Biography

Based Maggie Smith's Gosford Park character on his great aunt.

In the 1970s, wrote romantic novels under the pseudonym Rebecca Greville.

Fellowes proposed to his wife Emma Joy 20 minutes after first meeting her. She is Lady-in-Waiting to HRH Princess Michael of Kent and was invested as a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) in 2000. Emma is a great-great-niece of (General) Lord Kitchener and on 9 May 2012 The Queen issued a Royal Warrant of Precedence granting The Lady Fellowes of West Stafford the same rank and title as a daughter of an Earl, as if her late father had survived his brother and therefore succeeded to the title of Earl Kitchener. She is also a vegetarian.

Was once a member of the Cambridge footlights comedy group. Other members through the years include Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Eric Idle.

Lives in Dorset, England, close to the cottage once owned by writer Thomas Hardy. His estate includes a manor house built in 1633 and a newer portion built in 1840, all on 50 acres.

Upon receiving the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2002: I feel as if I'm in A Star Is Born and any moment, Norman Maine will come up and whack me in the mouth.

I was rather a lazy student. My interests were drama and taking girls to parties. However, they locked the college gates at 11 o'clock, and if you were out later than that, the girls would take off their party dresses, climb over the gates and then re-assemble themselves on the other side. A rather charming sight!

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that gray area.

When you make your first film, there is a hell of a lot to think about, and you've got to have a gut understanding of your material. It's not enough to say, 'I've met people like this.' You've got to know them inside out. So with Separate Lies I placed my characters in a class that I understand, but it doesn't mean that this is a film about class. It's about being trapped, about the consequences of our choices, and about lying.

We live in an era of tremendous dishonesty where people, even nice people, will say things they know are not true because they want to be perceived as someone who thinks they are true. But I think this is dangerous. I think personal dishonesty in a society is as dangerous as it is in an individual. For most of us the biggest journey in life, and certainly the toughest journey, is towards self-knowledge.