Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the writer, actor and director Julian Fellows. An Academy Award

and Emmy winner, his is a class act.

The movie Gosford Park, the TV hit Downton Abbey,

and the best-selling book snobs have all flowed from his pen.

He captures Dowager Duchess's social climbers and housemaids with equal

acuity. For years he earned his living as an actor. His parents would rather

he'd gone into the foreign office, but he managed to avoid becoming the pathetic figure I think

my father thought I'd become. I am a late starter he says I feel I have a lot to do in a very

short time. Sir Julian Fellows, you won your Oscar, let's call it your first

Oscar, shall we there might be more to come at 52, it was for the screenplay of course, Gosford Park because...

52.

Really that's so shocking to me.

I always think I'm about 44 now.

Was there a feeling of unreality about it given that you had been making your living in show business for a while?

Well, the whole thing was very unreal, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I had been an actor for, you know, hundreds of years and I'd had a sort of reasonable career you know and

and I was sort of I had that level of fame where people think they met you in

Norfolk when they were last you know what I mean and then I was suddenly rung up by Bob Balaban, an actor producer in America.

And he said, would you like to write a script for Robert Altman?

And he did come out of the blue.

...