 years ago, I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, probably resulting from an early slipped disc. I had an operation and, after quite a long convalescence, I was well again, dancing, riding and the rest. "Unluckily, a couple of years ago, I was told the condition had returned and, after another operation, I was obliged to recognise that my powers of recovery at 75 were not quite what they had been at 35. Which, I suppose, is no great surprise." But Julian doesn't feel "unlucky" because other people have "far worse" health issues to deal with. He added: "I am not entirely immobile, but I do have to remain sitting for most of the time. I don't consider myself unlucky in this. Other people have far worse to put up with."
Daily Record
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
'Incredible' period drama 'just like Downton Abbey' you can now stream
The six-part period drama series from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video UK now Julian Fellowes seemingly can't stay away from the allure of period dramas. The mind behind Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, The English Game, and The Gilded Age now graces us with another historical series - Belgravia. Belgravia unfurls in the 19th century and takes its initial bow at an event that is engraved in history - the Duchess of Richmond's ball of June 1815, a notable affair just days before the Battle of Waterloo. Centring on the intrigues of the Trenchard and Bellasis families, the show dives headfirst into familiar territory for devotees of period drama, complete with clandestine scandals, high-society relationships, and the intricate dance of class politics. Under John Alexander's direction and sprung from the imagination of Julian Fellowes, Belgravia is crafted from Julian's own 2016 novel of the same name and reunites the production crew that brought Downton Abbey to life, reports the Mirror US. Regarded by many as the undisputed monarch of the period piece, Julian's work inevitably draws comparisons to his giant success with Downtown Abbey. Sharing his thoughts with Town and Country, Julian said: "I think [Belgravia] it's darker than Downton. The servants are working people; they're doing their jobs because those are the jobs that were available. It's not sentimental. It's a sharper world." The limited series initially debuted on ITV in the UK on March 15, 2020, followed by its release in the US on Epix on April 12, 2020. After its release, a sequel, titled Belgravia: The Next Chapter, was promptly commissioned and announced in September 2022, with Helen Edmundson on board as its writer and developer. The show premiered on ITV in January 2024. A blend of new and returning faces comprised the cast of Belgravia, including Alice Eve, Ella Purnell, Tamsin Greig, Richard Goulding, Emily Reid, Tom Wilkinson, Harriet Walter, Philip Glenister, and Tara Fitzgerald. Upon its release, reviews were rather mixed. One said: "Belgravia has all the touchstones of a bodice-ripper. "Great romance and thrilling revenge. And the usual coterie of leaching and sneering in-laws." However, others expressed differing sentiments, such as this critic, who mentioned, "Though billed as a showcase for state-of-the-art costume drama, the six-part bonnet-fest feels more like a one-stop shop for all the worst excesses and boredoms of a genre that has outlived its usefulness." By contrast, another critic observed: "Belgravia is gorgeously appointed, it's romantic enough, it's grounded in the manners of a far more delicate time when everyone stood six-feet apart lest they bump hands." Additionally, a reviewer shared that while Belgravia veered off course, it remained captivating due to its intricate visuals: "Belgravia errs on the wrong side of that divide, but it is so well-appointed that it is never less than beautiful to watch, just like 'Downton'. "For some, the finery will win out over refinement." Audience feedback leaned towards the positive, with one viewer writing: "Incredible show! "Nothing was obvious, it kept the audience in suspense until the very last minute. Loved the complexity of the characters, the authenticity of the costumes and overall atmosphere. Highly recommend!". Another chimed in with: "Wonderful series! ! The storyline is gripping from the very first episode. "There is no woke political ideology that spoils so many films and series these days. Brilliant, authentic acting and casting in the excellent period production. "So many movies and series try and fail to promote female empowerment; however, Belgravia delivers this message superbly."
