12 Fascinating Facts You Probably Don't Know About “Downton Abbey”

Downton Abbey – as in the physical building – is “portrayed” by Highclere Castle, a real, working house owned by a real family of aristocrats. It’s the ancestral home of the Porchester family, the Earls of Carnavon.

It’s impossible now to imagine anyone other than Carmichael playing the endlessly complicated Edith, but it almost happened! Around the same time as her audition for the role of Lady Edith, she landed the leading role of Viola in a touring production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

“A few days later my agent said, ‘You have an audition for a period drama.’ I thought it was going to be a ‘Yes, milord,’ a half-day’s filming, one line maybe. But it would be good to have on your CV that you’d done telly,” she told the Tribune News Service. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to have to turn down this dream Shakespeare [role] for this TV job. What a disaster!’ And it was ‘Downton.’ So I went and read and realized it was for a lead part. And I don’t know how it happened… [and] I thought, ‘I can do this’ and ‘This part is mine.'”

Two of the most iconic “Downton” couples actually played opposite each other before! Michelle Dockery (Mary) and Dan Stevens (Matthew) costarred in an adaptation of “The Turning of the Screw,” while Hugh Bonneville (Robert) and Elizabeth McGovern (Cora) played a married couple on an old sitcom called “Freezing.”

“Downton” is packed with stunning costumes evoking the real fashion of early-20th-century England, and some of those costumes look so authentic because they are. In the behind-the-scenes companion book “The World of Downton Abbey,” costume designer Susannah Buxton reveals that some of the most beautiful costumes are made from real vintage pieces. For instance, two of Mary’s evening dresses from the first two seasons are made from “original beading so delicate it couldn’t be worn again” and “a turn-of-the-century Spanish evening dress.”

Laura Carmichael (Edith) and Michael C. Fox (Andy) have “Downton” to thank for their relationship! Although their characters rarely, if ever, interact on screen, the pair fell in love on set and have been together publicly since around 2016. In 2021, they welcomed their first son.

Those iconic dinner table scenes are some of the most challenging to film, not least because they involve long hours and real food.

In another behind-the-scenes book, “The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era,” the creative team explains that all-day dinner scene shoots pose major challenges. A dinner scene involving 18 people can take around 70 “servings” of food in order to keep refreshing the table throughout several takes, and care is taken to avoid serving particularly smelly foods, even historically accurate ones, that might get extra unpleasant under filming lights for long hours.

While many of the characters on “Downton” have some degree of real-life inspiration, creator Julian Fellowes specifically found inspiration for the character of Cora from a real baroness.

In “The World of Downton Abbey,” Fellowes reveals he based Cora loosely on Mary Leiter (later Lady Curzon), an American heiress who married George Curzon, a British aristocrat in financial trouble. Like Robert and Cora, their marriage began with her much more in love with him than vice versa, but it grew into a loving marriage. When George was named Viceroy of India, Mary became the Vicereine, making her the highest-ranking American (of any gender) in the history of Britain.

The major plot in season two involves the Crawleys opening up Downton to serve as a convalescent hospital for soldiers wounded during the “Great War.” In real life, Highclere Castle and its stewards, the Carnavons, did the exact same thing. As shown in a BBC featurette, the Countess of Carnavon, like the fictional Countess of Grantham, oversaw the transformation of the estate into a temporary hospital to support the war effort.

The vintage and historically-accurate costumes may look great on screen, but according to at least one of the actors, they aren’t as much fun to wear as you might think due to constraints on laundering the delicate garments.

“We do stink, as they don’t wash our costumes,” Sophie McShera (Daisy) told The Telegraph. “They have these weird patches, which are sewn into the armpits and which they wash separately.”

While Queen Elizabeth II famously keeps most of her opinions to herself, word has gotten out about her fondness for “Downton” – and the hilarious way that she enjoys the show.

“She loves to pick out the mistakes,” Brian Hoey, author of the book “At Home With The Queen,” told People. “They do tend to get it right. However, the Queen did notice on one episode that there was a young so-called British officer wearing medals which had not been awarded when he was supposed to be alive. He was fighting in the First World War and the medals on his chest did not come in until the Second World War.”

Corsets were a must for ladies of the early 20th century, and most of the female cast members wore them for an authentic look throughout filming. Dame Maggie Smith (Violet), however, managed to get away with ditching the often-restrictive undergarment.

“I have to say that I did cheat a bit. Because I promised that if I sat up, bolt upright, I made it look as though I were wearing corsets,” she revealed to CBS Sunday Morning in 2015, insisting that she was “through” with wearing a corset.

While “Downton” prides itself on being as historically accurate as possible, there’s one area where the show intentionally allows some anachronisms to creep in: the language. Both the accents and the idioms used by the characters are a little more modern, mostly for clarity to viewers.

“Since language is subject to historical change, the scriptwriters of ‘Downton’ have adapted the English of the 20th century to ensure its easy accessibility to the modern viewer. Being too authentic, in this case, may have thrown the audience off course, making terminology – and the delivery of the Dowager Countess’s one-liners – difficult for us to understand,” explained Ted Mentele, an editor for Babbel‘s Didactics Team.