MICHELLE DOCKERY IS BAZAAR’S OCTOBER COVER star, sterne 

Michelle Dockery is Bazaar’s October cover star

Preview our exclusive interview with Downton Abbey\'s leading lady

Michelle wears Ralph Lauren Collection dress on the newsstand cover. Photographed by David Slijper and styled by Leith Clark. 

draws to a close, Michelle Dockery reveals her complicated relationship with her famous alter ego, and looks beyond life as Lady Mary towards a new beginning... 

Benjamin Disraeli’s first words on seeing Highclere were reportedly ‘How scenical! How scenical!’ and he could in no way be accused of overstatement: even with clouds hanging over the deer park, casting shadows across its dramatic façade, the Hampshire castle looks like a postcard-perfect stately home. This it is, of course, with its elaborate turrets and ambitious scale – Charles Barry rebuilt Highclere shortly after completing work on the Palace of Westminster, and it remains one of the country’s most celebrated houses. For approximately 120 million people in 220 territories, however, it is England’s

house of note, surpassing even Buckingham Palace in terms of fame; it has been home to the Carnarvon family since 1679 and is now reinvented as Downton Abbey, global symbol of a more gracious era and the televisual equivalent of crack cocaine. 

‘It’s like a character in its own right,’ says Michelle Dockery as we crunch up a gravel drive that leads from an untidy huddle of caravans in the Capability Brown grounds towards the grand sweep of the house itself. ‘I’ll miss it.’ On an overcast midsummer afternoon, the 33-year-old – Lady Mary, in case you somehow avoided the past six years of popular culture, eldest daughter of the aristocratic Crawley family who inhabit this fictional space, and consequently one of the best-known British actresses in the world, with Golden Globe and Emmy nominations to boot – is out of costume, in skinny jeans and ballet pumps. ‘People don’t like to see me in modern clothes,’ she says apologetically. ‘It ruins the fantasy.’ She has finished filming for the day (a church was involved, as well as Tom Branson, former chauffeur and Lady Sybil’s widower) and is counting down the hours until she leaves here for ever. It’s the final series of

– season six – and although there’s a Christmas special and talk of a film spin-off (‘We’ll see,’ says Dockery, circumspectly), this seems to be the end for the beloved costume drama. ‘It will be strange,’ she says. ‘I don’t really know how I feel about it yet. Of course, I’ll be sad. Devastated on the last day, probably. But I’m also ready for it to finish. It’s time to go.’ 

When Michelle Dockery first signed up to the show – elegant and eloquent but otherwise delightfully ordinary, from a close working-class Essex family, without any of the entitlement her character embodies – she had just completed a stint at the National Theatre after training at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Nothing could possibly have prepared her for what would come next. Nowadays, it seems everyone is completely obsessed with this house and the characters who inhabit it, upstairs, downstairs or in a lady’s chamber: the social hierarchy, the moral codes and manners, the allure of privilege and a way of life that seems better, somehow, more solid and certain. It even inspired Ralph Lauren’s A/W 12 womenswear collection – and who knows how to create a gilded fantasy better than he? Such is the fervour of fans that the taxi driver who picks me up at Newbury station first asks if I have permission to visit, passing over a letter from the Highclere estate office requesting that nobody is brought to the house on days when it’s closed to the public. ‘American tourists are the worst,’ he grumbles. ‘They won’t take no for an answer.’

Michelle wears Delpozo dress, Jimmy Choo shoes and Dior ring

‘At the start, we had no idea where it would go and how people would respond,’ says Dockery. ‘I signed up for three series and there was definitely a moment when I considered not coming back for the fourth. We all had that option, and I’m glad I didn’t take it. When we’re here, it’s like nothing has changed: I’m in my trailer, I get dressed, I go up to the house, I do acting and then I go home. The other side of it is completely different – the recognition, the awards seasons, the red carpets. I’ve finally realised that that stuff can be fun if you embrace it all, whereas initially I would get really nervous. I can be quite shy and I didn’t want to do anything except the acting. I found talking about myself especially difficult. But you learn that you don’t have to talk about your private life; you don’t have to please everyone. I’ve changed as a person in the last six years. I’ve grown up. It has really changed my life.’

After a tantalisingly brief tour of the house, Dockery jokes easily with the production crew while we watch Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern, aka the Earl and Countess of Grantham, running through a scene in the library before filming resumes (for regular viewers anxious to know what the next series holds, I can exclusively reveal that Mrs Patmore’s B&B is suffering some financial difficulty and there appears as yet to be no replacement for poor dead Isis, the unfortunately named Labrador). When we return to her modest caravan to talk, costumes are hanging from the bathroom door – on top, a calf-length tweed work suit, curiously appropriate for the new fashion season. ‘It’s very modern, what we’re starting to wear,’ Dockery says. ‘We are in the mid-1920s and it’s all changing. I’ve tried to stay away from anything too

on the red carpet, but now it feels as though I can vary things a bit. That’s something else the past six years have given me – an opportunity to really start to gain an understanding of fashion. I’ve always loved costume, but I was such a novice in the beginning and fashion was something I was very uneducated about.’

It must be said that Dockery is a
 great beauty, in life and on screen – pale
 as ivory, possessed of a composure that is key to her appeal. A slight set of the chin and she assumes Lady Mary’s froideur, imperious and cold, impeccably poised and perfectly contained. It’s an old-fashioned kind of glamour that owes everything to what she doesn’t give away. ‘I notice people are quite intimidated when they meet me, because they assume that I’m going to be like the character,’ she says. ‘I was once asked in America if I had a housemaid and someone who cooked for me, which I found hilarious. You know, most nights I just get takeaway when I’m at home.’

Michelle wears Valentino dress and jewellery from Dior Joaillerie, De Beers and Sabine G

She tells me a story about staying in a hotel near Highclere during filming, sharing a room with Laura Carmichael (who plays her sister, Lady Edith), and being disturbed by a party happening on the floor below. ‘I’m like a bear if I’m woken, really annoyed, and we had a car coming to pick us up at 5am. So I went downstairs, banged on the door and these guys opened it – I could see by their faces that they recognised me. I just said, “Can you

keep it down?” Laura was listening above and she said, “You literally turned into Lady Mary without even thinking about it!” Then she said, “Oh my God, look at you!” And there was Lady Mary telling them off in pyjama pants and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, hair all over the place. But the thing is, they shut up! A few days later at the hotel, we got a crate of champagne from them and a note saying, “Sorry, serendipity collided with stupidity.” It was brilliant.’

Of course, so inextricably linked are the actress and the haughty aristocrat she plays that it’s impossible not to look for similarities. There seem to be none. In person, she is quite the opposite of Lady Mary, kicking off her well-worn shoes, tucking her legs up on the sofa and being unexpectedly funny and friendly, generous with her time and charm. She wears a simple gold solitaire-diamond engagement ring (her fiancé, John Dineen, is an Irish financial PR to whom she was introduced by fellow

cast member Allen Leech, who plays Tom Branson) and an Annina Vogel vintage charm necklace, but otherwise she couldn’t be less ‘done’.

You do suspect steel beneath the surface, though. Dockery may not resemble Lady Mary, but there’s a sense of her when Dockery discusses the defining role. ‘I’m very protective of the character,’ she says. ‘I love her and I hate her at times. She’s so complex! She can be quite the coward, putting other people down just because she feels bad, but then she can be strong: she’s a complete contradiction. It still continues to be this complicated journey for her. She can’t really make her mind up. I think that’s what creates compelling television.’

Dockery’s skill, of course, is to convincingly portray a young woman caught up in the decline of the British aristocracy and the social transformation that is an inevitable result. This, I sense, is where the focus of the final season will be. The writer Julian Fellowes constructs fascinating female characters – perhaps the single most important element of

– and Dockery as Mary is at the heart of it all, delicately balancing societal expectation with personal disaster, and experiencing first hand the emergence of feminism, the relaxing of the class hierarchy, the tragedy of war and the way that the world around her gilded cage is changing for ever.

The cast get scripts only a few episodes ahead, sometimes out of sequence, so when we meet Dockery has no idea how the season ends. Still, she’s genuinely excited by what she knows. ‘This series, I’ve got such a great story – Lady Mary’s bite kind of comes back again. When I read the scripts,
they really surprised me. How Mary is
 and what happens is quite shocking.
There are always twists and turns in 
the plot – there are every year – but
 this year particularly, there’s a bit of a 
U-turn that happens with Mary, and 
it’s amazing. It is another kind of chal
lenge and another really interesting
  series for me. Just when you think Julian 
has exhausted the possibilities of a
 character, he manages to throw in 
something else that pulls the rug from
 under you. I really enjoy that. On a 
show like this, when you’re playing
 a character – the same character – all
 the time, you want to still feel like you’re 
being challenged.’

But for all her pleasure in this latest
 series, Dockery also suggests that it’s an appropriate time for

to draw to a conclusion. ‘We’re moving towards another big societal change,’ she muses. ‘And if we continued the show for a seventh series, we’d come to the general strike, then another war. So I think it’s perfect that it’s stopping when it is.’ That doesn’t mean she isn’t sorry to go: ‘I’ve been so fortunate in having been part of something so special so early in my career. It’s rare that a show takes off like this, and I feel that we’ve been part of a new golden age of television. But still, it’s right that this is the end. I don’t believe in outstaying one’s welcome.’

As filming at Highclere only happens from February to August, Dockery has been able to take on other roles in her downtime. In 2012 she appeared in Joe Wright’s

, and since then she’s had parts in the Ben Kingsley sci-fi thriller

, then with Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson in the airplane drama

. She is also Oxfam’s first humanitarian ambassador, which saw her visiting refugee camps in Syria with the organisation two years ago. This is something she’s keen to spend more time doing, she says. ‘I’m continuing to help the charity fundraise and highlight their work responding to emergencies around the world. I always want to do more, but I do what I can when I can. I used to be very sceptical about social media, and then I realised it is a wonderful tool for creating awareness.’

Next up, though, Dockery has three new projects: the first is a film called

with Jim Broadbent, based on the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes and co-starring Charlotte Rampling. ‘I play his daughter,’ she says. ‘It’s a wonderful story and Jim is a hero of mine. I think I’ve seen most of his films.’ The second role is the pilot for a US drama series called

, in which she plays Letty Dobesh, a con artist recently released from prison. ‘It just happens to be quite a departure from Mary,’ Dockery says. ‘I couldn’t put the script down. It’s about a woman tackling her demons; trying to escape her dark past. I’m excited to be playing a character that is so emotionally raw.

is all about keeping face, calmly dealing with situations without getting emotional about them. Letty’s an animal.’

The last role – and one that seems closest to her heart – is Madame de Tourvel in a production of

at London’s Donmar Warehouse, which opens in December. ‘Of course, it’s a period drama – but wanting to take it on has nothing to do with that,’ she says. ‘I’m in love with the story and the character. I’ve always had in mind that I would finish

and go on to a play, because I want to go back to where I started. In fact, I’m longing for it. It’s so different from what I’ve been doing for the past six years. My gut is with theatre – that’s real acting, for me. Honestly, I don’t feel like it’s all downhill from here. There’s so much more I want to do, and I feel like

has given me the opportunity for that. I don’t just mean in acting; I mean in my life. It feels like more of the beginning of something rather than the end.’

Go behind the scenes on the shoot in our exclusive video below:

Read our full interview with Michelle Dockery in the October 2015 issue of

Michelle wears Ralph Lauren Collection dress on the subscribers' cover

Behind the scenes with Suki Waterhouse for Amazon Fashion

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