© NICKY JOHNSTON/WEEKEND MAGAZINE
same making it, not least
because we were playing the
same characters.
“Personally, it was like putting
on a pair of old slippers. I’d
change into Carson’s costume,
comb my hair the way he wears
it and there he was, as familiar
to me as ever.”
The actor understood Carson
from the off, he says. “When I
read for the part, there was a
stage direction in the script that
said something like, ‘Carson
enters, in his magnificence.’
And I thought, ‘I can do that.’
“Without being vain, I thought
I was a good casting for the role.”Jim’s wife is the acclaimed
actress Imelda Staunton (63),
and we once asked her whether
she’d like a part in Downton,
given the show’s global success.
“I’d be in there like a shot,”
she said. “I fancy a part for
a small woman with a drink
problem causing a little trouble
below stairs, maybe.”
She got her wish, but not
quite in the way she’d imagined.
“She thought if she was offered
a part, it would be downstairs,”
explains Jim. “The offer came
completely out of the blue.
She turned to me one day and
said, ‘I’ve just been sent anIn TV come to life,
Fiona is served tea
by Jim at her home,
Highclere Castle,
the setting for
Downton Abbey.